“Everybody worships.” Two simple words, subject and verb. Everybody. Worships.
Google the dyad and the source explodes off the screen, a wholly unexpected wellspring for theologians (and Mockingbird).
David Foster Wallace was an enigmatic literary genius. It’s almost embarrassing for me to say, the height of clichés, but I must: Reading Infinite Jest changed my life. DFW’s hyper-intellectual maze of words and atonal writing style sprung a creative trap in me that may not be evident in my novel, Eat What You Kill, but, trust me, both are woven through my very being. DFW did something that, naively and mistakenly, I did not, at that point in my life, believe possible: He made fiction an intellectual exercise, a measure of intelligence, a journey into random, self-indulgent, story-telling. David Foster Wallace gave me permission to write.
A decade after devouring Infinite Jest, about 40,000 words into EWYK, I found myself volunteering at Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s welcome table, and there it was, excerpted on a banner hanging on the wall:
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
CONTINUE READING
