"There were a number of confessionals in the church, but no priests. They had died, or they lay in the hospital, or they had fled for fear of contamination. The church was empty. Goldmund's steps echoed hollow under the stone vault. He knelt before an empty confessional, closed his eyes, and whispered into the grill: "Dear God, see what has become of me. I have returned from the world. I've become an evil, useless man. I have squandered my youth like a spendthrift and little remains. I have killed, I have stolen, I have whored, I have gone idle and have eaten the bread of others. Dear Lord, why did you create us thus, why do you lead us along such roads? Are we not your children? Did you son not die for us? Are there no saints and angels to guide us? Or are they all pretty, invented stories that we tell to children, at which priests themselves laugh? I have come to doubt you, Lord. You have ill-created the world; you are keeping it in bad order. I have seen houses and streets littered with corpses. I have seen the rich barricade themselves in their houses or flee, and the poor let their brothers lie unburied, each suspicious of the other. They slaughter the Jews like cattle; I have seen many innocent people suffer and die, and many a wicked man swim in prosperity. Have you completely forgotten and abandoned us; are you completely disgusted with your creation, do you want us all to perish?" - HH
My parents are religious, more so than your average church goers. My mother calls people she works with to spread the word of God and tries to recruit them to join her in Sunday services. Despite adversities, her moaning on entitlement as a wife, as a mother, and as an American, she somehow finds life through God as one better than without God.
This "passage" in Hesse Novel was relatable in that when all hope is gone, when the future seems bleak, and when the past is strongly avoided, I find my thoughts contemplating the idea of prayer, and sometimes I go through with it. As a reader, reading this passage, at first glance it would be curious for someone to go through so much but still spare time and effort to concisely attempt to give God one last try. Perhaps there's no such thing as the absence of hope or something or someone being "hopeless." It's human to hope, to want to be better. It's life, to find reason or to want to find reason to continue living.
"It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. LIke virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be. But -- and here's an interesting point -- for the most part it doesn't want to be much." -Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
I want to be seen with a fresh pair of eyes. I miss God, I miss God. - Brooke Waggoner,
"Fresh Pair of Eyes"
