Conclusion                                                       Page 58

A PERSONAL REFLECTION BY WAY OF CONCLUSION

The death of God came as a great, shock to me. It was a shock whose waves

rolled through the entire structure of my life and my world. The realisation of

such loss came not as the result of reading about it in philosophy or "radical"

theology or through any process of rational thought but in dark personal

experience. In a part of myself I thought the loss to be temporary and that it

was a matter of just getting through this difficult time. But somewhere within

myself I knew this was not to be. The loss was not only necessary, it was

irrevocable. The transcendent God vanished and was not going to return. A

huge void opened and there was nothing.

It is hard to understand, let alone describe, how it is possible to be in nothing

but that is where I was and it became the only place I knew for a long time.

There was no light, only darkness and it was in no way consoling. Any "dark

night" I'd lived through before was nothing like this. Everything I'd been able

to call upon before was gone, with a sense of utter finality.

Yet in an obscure, never able to be spoken way, dark-nothing seemed the right

place to be. This "seeming" was not conscious thought, it was more blind,

dumb instinct. Slowly some vague sense stirred with the faintest suggestion

that what I regarded as terrible loss was, perhaps, the lifting of a series of thick

veils through which I had seen the world and everything in it.  Veils of

certitude, infallible dogma, and oppositional dualisms had predetermined my

vision.