I worship Christ, I worship Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite.
But I do not worship hands nailed and running with blood upon a cross,
nor licentiousness, nor lust. I want them all, all the gods. They are all God.
But I must serve in real love. If I take my whole passionate, spiritual and
physical love to the woman who in turn loves me, that is how I serve God.
And my hymn and my game of joy is my work.
1912 D. H. Lawrence
My dear friend D. H., it is my dream to meet you in some heaven reserved only for those who passionately love the earth. It is my dream to sit under a flowering tree and breathe the spirits of the wood with you, the water, the green grasses, the swooping starling, the huge round fire above us and the huge curve of earth beneath our backs. We will let words slip from our mouths like lightening, like rain, like smoke from a night fire.
Your coal miner father dropped into the bowels of the earth and crawled through ancient carbon forests in search of fuel for the industrial age. With shovel and pick he chipped away at earth’s ancient exterior which in his day was deeply interior, all the long dead flora become coal to be mined, bought, burned in the fires that darken hearts, lungs, minds and make men dead, that is, a strange disaffected fearful, shallow way of being alive.
You say honor all the gods. So do I. It is our intellectual honesty which recognizes the diversity and complexity of these divinities who live not on Mount Olympus but in our human psyches. We do not approach the gods in attempt to make sense. No, the divinities approach us first, seize us like significant bullies did on the school playgrounds of your childhood and in mine. Like multi-valent atoms we have many receptors, many points of connection with the loving and mischievous divine. It is the heat we love in these gods and goddesses, the intense heat that brings urgency to a boil. You found that heat as well in Christ’s wounds, in Jehovah’s laws, in Aphrodite’s bare backside, in Pan’s wild dance among the goats and rushes. We cannot love them by losing their idiosyncratic stings by reduction ad nauseum. We must travel deep into their differences, their strangeness, their mutual incompatibility, their peculiar passions. We must love each as though they were the only one. All these flame together, as oak and pine burn to be the same fire.
The gods and goddesses are fuels. They should not become fossils.