I have caught myself too many times telling somebody else how I do like her enthusiasm, right before saying “but…” and then deliver one or another criticism. When I realize what I am about to do (or what I did) I get that bad taste in the mouth. Why do I have to balance out a compliment to an enthusiast with criticism? Am I jealous of something that I don’t manage to be anymore, at least not as much as I would want to? Why enthusiast people make me nervous? I do admire them, don’t I?
I just learned that enthusiast comes from “being possessed by the gods”.
So the drums in the night and the one that feels them more than us, the one that we call possessed by lack of a better word, the one that will lead us from now on, the one that will interpret so many things for us from now on. The one that has been set apart. The one that was our friend, and now is our leader, our medium. The enthusiast. Admired. Feared too.
And then again, that image is from a long gone time, from religions and societies that aimed at finding the one god-possessed that will be powerful ever after. But those paternalistic and jealous religions have been challenged, eroded in our days of diversity. It does strikes me that if we believe the etymology, we are living in an age of unbelievable polytheism. Aren’t we all encouraged to find that thing, that sport, hobby, work, person! that makes us… enthusiastic? Aren’t we telling each other, then, to go and find our own god? And shouldn’t that lead us to understand that each of us might find a different one? And that it is ok?
There is a proposition that I read, once upon a time, in excerpts of Inoue Yoshihiko’s “cultivating japanese heart”. He says that in Japan there has never been a religious war because the most ancient believe of the japanese is to believe that everything is inhabited by gods. Given that they have been always be with the gods, there has never been a problem to accept whichever (other) gods from whichever other people have reached their islands. Inoue Yoshihiko is then telling us that to believe in many gods is, actually, to believe in all of them, and accordingly respect those many and different people that believes in them too.
And perhaps that is why “to be enthusiast” is more important than whatever the concern of that enthousiasm might be. And perhaps that is why enthusiastic people scares us a bit, and make us jealous. If you are really possessed by a god, it doesn’t really matter which one it is, does it now?