How did you meet?

How did you meet?.

 

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Who is God?

I prayed so often all through my adolescence. I thought of God frequently. It was an easy God I prayed to, a small God. A God who existed in my own frame of understanding. There was never a need to question him. He fit so neatly in this framework. It wasn’t until recently that I realized maybe I didn’t know God at all. It’s no wonder my faith turned out to be so fragile when my idea of God was so tiny. As soon as the world got bigger, God didn’t seem to fit as well. I couldn’t reconcile the differences between the God I thought I knew and the knowledge of the world that I was beginning to learn.

I think by beginning to question and search for answers I’ve been faced with the stark realization that I don’t know God at all. It’s like I spent the majority of my life making small talk with God without getting to know him in any real depth. How ironic considering we describe him as infinite depth.

I think it must be a kind of small beginning that I’m starting to realize just how big my questions are, how vast and deep an infinite, absolute Being must be.

A warm latte

I’m sitting under a tree drinking a warm latte in this perfect weather. It’s almost cool under the shade of this tree with the breeze blowing through me. That’s always how I’ve felt about the wind, that it somehow passed right through me. It’s only outside in quiet times like these that the world makes sense, or maybe it’s not the world but it’s definitely something that makes sense here. The way the shadows from the tree cast flickers of light all over the ground. I’m fascinated by it. These flashes of light interspersed with shadow cover me and I’m warm and cool at the same time.

When I’m outside I feel absolute goodness. I feel as if the fabric of the world, the fabric that I’m a part of is good, if only for a moment. I also never feel alone in this place. I feel the most myself, in perfect balance with my surroundings.

I wonder if this feeling of beauty and awe of the world that I experience so often is a glimpse of God. I wonder if it’s a gift that I experience it so vividly, so profoundly.

I feel made of love in these moments. Or if it’s not love it’s something beautiful and wonderful and warm and good.

“A Grief Observed”

I am currently reading A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis. Tearing through it is probably a better description. I only have pages left, but the need to write was too overwhelming. It’s painfully real to read this book. He is bleeding on the page. In the introduction, someone mentioned that the first time they read this book, they felt a kind of detachment from it. I cannot imagine this, unless maybe one is so good at putting up a defense they can manage it. My defenses are of no such substance. I feel myself bleeding with him, although it is wrong to compare the suffering of reading his suffering to the actual suffering itself. Yet, I find in the suffering, a particular brand of love. A familiar brand of love. It’s familiar in the way that God is familiar. In the way that our joy finds God, but also finds God separated from us in some way. It’s the clarity of suffering. The pain is in our own separation. The closer we get to God, the more acute the separation. The more we realize the limitations of our humanity. That we are not meant for freedom from suffering but freedom through suffering. Suffering is not separate from love then or even distinct from it, but it is beautifully knit into the fabric of human love. Because it is love itself, God himself, but still separated, limited. It’s another clue pointing towards some sort of union. The one thing we long for. Freedom from separation. It’s a beautiful longing we have. There is truth in that, I think. The purest kind of truth we can grasp.

A desperate feeling

I feel a bit like a child reaching for something my parents won’t give me. No matter how hard I try, it’s just out of reach. It’s such a desperate feeling.

I don’t know how to be certain. At first when I started this journey I felt anger towards anyone who was not challenging their beliefs in a similar way. I felt that it was wrong to just be content to take on the things you had been taught without thoroughly examining them. Now, I’m starting not to blame them so much. How wonderful it must be to be certain.

I’m so sensitive to the world. I’m embarrassed to say I can hardly stand to watch the news because I don’t know how to listen and not be affected deeply. I don’t know how to watch and then go about my day normally. It stays so vividly in my mind. I never know how to shake the fear that accompanies those thoughts.

Sometimes I worry that the older I get, the harder I will become. One of the parts of myself that I have always valued is my ability to hope. It’s a beautiful gift, but it’s fragile. It’s so hard to hope in this world sometimes.

I hope for God. I hope desperately. Maybe that’s the only brand of faith I can be sure of.

More than material

I see him. He sees me. I freeze as a powerful burst of energy shoots through me. He smiles a familiar grin. Why is it so familiar? His expressions seem to have a language of their own attached to them. This particular one says “There you are.” It’s been months since I’ve seen him. This is only the second time we’ve ever met.

I’m not making this up… is the only logical statement my brain makes. This is real.

A group of us stand around in a circle, casually conversing. I try to maintain an equal air of nonchalance. He is there. Five feet away from me.

I glance up to find him looking directly at me. No, this was more than a look. I’ve had people look at me before and this was something tangibly different. It was as if one look from him could cut right through me. Shatter all of the walls and defenses I’ve ever had. This was pure vulnerability. He was looking straight at the essence of me. I could see him too. Immediately. Purely. There you are… I thought. I was not meeting him, but recognizing him. I was remembering him.

“Give up”

I feel yet again trapped in my own doubts. Only, I feel more anger now. Because of the small progress I’ve made towards God, I have more to lose. I have everything to lose. It seems that everywhere I turn there are more books and people trying to turn me into an atheist. “Science explains everything” they all seem to say. One moment I’m elevated into the purity of some truth I’ve discovered and the next I plummet back down, down to the depths where I started where the world is nothing but this red table in front of me. My brain nothing but neurons firing. I succumb to this doubt and it overtakes me, robbing me of the hope and delight I once had. In this state, the passionate belief and faith I had only moments before seems to dissipate into the darkness.

“Give up” it seems to whisper to me.

It takes hold of my thoughts, my mind is no longer safe.

I sink lower, still. How far can I fall? Where is the bottom of this pit? “Help” I try to say, but nothing comes. The world goes on unaffected. Am I fated to be so fickle?

My thoughts race. There must be a way out. I can’t feel the joy in this moment, but I know it was there. It was real. It must have been real. It was the most beautiful reality I had ever seen. It wasn’t mere comfort like the atheist says. It was freedom.

“Give up” the voice says. It’s louder this time, more insistent.

I can’t. Not yet.

Something like clarity

The weather is perfect, the sky crisp and clear. A gentle breeze rustles the trees that stretch across the lawn in front of me. People pass me. All kinds of people.. I wonder about who they are and what their lives are like. I can see the deep blue of the lake off in the distance to my right. There are sounds too. Birds chirping and cicadas buzzing in a nearby tree. There is a fluidity to it, an ever changing yet interconnected motion.

All at once, I’m transported into this sense of peace filled longing. The gentlest intermingling of contentment and desire. A feeling of silence amplified by the humming noise. It is joy.

It takes me out of myself and further into myself.

The world looks different from this view. It is bigger, grander than I ever imagined. It is no longer distorted. It is no longer dim, but brimming with the light of possibility. It is good.

An Infinite Something: the absurdity of creation

I figure that creation is a good place to start, considering it is the literal starting place of everything. It’s such a massive idea. It’s as simple as cause and effect, but try to accurately wrap your mind around just how large that “effect” was. You’ll be thinking for quite awhile. I think in some ways creation is the easiest argument for God because we are rational beings (for the most part anyway) and reason looks for a cause. It is how we go about understanding things. Reason always searches for a reason. And the Big Bang is great and wonderful and exciting, but in the words of one of my current favorite writers, Peter Kreeft, “who banged?” How does nothing explode into billions upon billions of somethings? I think it is quite literally the most difficult thing to wrap your brain around because the world we live in is so clearly defined by something causing something. Causality underlies everything that we know and can observe. Science relies incredibly heavily on this principle, and I find it rather amusing that a field who relies on cause and effect would put forth as one of the biggest argument against God an argument that claims an effect without cause.

Causality permeates so much, we hardly think about how much we use it as a lense to view and understand the world. A + B = C. We don’t live in a world where C just shows up by itself, from nothing. It wouldn’t make any sense. In this same way, Creation makes absolutely no sense. It is quite literally, absurd.

I recently read an extremely fascinating book called “A Universe from Nothing”. The author of this book begins by divulging his intent to prove through physics and cosmology that the universe could have just come from nothing, and that there is no need for a creator. My older sister told me about this book and I went out and bought it immediately. It was extremely challenging. I am by no stretch of the imagination a particle physicist, and so I tried to comprehend his book as best as I could. I can say, however, that I’m fairly positive I picked up on his main points. I know that summaries almost never do justice to a work, so I apologize in advance, but I’m going to attempt to summarize.

Basically, the idea is that what we consider empty space or “dark matter” in space is actually composed of energy. Not just a small amount of energy, but the majority of the energy in the universe is actually found in what we consider “nothing”. He goes further to investigate subatomic particles (even smaller than protons, electrons, and neutrons) like quarks and leptons that actually have the potentiality to pop in and out of existence, revealing that something can and does often come from nothing. I could feel myself start to get on this bandwagon. If something can come from nothing, or as he says “Nothing”, then the universe could have come from Nothing as well.

I did not find myself jumping on the bandwagon.

Why, you may ask? There are several reasons. Firstly, if you haven’t noticed already, I have this rather annoying tendency to be very skeptical of the bandwagon. Second, as I was processing his claims, I found myself suddenly reminded of an analogy my mom has used in the past to describe my dad. My dad is an engineer. He is brilliant and very methodical, and because of this he has a tendency to get caught up in the details. My mom’s analogy for him was that he would get so close to the tree, all he would see is tiny specks of brown, and he would have no idea what he was actually looking at. Some of you may disagree, but I think it is definitely possible to get so close to something, you miss completely what it actually is.

This is the exact feeling I got from this book. If you claim that nothing is in fact energy or even the potential for energy, then it is not nothing or even Nothing, but something. In which case, true nothing wouldn’t exist, which would mean that something actually did come from something. This seems to resolve a bit of the creation dilemma until you remember the annoying fact that, again, you are still left without a reason for the energy or potentiality existing or not existing in the first place. And say that we found an explanation for that potentiality, what then would be the explanation for that explanation, and the explanation for the next explanation, etc., etc.

I found myself drowning in the unavoidable yet incomprehensible waters of infinity. Infinity was the only reasonable answer. An infinity of something with the potentiality to put our universe into motion.

An infinity of something brought about the Big Bang and creation.

An infinity of Something…

An Infinity Of Something…

The analogy came back to me. He was so close to the tree, he couldn’t see what he was looking directly at…

I don’t know if it was God that created the universe, but his argument against the need for a creator seemed to me to point directly at a creator. His argument against the need for causality seemed to point directly to causality. Infinite Causality. An Infinite Something.

Is God this very infinity? Are we actually looking directly at God? I can’t be sure, but it would seem I believe in something. An Infinite Something.

“Just have faith”

I just spent a while talking to my aunt, who is a very strong Christian. I swear, she and my uncle are the sweetest people you’ll ever meet. They have very strong Christian values and have been avid Protestant church goers for as long as I can remember. For whatever reason, I decided to open up to my aunt about some of the religious searching and questioning I’ve been doing lately. I think maybe it was out of curiosity for how she would respond to my intellectual/spiritual journey. Like I said, I was raised Catholic, so I know that fundamentalist Protestants approach things a bit differently, so I was interested to hear her thoughts. I tried to express myself as best as I could, talking about my questions about the origin for the universe and causality and a few intellectual arguments that I felt pointed at least in some way to a God. I think I was rambling and fumbling for the right words, and wasn’t having much luck. It’s an odd feeling laying my doubts so openly on the table, especially to someone so firmly established in their faith.

She asked me very poignantly what I thought would happen to my soul when I died, implying whether I thought I would go to heaven or hell or how I thought I would be judged. This stopped me because I didn’t know how to answer it. To begin with, I’m not sure what I believe about the afterlife. I don’t know whether there’s a heaven or hell or if the light just simply goes off, and that’s it. The only description I’ve ever been able to get on board with about heaven and hell is a particularly beautiful one and, in my opinion, the only one that is in any way seemingly consistent with a God of pure goodness. I’ve actually seen it described in more than one book, but the general idea is that after we die, God reveals all of his goodness to us, and at that point, we can accept Him and come into his kingdom, or reject his goodness and go to hell. I don’t know if this is at all what it will be like. After all, speculating about the afterlife is about the most speculative thing a person can do.

I told my aunt that if this were the case, I would definitely choose to accept God’s goodness. She seemed to veer off in a slightly different direction at this point, saying that accepting the absolute goodness of God was something I could do on earth. At this point (please forgive any mockery in my tone) the conversation turned into a bit of a “just accept Jesus into your heart” and a “just have faith” conversation. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it seemed equivalent to me to someone telling me to “just accept that Hinduism is the only true religion.” That very well may be true, but how can I “just accept” something I don’t know if I believe in. It would be a falsehood. I cannot claim to believe in something I don’t know if I believe in. I cannot claim to accept something I have not accepted.

I wholeheartedly admire the people who seem able to “just have faith”, and I wish I were more like that. I guess we all have our own gifts. Maybe it’s one of those things that only comes about once you have put at least a few of the puzzle pieces together. I don’t have my puzzle pieces together at this point. I can say I have faith in one thing, though: that my questioning is the only way I can truthfully and honestly begin, and that this searching will lead me somewhere.