Between Religious Feelings And Belief Poem by gershon hepner

BETWEEN RELIGIOUS FEELING AND BELIEF

Between religious feeling and belief
there lies an area that is gray.
God rules this area, Champion but not Chief,
and prefers to stay away,
causing much belief to atrophy
while men towards their fellows nourish
feelings, suffering no catastrophe,
since in that area they can flourish,
doing unto others what men should,
and not doing what they shouldn't.
Though they're beyond belief, these men are good.
I think God loves them, and wouldn't?

Arlene Croce reviews Sjeng Scheijen's Diaghilev: A Life, and an exhibition on Diaghilev at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the NYR,12/13/10:

Diaghilev's exaggerated fears of disease and death, often dismissed as superstitions by memoirists, were based on serious afflictions and were with him a long time. As a student, he met Leo Tolstoy and afterward wrote him long, troubled letters about sexuality and death, to which Tolstoy is said to have replied. The most heartfelt letter, which Sergei wrote on his twenty-first birthday, is excerpted by Scheijen in the V&A album, evidently having come to light after his book was published. The intensity of this experience with Tolstoy, the urgency of his need for the fatherly, not to say godly, figure of Tolstoy (his own father was aloof) , cannot fail to have had an effect on Diaghilev's moral character. In later life, it's true that he was superstitious rather than religious, unlike Stravinsky, who was superstitious and religious. But though Diaghilev lacked religious belief he did not lack religious feeling. When Stravinsky asked for his charitable forgiveness in order to take communion, he wrote back:
I think only God can forgive because only He can judge. When we quarrel and when we repent we, poor little lost souls, must have enough strength to greet one another as brothers and to forget all that wants forgiveness. If I want it, it's because it concerns me too, and although I am not preparing for communion I still ask you to forgive me all my conscious and unconscious sins towards you and only to keep in your heart that feeling of brotherly love I feel for you.

One would have to side with his most militantly malicious enemies not to think that he was sincere.

6/8/12 #10448