Thoughts on Religion

"He thought, 'How strange this is! Everywhere, in so many individual rooms and chambers, whereber you might be and regardless of your present business, you are constantly seeing these fragments of religions hanging on the walls, fragments that in part say a great deal, in part not so much, and in part nothing at all. What does the male nurse believe? Surely nothing! Perhaps religion for many people nowadays is nothing more than a half-measure, a superficial, unconscious matter of taste, a sort of interest and habit, at least with men. Perhaps a sister of the nurse decorated the room this way. I could believe that - girls have more personal grounds for piety and religious contemplation than men do, whose lives have always been in conflict with religion, always unless they happened to be monks. But a Protestant minister with his snow-white hair, his mild patient smile and his noble gait is and remains a beautiful sight when he strides through a lonely forest clearing. In the city, religion is less beautiful than in the countryside, where peasants live whose very way of life has something deeply religious about it. In the city, religion is like a machine, which is unfortunate, whereas in the country one perceives the belief in God as being just the same as a field of blossoming grain, or like a huge lush meadow, or like the delightful swell of lightly curving hills behind which a house stands hidden, containing quiet people for whom contemplation is a sort of friend. I don't know, to me it seems as if the minister in the city lives too close beside the stock market speculator and the godless painter. In the city, the belief in God lacks necessary distances. Religion here has too little sky, it smells too little of the soil. I'm not putting it very well, and besides, what use is any of this to me? Religion in my experience is a love of life, a heartfelt attachment to the earth, joy in the present moment, trust in beauty, belief in mankind, a feeling of carefree pleasure during revelries with friends, the desire to ponder and a sense of being responsible for misfortune, smiling when death arrives and showing courage in every sort of undertaking life has to offer. In the end, a profound human decency has become our religion. When human beings maintain decency in their dealings with each other, they are maintaining it before God. What more could God want? The heart and all the finer sentiments can together produce a decency that might well be more pleasing to God than dark fanatical belief, which can only disconcert even the Divine One himself, so that in the end He'll no doubt wish not to hear the prayers thundering up to His clouds any longer. What can our prayers mean to Him if they come bawling up so clumsily, presumptuously, as if He were hard of hearing? Mustn't you imagine Him possessing infinitely acute ears if you can picture Him at all? I wonder whether the sermons and the peals of the organ are agreeable to Him, the Ineffable One? Well, He'll surely just smile at our efforts, dubious as they may be, and hope that it will occur to us some day to leave Him in peace a bit more often.'"

from Robert Walsers's The Tanners, pp. 281-283