In Dr. Gregory Benford’s novel The Stars in Shroud, Ling has traveled to the planet Veden to find an antidote to the Quarm plague that has attacked virtually all of humanity. But the Hindic peoples on that planet do not play Sabal, the game that unifies individuals with their neighbors and coworkers, as well as with their inner selves. Cut off from his family, his old job as a starship captain, and the game that forms the core of his religion, he finds solace where he can: in the company of an understanding young woman named Rhandra.
It is during this time of searching that his mind drifts back to an earlier spiritual experience. As a young Fleet officer, he had crashed on a frozen world. The natives there were vicious. They trapped him and added to the injuries he sustained in the crash. Then they let him go and hunted him as he fled. He managed to kill some of them, but by then he was weak, his rations were gone, and his right leg was giving out after a spear ripped through his suit insulation. He passed out in the shelter of a narrow, icy pass.
When he awakened, Ling found a strange creature moving toward him. He tried to evade it, but he was weak and dehydrated, his muscles frozen and unwilling to move. He couldn’t stop the creature as it put a feeler in his mouth. A warm and sticky fluid squirted into his mouth. Ling fell asleep.
During the long night, he woke again, and thought he could hear voices. He prepared himself for death: surely the hunters had found him. Yet they never appeared. Strangely, he could see no sign of the creature, not even the tracks left behind from its movements. Yet he felt a familiar stillness in his soul, that sureness that comes from sensing the presence of “The Other” during prayer, worship, and in Ling’s case, Sabal.
In the morning he was able to get up and travel to a power station where he signaled Fleet for help. While he waited for the rescue party, he wondered: was the creature real, or the product of a delirious mind. Years later, he chanced upon a report from a scientific team that found the strange lifeform on the frozen planet. With the creature’s existence confirmed, Ling was left to ponder whether the spiritual presence of “The Other” he had sensed had been equally real. Ling states his uncertainty thus:
“An ancient philosopher once observed that when a man saturates himself with alcohol and sees purple snakes, we laugh. When a man fasts and sees God, we listen. Should I laugh or listen?”
Spirituality isn’t something that is easily defined. If it were more clear-cut, humanity would have one Religion, and Science would have codified exactly how God interacts with Humanity. Some have been so turned-off by organized religion that they claim there is no God. Most practicing believers will admit that, from time to time, they all question the existence of “The Other.” We wonder if the sensations of our spiritual life are merely manufactured by our own wishful thinking. Like Ling, when it comes to such issues as Faith and Spirituality, we occasionally ponder the validity of our beliefs.
Such a universal predicament suggests a resolution. If so many of us sense “The Other,” and if so much of humanity seeks a relationship that unites us with our community and the Divine (Whatever its name or form), then uniting to seek out “The Other” can hardly be a mistake.
Provided we don’t then fracture such a universal effort with differing dogma.
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