It is interesting that the word quest, as in spiritual quest, so easily becomes the word question.
Questioning every aspect of life — from mundane matters to profound spiritual beliefs — is what keeps the human mind engaged.
And the question that transcends all questions, in my opinion, is and always will be: Is there God? Not a God, but God, purely and simply (although hardly simple), God.
Whether we admit it or not, that question, if not always in our cluttered minds, is certainly in our hearts.
AGNOSTICISM
The agnostic and to some extent the atheist will say the question is of zero interest to them. Their minds are made up — there is no God. But that kind of arrogance is as annoying as the crazed fervor of some evangelists.
The non- and never-believers want evidence that God exists. Faith isn’t enough for them.
But such evidence is currently, and possibly as impossibly unfathomable and unknowable as radio waves were to the cavemen of a million years ago. Yet radio waves and other “miracles” in the electromagnetic spectrum were in fact ultimately revealed over time — as unknown others may also be discovered in an impossible universe where, I suggest, anything is possible.
GODLESS TRICK?
If there is God, then all is well with life — and death. But if there is no God we are all lost. Life, in the end — even though we may have had a “good life” — becomes an empty shell, a cosmic fraud, a godless dirty trick. If that is the case, for one thing, the main thing I would say, we will never be reunited or in communion in some unknown Godly and mystical way with our lost loved ones.
We will mourn them for the rest of our lives and stubbornly live in the hope and prayers we will be with them — again, in that unknown and unknowable way — but if that hope is false and all our prayers are based on a diabolical delusion inflicted upon us by a flawed theology and a Christian concept that is contradicted by history and science and common sense, then we are all doomed to oblivion and the nothingness that existed before we were born, when we knew nothing, experienced nothing, were aware of nothing because we didn’t exist and were in fact nonexistent.
SOULS OF LOVED ONES
Therefore, in order to survive the tragedies in life, one creates or at least imagines a spiritual place or space, a realm, a supernatural sphere, a dimension, and as-yet undiscovered wave-length within a universe of 200 billion galaxies — call it Heaven if you want — where one may, however remotely, but hope-beyond-hopefully, find the spirit, the soul if you will, of lost loved ones; because even if one doesn’t believe in God, one believed and continues to believe in our loved ones — whether they be wife, husband, soulmate, companion, child, sister, brother, best friend, whomever.
They were real. But now they are dead and no longer real, one can only hope that they are surreal and therefore spiritually communicable. But if that is not the reality, by which of course in this context I mean the surreality, then all is lost and emptiness and meaningless awaits us all.