idea: choose who you worship (David Foster Wallace)

Hello,

Sorry I’m a day late! It’s Hari Raya weekend & I wrote this in between distributing meat to refugee communities in Jakarta.

This one’s my first foray into religion-related ideas. Religion is a deep, powerful source of ideas for many including myself. This one, and the entire speech it came from, put me on a journey back in 2012 that I remain thankful for.

I hope you like it too.

The question of God is usually approached today (when its not ignored) as a matter of deduction; before I believe, can you prove to me that God exists?

But this (often equally ignored) excerpt of late writer David Foster Wallace’s legendary This Is Water speech flips the script:

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping.

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

DFW doesn’t start with the question if God exists. He observes – very perceptively, as always – that everybody worships, and so everybody has a God. The only question left is: which God will we choose to submit to? He continues:

And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”

who are we a slave to?

I’ll flip it again to give another perspective to this idea. Worship in Arabic is يعبد (ya’budu) – it comes from the word عبد (‘abd).

Slave.

The idea is that we’re all a slave to something or someone. But you get to choose.

This is Eid weekend & the story of Abraham in the Qur’an is of a man who went on a journey to choose – and then chose again and again, through his actions, to:

Say, “Surely my prayer, my sacrifice, my life, and my death are all for Allah – Lord of all worlds. (Al-An’aam: 162)

But whatever you end up choosing, the question that sticks with me is the one we started with.

Did we choose?

what makes life worth living?

That’s why asking who do we worship is a far better and more interesting question than if God exists – especially for self-proclaimed believers. what makes our short, challenging and fleeting lives still worth living?

Choosing who to worship and being satisfied with it by the time our earthly life ends is perhaps the most meaningful choice we’ll ever make…if we allow ourselves to go on this journey in the first place.

anyway that’s the idea,

zaid