A novel enterprise

It’s been a year since I finished writing a novel. (Shameless self-promotion: It’s available at Amazon; title is The Misforgotten.)

There wasn’t any reason or logic, especially, behind this undertaking. I wrote my 340-page magnum opus to purge myself of accumulated random thoughts and a narrative that’s been nagging at me for years. It was an act, you could say, of pure self-indulgence. Beyond that, if there is a beyond that, it was an effort to make sense of things.

And, for better or worse, that’s what religion is. Dawkins and Hitchens and Maher and all the other shrill and strident atheists want everyone to come to their senses and start using their heads on the question of God. But if everyone used their heads all the time then no novels would get written (also for better or worse, people will argue), no music would get composed (except the sterile kind of music), no paintings would get painted (ditto on the last parentheses). Literature and music and art are what help a lot of us get through life, and the same goes for religion.

The utterances of Jesus are as beautiful and mysterious and startling as the works of Michelangelo or Bach or Keats, and to ask that we abandon our “belief” in any of them is to say we should close our hearts – while using our heads – to the ineffable.