It's tempting to read this moment of disappointment, this moment when worship fails and transcendence collapses back into distraction, as cause for either condemnation or vindication. As grounds for condemnation, the moment of disappointment can be taken as more good evidence that the religious project is pointless. Worship doesn't work. It never has before and now, despite whatever local heights you may have reached, it has definitely failed again. But the opposite verdict is also possible. This disappointment can be read as a vindication of religion, as good evidence that worshiping anything other than the one true God will cannibalize you every time. You weren't wrong to worship, you just aimed at the wrong thing. Pick the right thing next time. The failure of a false god vindicates your hunger for the true one.

This polemic can go either way but, in the end, both readings seem thin. They both think worship is about finding an object that won't disappoint. And as polemic, they both miss something vital about the character of this disappointment, about the curvature of the arc that worship describes. Cribbing from David Foster Wallace, this book argues for a third reading. This third way doesn't see the moment of disappointment as a failure of religion or as a failure to be religious. Rather, it reads the moment of disappointment as pivotal to the character of worship. It reads this failure of transcendence as a feature (not a bug) of religion itself. In fact, it holds that one main goal of religion is to induce this disappointment.

This third reading offers a contemporary version of a very old religious idea. This old idea has the shape of a paradox: to save God you must lose God. This idea claims that there is a moment of inversion at the heart of worship, a twist in the loop of transcenderce that renders it, Möbius-like, continuous with immanence. This twist joins both sides—transcendence and immanence—as a single surface. If, with dogged persistence, you rise along the the line of transcendence you will reach a point of inversion in your ascent that will, without ceremony or explanation, return you to immanence. This homecoming will hurt a bit. It will feel like failure. It will disappoint.

[...] This sadness [...] threatens to obscure the urgent revelation at the heart of your loss: the revelation that the end of worship was, all along, immanence and that, though your head may invent a thousand ways of escaping this world, the point of religion is to return you to it.

There are two elements at play in worship: the aiming at the aimed at. The aiming itself is hungry but unstable. The aimed at is nameable but evasive. Invested by your aiming with the hope of satisfaction, with the hope of escape and transcendence, the aimed at becomes an idol. [...]

But, again, your idol can't meet this expectation. No idol can. The hope that it could is a mirage. And when that idol fails--when it disappoints your aiming and shows itself without transcendence: immanent, disheveled, disenchanted--there will be a moment, perhaps quite brief, when all that remains of worship is a pang of raw aiming. This moment when it looks like your worship has failed is the religious moment. This is the revelation. This moment allows the aiming itself to appear. And it is in the aiming itself, not in the object aimed at, that God is most clearly manifest. This is the epiphany. [...]

[...] the more time you spend stuck in your head, ignoring the world, hungry for transcendence and distraction, the more superficial your life becomes. [...]

[...] when life starts to feel insubstantial, you may be tempted to abuse substances. Wallace hints at this connection between feeling insubstantial and the abuse of substances by consistently writing "Substance abuse" with a capital "S". He does so because part of what's at stake in substance abuse is a hunger for some uppercase Substance that could, for once, satisfy desire and appease the head's hunger for transcendence.

But this hunger for some final Substance is a dead end. You can't get rid of it. [...]

[...] Desire naturally assumes that its own intensity is strong evidence for the existence of a correspondingly intense satisfaction. Desire assumes some correlative Substance. It invests its idol with the promise of release. But there is no such substance. [...] Desires wants to desire. It blindly wants, more than anything else, its own perpetuation. Nothing will satisfy it. [...] Desire is adaptive. No matter how great the success, its intensity is easily and upwardly adjustable. Success is no Substance. [...]

[...] Achievement can be more dangerous than failure. At least failure leaves you with the fantasy of some uppercase Substance. But imagine what happens when "you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life 'OK' as you are, in the culture, educated to assume" (IJ 680). [...]

[...] These are the gods we worship: whatever coincidental Substances might promise perfect release. God has himself regularly been conceived along these lines. And the heavens where he resides have often been described as a finally satisfying place reachable only by way of death. [...]