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Religion can be defined as a heightened awareness of the poetry of existence.
However materialistic our views become, it is consoling to know that we can never be deprived of the charmed prerogative of this devotion.
The rewards of a sensitive consciousness are sufficient for the health of our spirits.
If through the channels of our homely senses we learn to envisage with imagination the movement and murmur of life in our moment of time, we become confederate with eternity.
With so proud a purpose before us, all extravagant anthropocentric hopes appear irrelevant, and we grow content to contemplate with philosophic detachment the flux of creation as it is presented to our eyes, noses, ears, mouths, skins.
All the greatest poetry from Homer to Shakespeare, from Shakespeare to John Keats, is founded upon such elementary apprehensions—apprehensions which are beyond good and evil, and which make no demand outside the curved horizons of the planet…
If we had been allowed to see the earth on the morning of its first creation we would not have been importunate to know the future, to demand that such a dispensation from non-existence should carry a promise of moral significance.
“We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life” would have been our cry. Until we are satisfied with the plain miracle of life, with the plain miracle of what is, and make no further clamor, we will remain restless, froward, dissatisfied.
True religion consists in a simple worship of life without stipulations.
As civil spirits it is incumbent upon each one of us to resist stupidity, injustice, and cruelty; but this is no reason why we should be sentimental enough to fancy that the poetic religion of our new worship is not able to accept every manifestation of strong life; for it is as much present in a cancerous bed-chamber as in the freedom and innocence of an Easter cowslip meadow.
You can find this passage in Llewelyn Powys's great little book — Earth Memories.
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