There was a series of churches, priests and religious books, wasn’t there? What else was there for you? You felt there was nothing else for you, didn’t you, felt it so firmly that it became a kind of knowledge. You were baffled by the pleasure people took in things, weren’t you? Wasn’t the only real pleasure you could imagine to be with God, to be right with God? What other pleasure could there possibly be?
Didn’t your little excursions to the forest or the coast take on a different tone then? Wasn’t the beer replaced by God, the presence of God in the whispering leaves, in the mist and the surf? In it or beyond it? Life was God and God was life, all else was death, that’s all you knew. There was something just beyond you, just out of reach – except in those moments when things seemed to come together, in moments of heady unity. What fervour! It was as if you’d recaptured your youth, recaptured life!
Where was I in those moments? I don’t know. With you, perhaps. Just beyond you, perhaps.
Didn’t your life become an attempt to recreate those heady moments, to prolong them? There was even a school of theology, wasn’t there? What were you trying to achieve there, did you even know? Did you think you’d be saved?
Didn’t you start to sense that your fervour was in vain, as the moments became rarer, as what you thought you were capturing slipped out of your grasp, as you realised that only something you could never know could save you?
