Nostalgia For God

The dual substance of Christ --- the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God or, more exactly, to return to God, and identify himself with him --- has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. This nostalgia for God, at once so mysterious and so real, has opened large wounds and also large flowing streams.

Prologue to;

The Last Temptation\of Christ

by Nikos Kazantzakis

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I am fortunate in that the idea of seeking to recover a relationship with the divine was always in the background and, sometimes in the foreground, of my life. My excesses would appear, from a moralist’s viewpoint, to be libertarian at best and just plain unconscious as a norm. I can’t argue against either case but, I have found, through the process of recovery that I have always been seeking God in one way or another… even in my excesses. After all, what was I seeking but relief from the agony of this “inscrutable mystery" by hitting the bottle or drugs so heavily?” Some drugs (like LSD, mushrooms, and sometimes pot) gave the illusion of expanding my mind, while others (like alcohol, and opiates), were most affective in giving me temporary relief. In all cases, drugs and alcohol led to the peculiar insanity of alcoholism and only made things worse. Today I know that the mystery of the godhead is approachable with humility and, once approached, the rough tracks of life became paved with the labor of persistence into the "road of happy destiny". Therefore, I must be doing something right and doing a lot better than I sometimes think I am.

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