I wrote the following while sitting in La Segrada Familia, shown above at distance.
What is it about God that makes us want to contain that which isn't there? We put up these lofty spaces and then fill them with lofty ideas that always come crashing down from the high ceilings.
Gaudi might be touching God here in this holy space made with such precision and light but what if he isn't what if it's all a cruel joke and we would all be better off stopping the building of any more churches and letting the trees shake the foundations with their overflowing roots and rupture these ideas of old and replace them with the oldest of ideas: that we are probably alone in this universe and that's okay no it's God damn beautiful and scary and wonderful and powerful?
Yes, that's what we must do: return to nature and stop imitating it. We can just sit with it all under the tree, not cutting the tree down to worship a man nailed to boards made of our wandering destruction of nature. We could tear it all down, everybody, and start anew. I'm asking for a tabula rasa, a blank slate created in one swipe that can undo all the hurt and confusion we've sown just trying to make sense of being alone.
We could sit with that aloneness and be radically honest with it. I say again that we're alone but add that we're together. Let's be terrified together and hope for all the tomorrows all the nows to just erupt with joy and patience and kindness and the urgency of beauty and love. We can say yes to all of this while softly saying no to anything else that makes us sink.
All this is all of it and it's enough seven times over. Maybe God didn't make the world in seven days, maybe He didn't make it it at all and I think I can see through the ruse in the piercing light as it dances gently all around me. Maybe this temporary clarity is Truth if I can hold onto it with a sweating hand on the edge just grasping for purchase.
Hanging on this edge I'm led not to giving in to fear but letting in hope despite the utter terror because that is my only -- our only -- recourse. I don't doubt that we can flourish in this powerful uncertainty but I do think that we need to cast out the demons if we want to live again pure and maybe God is just another demon too convincing of our own making, buoyed by the calls for love. I mean can Man really stake a claim on something as big as the idea of God? I sit here and look up to these beautiful ceilings that are held up by the stretch of tree-like columns and still the idea of it all is just too big to house in this house of worship. We've fired too many arrows at Truth and I think we keep missing because the target we are shooting at isn't there. I want to just put down the bow and sit under the tree and always begin again in this moment. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm right who knows I'm just a mortal man dreaming out loud in a dream.