“Reassurance” is relative. Some cultures have populated the infinite with personifications of oppressive brutality, many have come to notions of more or less delicately balanced forces and a few to concepts of all-sustaining total goodness. Enter: "GOD". Or "the gods".
In each case, appropriate human responses have been prescribed by
religions or wisdom teachers: unwavering obedience, public or private
sacrifice, formulaic worship and adoration, denial or annihilation of
“self”, obedience to codes of socially
practiced goodness, obedience to codes of purity and “cleanliness”, the
practice of ecstatic social ritual or private reflection and meditation.
Across the board, you can find all sorts of similarities… and
all sorts of differences. Many of the differences can be traced to cultural
insights, biases and practices (the tastes of the “gods” happily coinciding with the
culture’s set of sanctions). Many of the similarities can be linked to
widespread or universal human capacities (we share finite abilities), or to the daily needs of social
animals: genes or survival.
But, no matter how the impulse is expressed or where you
find the shapes of its expression, the existential mysteries still vex human
consciousness: “god” does not go away.
This is where atheism fails, not because of its apparently
watertight arguments but because "god" will not go away. And whether or not “god” or the “gods” take form in the
human mind or at the furthest ends of the universe, or exist all-pervasively, is similarly irrelevant — in
that case, we are just conjecturing about the gods’ location, not their
existence. Either way, they are just as “present”.
There is one way to get away from the issue. That is to
build a brick wall around all we think
we know and call the wall “the ends of the universe”… enter the “modern”,
rational, “practical” man of action, the pragmatist who gets things done. As a
cultural style, it produces the literalist, the materialist, the rule of law,
the clinician, the accountant, dualism and fundamentalism thrive: you can only
be “right” or “wrong”. Minds close. All becomes vanity.
The trap here is that there’s no “higher court” of appeal:
there is no effective recourse for aesthetic, intuitive or “spiritual” values
and “emotionalism” is a weakness. Nothing is sacred.
We have moved a long way from the Middle Ages, when magic
pulled the strings, to the rising reign of the rational …and the danger is that
human beings have always tended to swing between extremes.
We need “religion”, “spirituality” and “faith” in order to be fully
human.
THIS is the “bedrock” of any faith…
not what is “believed” but where we plant its foundations. It's the context, not the content that's decisive. And the context is the absolute mystery of existence.Where, in our
being, is the seed of faith? How have we found it?
I don’t think the churches, collectively, know. I don’t
think they even think very deeply about it, nor our culture and the directions in
which we are pulled — at the deepest levels — by it.
But we are healthiest and happiest when we are most fully human; not
necessarily when we are rich and clever.
We find “god” when we seek the wholeness of our own
humanity.
 |
| Where are we going? |
HOW do we go about that search?
Here are my thoughts:
CURIOSITY… as an youthful atheist I felt the
purpose of life was to experience it all as fully as possible: in New Zealand in those days, that meant going up mountains, down caves, into the wilderness and, as often as
possible, to the ocean: sailing, diving, surfing or just swimming. It meant
partying and mixing it with different (mostly Polynesian) cultures. This led me
to an awareness of an overriding unity that makes life “real” as opposed to
something that passes by.
I found that incidents began coalescing into
narratives — there was some kind of unintelligible “meaning” to it all. I
experienced this as the biggest “why?” of them all. So I tried doing stuff I
didn’t think I wanted to do, just to push the boundaries and this led me into
religion and on into Christianity (of a sort).
I’ve sought meaning intellectually but, much more importantly, experientially.
OPEN-NESS… to life, people, places… accepting the
unexpected, the “strange” and the “stranger”. It’s an amazingly diverse little
World. Without open-ness I think my curiosity might have dried up. I feel I’ve
come to faith by trying to be the least interesting person I know. At the same
time, it is the stimulus — a vivid face of love — I’ve found among very
different people that’s given me confidence to seek my “self”-hood.
But
self-hood has no meaning to me without its connectedness to the “meaning” I
began to discern as an atheist. While open-ness adds to the narrative (meaning)
and self-hood — which inevitably becomes defined in the context of some sort of
community — it does nothing to diminish the mystery: the mystery keeps
expanding. Self-hood helps me enjoy the ride and, thereby, learn from it.
LOVE… love rises when I let myself be
passionate about entering into experience. And love then energises and
heightens the experience. I find it difficult not to feel love rise among most
the people and in most of the places to which I’ve let myself be led. I’ve seen
love expressed widely enough to conclude that “love” is a human being’s natural
state.
The distance any of us moves from that natural state is a measure of how
screwed up things are.
But I easily get immersed in and distracted by all sorts
of beauty — beauty is, in my conception, god's language of love — and incessant drama, often as commonplace as a spider making a web, a fish in
the river, a cloud unfurling in a high wind, the way a creature moves… and by
watching people interact: you can learn more about people by watching their
movements, gestures and expressions as they interact with each other than you
could from a transcript of their conversation. And it all adds to the grand
narrative of existence.
BUT there are obstacles.
• “Wants” and “needs”: To serve a need or
a want is to narrow your frames of experience — it becomes
necessary to exclude the “distractions”, to “focus”. The false premise behind
pursuing “wants” is that fulfillment and happiness are “out there”. I can’t
remember ever having seen the satisfaction of that sort of “want” bring enduring
pleasure or joy. On the contrary, it usually seems to spark awareness of some
new “want”. I’ve known people who have been made made less happy than they
expected by relief from desperate material need. The hope that sustained them
through their direst times and gave them the resilience to last the distance…
that was the basis of their joy — even after the need was satisfied.
Most of
us though, in the global middle class of “Western” societies generate wants and
needs, it seems, for their own sake. So, blinkered by fanciful “needs”, we consume vast
amounts of “entertainment” because we are blind to the torrents of stimulus
that wash over us ever moment, everywhere we are. (According to the Canadian
Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s annual Communications
Monitoring Report released on 4 September, the “average” Canadian watched 28.5
hours of television a week in 2011, up from 28 hours a week in 2010.) And entertainment annihilates awe.
• ANXIETY… is another enemy of faith. Anxiety is
a culturally induced frame of mind that draws boundaries close and dampens interest in anything beyond one's immediate self.. Our own, very often
groundless, little fears and worries about trivialities nag us away from
curiosity and the risk-taking that open-ness to life requires. We are made to
fret about our comfort zones and our fretting too often grows into fear. And
fear is paralyzing. If anything can damn us, it's fear and anxiety.
