eyes as clergy

“For a while she was enchanted by those who proposed that God was in nature, was all around us, was the accumulated natural world. ‘God,’ they would suggest, ‘is in all living things. God is beauty, God is in the long grass and the foam finishing a waterfall.’ That sort of thing. She liked that idea, God being in things that she could see, because she liked seeing things and wanted to believe in these things that she loved looking at — loved the notion that it was all here and easily observable, with one’s eyes being in some way the clergy, the connection between God and –

But a single contained God implied or insisted upon a hierarchy that she didn’t accept. God gave way to a system of extremes, and implied choices, and choices required separations, divisions, subtle condemnations. She was not ready to choose one God, so there would not be this sort of god in her world, and thus the transcendental deity –

But then why God at all? The oil-wet water was not God. It was not the least bit spiritual. It was oil-wet water, and it felt perfect when she put her hand into it, and it kissed her palm again and again, would never stop kissing her palm and why wasn’t that enough?”

- Dave Eggers, How We Are Hungry, HT