7.16.24

On the Life of Gods

Aside from orphans, almost everyone starts life with a firsthand experience of the presence of gods.

We spend time with them in our most formative first minutes, days, years, when they are luminescent and powerful beings. For most people, I believe these gods are benevolent creators of your universe. In some cases I suppose they are regrettably terrible, absent, cruel or worse. But most of us experience a deific presence in our lives for the first few years.

Then, later, we go through a period when the gods become slowly diminished, falliable, perhaps even out-of-touch and silly. In this, our adolescence, we are driven by biology and our peers to view our gods with a most critical eye. They disappear into the normal and take on the guises of everyday people. Gods who walk among us, go to work, stand in checkout lines. Often this makes us not very forgiving of their foibles. And of course, they have foibles – even gods do. And what a letdown this can be, to recognize that the all-powerful are not.

And in time, though lack of belief or some other atrophy of the fuel that powers the devine, Gods wane. They stoop, hunch, forget. We watch them fall into the powerlessness of a forgotten former god.

And then they are gone.             

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Rushdie's amazing novel, Victory City, has me thinking about the lifecycle of the gods and goddesses of creation, the myths they inspire, the cities and worlds they dream into creation, and how these dreams are eventually forgotten...