36 beyond wishful thinking
high cultures that off er accounts of our place in the cosmos, the basic
fl aws in our existence come to the center of our consciousness. We em-
brace beliefs that put these fl aws in a larger context: a context that gives
them meaning and shows them to be less terrifying than they appear
to be. We assure ourselves that we will fi nd decisive help against the
terrors and the realities of death and of groundlessness, that we will be
freed from the torment of vain desire, and that we will fi nd a way to
live, now and hereaft er, that can bring our circumstance- bound exis-
tence into accord with our circumstance- transcending identity.
It would be perverse to reduce the religious orientations that have
emerged in world history to so many incantations against the fear that
the unfi xable defi ciencies in our existence will always arouse in us.
Nevertheless, without appreciating this element in these orientations, it
is hard to make sense both of what they have and of what they have not
said and accomplished.
In one such line of religious belief and experience, we devalue the
reality of the manifest world of change and distinction, affi rm the unity
of mind and nature, seek to submerge ourselves within real and hidden
being, dismiss death as if it were powerless to touch our essential bond
to this one and undying being, and nourish in ourselves the serenity
and the universal fellow feeling that such a view of the world may help
inspire.
In another direction of faith, we step back from the abyss of ground-
lessness and mortality, of diminished life and tormented desire, into a
social world of humanized social relations, focused on what we owe one
another by virtue of the roles that we occupy. We eschew metaphysics in
favor of solidarity, internalized in each of us as an ethic of self- denying
ser vice. Th e social creation of meaning in a meaningless world becomes
our watchword.
In yet another mode of consciousness, we come to think that a di-
vine friend of ours is master of the universe that he created; that he has
intervened and will intervene in history on our behalf; and that his in-
tervention has already rescued us, and will continue to save us, from
the otherwise unbridgeable rift s in our existence.
A religion off ering us no assurance that everything is all right would
diff er from what religion has been, so far, in histor y. It would amount to
a third moment in the history of our spiritual experience. Th e major