As I stumbled into the 7 train, munchie-munching on a Whooper Jr. and woozy from one beer too many (aka one beer), I heard the train conductor blather something about express stops and a local train arriving. In my self-induced beer coma/face-stuffing haze I paid no attention. I, after all, was a veteran 7 train rider and lived off an express stop, so nothing could possibly go wrong.
But then I imagined if someone had not known which 7 train marquee lights denoted express from local, and how they might have gotten out at an express stop, having helplessly overshot their desired local stop. And I imagined myself a train conductor trying to direct them to backtrack in that brisk New York "figure it out yourself" way. And how that wouldn't be helpful, especially if the poor unfortunate soul is raging against themselves for having missed what they thought unmissable, and raging against the system for having rendered them helpless. And how, when a lot of people are ranting, they want to be soothed more than they care to be solved.
And it occurs to me that this is what it means to be lost, and, what is correspondingly the (pre)disposition toward being found, by religion: to be railing against inequities that are not fully understood but known to be disempowering, and the overwhelming desire to be saved and to receive reassurance from none other than a divine source.
***
In my line of work I have learned how to reassure, how to apologize sincerely but impersonally - for wrongs I neither committed nor knew about, and in many cases nonexistent except in some such person's head. And I believe that's something that needs to be learned, not just in the social work or customer service realms, but for life in general. Because lost souls don't always find God but they always need the reassurance, and why not have them find it through us?