A Creed for the Third Millennium (33 page)

He stopped, not because he was drained,
or uncertain where he was going. He stopped because he was a natural orator, and
his instinct said it was the right moment to stop. No one stirred.

He went on. 'I am an optimist,' he said.
'I
believe
in the future of Man. And I believe that everything happened,
happening, will happen, is both a necessary part of the ongoing evolution of
Man, and an inescapable part of the pattern God weaves. I believe that to
despair of the future of Man is an insult unendurable to God.'

He drew a deep breath, and his next words
rolled out in a thunder that set the sound-volume indicators in the control room
climbing frenziedly.
'God is!
Accept that first, and only then question
what and who He is! It is said that as a human being grows older and therefore closer to his grave, he comes
to believe in God because he fears to die. I do not agree! Belief replaces
scepticism as a man or woman grows older because that man — or woman — in simply
living out life has begun to see a pattern. Not a pattern affecting the race,
but a pattern inside the limitations of his own little single humble life. The
chances, the coincidences, the truly astonishing relevancies. Youth cannot see
the pattern because youth is too young. Not enough years, not enough
data.

'God is!
That much I know. I
cannot find it in me to condemn any form of religious belief or observance, but
for myself, I can believe in none. I must tell you that about myself, for you
must not be under any misapprehension about me. The only reason I stand here now
comes out of my conviction that I can actively help all those who suffer from
millennial neurosis. I have already helped many who live in my town of Holloman,
but I am only a man, one man. So to reach all of you I have had to write a book,
a book which speaks in the same way I do in person. Therefore you are entitled
to know what kind of man I am. And what kind of believer. I am not a religious
man, if by that you envision a man who observes an established religious
regimen. Yet I believe in God!
My
God. Not anybody else's God. And God is
the crux of my life, my therapy, my book. So—' he drew a huge breath '— here I
stand speaking of God, here I stand in this bizarre—' his shaking hand swept
round him — setting speaking of God! To faces I cannot see, to people I will
never know.'

His head went forward, his chin dropped,
that chameleon voice performed yet another change, from a lion roaring to the
quiet sadness of long grief.

'Every one of us needs a bulwark against
the loneliness of life. For life is lonely! Sometimes intolerably so. Sometimes
indescribably so. Inside each one of us a human spirit lives alone, intensely
individual, perfectly formed no matter how imperfect the
mind and body housing it might be. To me that spirit is the only part of a man
or a woman God created in His image, for God is not a man or a woman. He is not
a human being, He probably doesn't even live in our infinitely small segment of
the sky. I do not think He wants or needs us to love Him, or propitiate Him, or
personify Him in any way. Times have changed. Human nature may or may not have
changed, though I think it has, and for the better. We are not quite so quick to
hurt each other, we are not quite so ignorant of each other. But many people
have abandoned God, thinking God has not changed, God has not moved with the
times, God has not given us the credit we are due. That is a completely false
set of assumptions. What has not changed is the formal and institutionalized
human concept
of God. God has no need to change, because God is not a
being Who can be defined in our human meaning of the abstraction we call
"change". The third millennium has shown us Americans especially the dangers of
naivety, the wholesomeness of scepticism. But never, never be sceptical about
God! Be sceptical about the men and women who have presumed to define and
describe God. They are just men and women, and they can offer little if any
proof that they are any better qualified to define and describe God than the
rest of us. The main reason such vast numbers of people have abandoned God in
the last hundred and fifty years is not actually to do with God at all. It is to
do with human beings. People have given me all kinds of reasons why they have
abandoned God, and in every case those reasons are actually based not in God but
in human rules, regulations, dogmas and the like. 'Do not abandon God!
Turn
to God! There is your bulwark against loneliness! To understand and feel the
pattern. To know individual personal existence is a vital part of the pattern.
To go forward not into chaos or random chance, but into a further phase in
the history of our race, its ceaseless
groping after the truth and the goodness which is God. Not our truth! Not our
goodness!'

He began to walk, which created a frenzy
among cameramen, floor staff and the control room, unable to predict his
peregrinations. He didn't even notice, let alone care.

'We are not God's children except in a
purely biological sense, because we belong to ourselves. It is our right as
human beings to belong to ourselves. God gave us not His laws but the ability to
make our own. And if God expects anything at all of us, then He simply expects
us with patience and endurance and strength to overcome every obstacle not He
but we ourselves and our environment keep putting in our way. This is not God's
world. It is
our
world! He gave it to us! I cannot believe in a
proprietorial God. We have made this world what it is, not God. We should blame
Him as little as we should praise Him. I like to think that when we die the best
part of us goes back to God, not necessarily as the entity we call self, but as
the part of God already in us, that lonely spirit. But I don't know, and I can't
tell you. I just believe that inside me is a little drop of God to fuel me, keep
me going. What I do most certainly know is that here is where I am right now,
here in this world made by me and my fellow men and all our ancestors. Here is
the world I have participated in creating. The world which is therefore my
responsibility, as it is all men's responsibility. '

'The book!' cried Bob Smith from his
chair, spellbound, yet sufficiently possessed of himself to dislike the way his
show had been wrested from him.

Dr Christian stopped pacing and turned to
look down on Bob Smith from his great height, eyes blazing, nostrils dilated,
the makeup on his face standing out like a mask in which those eyes dwelled like
alien fifes.

The remark had dragged him back to where
he was, why he was there, what he was supposed to be doing.

'The book,' he said, and it might as well
have been, 'Which book?' He paused, searching. 'The book. Yes, the book! I
called it
God in Cursing
because that is the crucial phrase from a line
or two of a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning which appeals to me. It is
biblical in that it refers to the severance of God and Man, that time when Man
was driven from the Garden of Eden with God's curse ringing in his ears. God
cursed Man with the choice between good and evil, with bringing forth — and up!
— his children in pain and travail, with wresting a living from the earth by the
work of his hands, with the cycle of life and death. The poem itself was written
as a hymn to work.
"Get leave to work.. . for God, in cursing, gives us
better gifts than men in benediction."

'It is my opinion,' he went on with no
apology in his tone, 'that all myth and legend and archaic theology including
Genesis is allegorical and was originally intended by its writers to be
interpreted allegorically. To me, God in cursing us actually gave us the gift of
ourselves. We were handed the entire responsibility for our collective and our
individual destinies. Like any good parent, He kicked us out of His nest to make
our own way in our own infinitesimal segment of the sky.

'The dawn of the race of Man and Man's
power to reason was a very long time ago, as long before recorded history as the
waxing and waning of several ice ages. The millennia have passed in endless
progression, though about the last five of them only do we know very much. And
now we stand on the brink of a new millennium. Facing the same old problems.
Facing some new ones too. Good and evil are. They cannot change. But work used
to be the lot of every man, and now it is rapidly becoming an aristocratic
privilege. Men nowadays are more often paid not to work. And the greatest pain our children
can inflict upon us is their dwindling number, in our having to wrap up the
whole of our urge to immortality within the frail person of one single child per
family, give or take the winners of the SCB lottery, and they have their own
pains, poor souls.'

Some shifted in their seats to hear Dr
Christian's evident sympathy for two-child parents; Bob Smith, who had two
children and would gladly have kept his family to one child had he dreamed of
the repercussions, was suddenly moved to like this strange and terrifying man.
Even to forgive his usurpation of the show.

'Millennial neurosis is loss of hope in
the future and faith in the present. It is a perpetual feeling of futility and
lack of purpose. It is a dull and utterly unproductive fury turned in upon
itself. It is depression often to the point of suicide. It is apathy. It is
believing in nothing, from God to our country to ourselves. It is also a
Tantalus situation, where most of us living — the average age of all Americans
is now up beyond forty — can look back to kinder days, days when we chafed and cavilled at restrictions on our liberty so minor by comparison that we could all
happily give an arm or two for the chance to go back to them. Therefore
millennial neurosis is not only loss of hope in the future and faith in the
present, it is love of the past. Because — well, who could want in his heart to
live in our present?'

'Since we don't have any choice but to
live in the present, Doc, how about giving us some answers?' called Manning
Croft.

Dr Christian looked at the black man
sternly and gratefully, pleased to be reminded where he was, what his purpose
was. He gave his answer quietly, with tender strength.

'Turn to God, first of all, and
understand that the more persistent in the face of adversity any
human being is, the richer will be his pattern
of life, the happier he will be contending with his life, the bigger his spirit
or share of God will grow, and the easier he will face his death. And learn to
be busy with hands and mind, for then grief is less unbearable. Acquire a taste
for beauty in the world around you, in the books you read, in the pictures you
see, in the house you inhabit, in the street where your house is, in the town
where your street is. Grow all kinds of living things, not to replace the
children you cannot grow, but to keep your brain and eyes and skin constantly
exposed to the adventures of growth and life. And accept the world for what it
is while doing everything in your power to make it a better place. Do not fear
the cold! The race of Man is greater than the cold. The race of Man will be here
when the sun warms again.'

'Dr Christian, do you think what we are
going through right now is really necessary?' asked Bob Smith.

In the White House two men sat up
straight in a hurry, and in the green room Dr Carriol crossed her fingers and
shut her eyes and wished she had someone to pray to. But how could one pray to
the God of Joshua Christian?

'Oh, yes, it is necessary,' answered Dr
Christian. 'For which is worse, to elect to possess one whole and perfect child,
or to run the risk of littering broods of genetically warped quasi-children
because the only way left to give ourselves that kind of freedom is nuclear war?
Which is worse, to run out of gas in a blizzard in upstate New York within the
splendid isolation of personal wheels, or travel to Buffalo packed shoulder to
shoulder in a warm safe train? Which is worse, to keep on reproducing at the
rate we were reproducing, and find our cities squeezing our available arable
land to the point of inadequacy, or to limit our reproduction and thereby our
industry and our urban sprawls to a size which will allow
all of us to live comfortably in the icy times to come?'

He looked around him slowly, suddenly —
visibly —weary. And the audience was weary with him, yet not tired of him any
more than he was tired of them.

'Remember that we are the ones who must
suffer most, for we are the ones who remember different times. What is alien to
us will be normal to our children. What you have never known you cannot miss,
except as an exercise in abstract thinking. And the very worst disservice we can
do our poor solitary children is to fill them with longing for a world they will
not know and cannot know. Millennial neurosis is exactly that. A phenomenon of
our generation, the millennial generation. It will not endure, if we have the
strength to let it die with us. For when we go, it
must
go.'

'Dr Christian, are you saying that the
only certain cure for millennial neurosis is the passing of our
generation?'

This came out of the audience somewhere
in the dimness; the floor manager nixed a suggestion from upstairs that he swing
a camera in the direction of the inquirer, for Dr Christian had embarked upon
his reply without hesitation.

'No. I am not even saying that with the
passing of our generation, millennial neurosis will cease. All I am saying is
that we owe it to our children to
let
it die with us! As for more
positive ways of combating it, I outlined those to Mr Croft, so I won't repeat
them now. But all of it is in my book, better said, because more logically
said.' The rare sweet smile was aimed into that section of the audience where
the almost invisible woman sat. 'I get carried away, you know, and that means I
forget how to be logical. I am only a man, and not even a very perfect specimen,
I'm afraid. I have struggled to give you an imperfect man's imperfect ideas
about what ails us, about God, about ourselves. And I only offer these ideas because I
have found that they have helped the people who have turned to me for
help.'