Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [31]
The religious impulse, as everyone knows—certainly I know—is hard to pin down. There are ecstatics, like my father, who become addicted to the rarefied air of spiritual communion, and then there are cooler minds who claim that religion exists in order to keep us from feeling our own absurdity.
For Cuyler Goodwill, a man untrained in conventional theology, the human and the divine are balanced across a dazzling equation: man’s creation of God being exactly equal to God’s creation of man, one unified mind bending like a snake around the curve of earth and heaven. (It has taken him years to work all this out.)
For those seven pacifists forced out of the Methodist ministry in the city of Winnipeg in the year 1916, religion finds its net worth between the hard rock of private conscience and the equally hard place of the political platform.
For those farmers and their families who are—right now, in the month of June—rebuilding the Chain Lakes Meeting House after it was burned to the ground by so-called patriots—for this congregation of Friends, religion is the cement that seals shut their door on the world.
For Clarentine Flett, lying in a coma after being knocked down by a bicycle at the corner of Portage and Main, religion is a soft flurry of petals drifting and settling peacefully on the evening of her life. And for the seventeen-year-old butcher’s boy, Valdi Goodmansen, whose bicycle (exceeding the legal speed of eight miles per hour) was responsible for the accident, religion is the bottled broth he sucks like a starved infant in the middle of the night. Seek ye forgiveness and it shall be given. For Abram Skutari, who sold the boy the bicycle (twenty-five dollars), religion is an open window, as well as the curtain with which he darkens the window.
For Magnus Flett of Tyndall, master stonecutter and abandoned husband of Clarentine Flett, religion is both the container and water of remembrance, holding sacred (that is leaving untouched)
the shriveled leaves of a particular parlor plant of hers called the star of Bethlehem; also the vivid tactile memory of loose beds of stone from his native Orkney; also an image he recollects of his own father and mother, the two of them at dusk, dragging hay into a barn, and his father stopping to extract a foreign object that had flown into his wife’s eye, leaning down and removing it with the tip of his tongue.
For Principal MacIntosh of Wesley College religion is the physic for right thinking, correct living, and earnest praying. "One thing this war has done," he writes in a letter to the Free Press, "is shaken us out of our self-sufficiency and brought us nearer to our Maker."
For Bessie Perfect, a Wesley College student ardently in love with her botany professor, Barker Flett, religion is a painful obstruction that forms in her throat when she whispers his name against her pillow, and also when she sings, "Keep the home fires burrrrning / While our hearts are yearrrrning."
Left to himself, Barker Flett, professor, scholar, collector of some seventeen different species of lady’s-slippers, believes religion to be a glorious metaphor for the soul’s desire. There is no God, no Son of God, no Holy Family, no resurrection, there is only desire. Desire for more. For perfection. For self-knowledge. Desire to possess all fifty known varieties of lady’s-slippers. Desire for sleep and forgetfulness. Desire for good and for evil. Desire for rapturous union, the object of which, he knows, can be, and often is, fraudulent. Lately he has been reading about a pollinating mechanism in which a male insect is attracted to certain small orchids, the lip of which simulates the sexual parts