A Letter

Unfortunately some of my favorite readers of old seem to have dropped away (I don't know that everyone uses an aggregator) so, while I'm curious for quite a few reactions that I'm unlikely to get, I am curious as to what the other four people (it's a negative exaggeration, for my amusement, I think there may be as many as six - kidding again) will have to say. The whole thing's off the cuff, but then I thought it was actually pretty good (we'll see if I feel that way in a week) and decided to post it.

What do I have for you. I dunno. Musings on belief and spirituality. To me, questions like this are to be lived through, answers held loosely and seen as inchoate.

You skipped the notion of God being unlimited in power, so who gives a fig if he has to hear seven hundred million prayers at once. "At once" being a null concept, since time is a theoretical construction. (Maybe prayer's for our good, not God's.) So if God doesn't experience time, then is it all blasting all at once, or does he just change channels? Wars could be fought, or at the very least several Protestant sub-denominations formed, over questions like this. To those to whom these things matter deeply I say, knock yourself out. But I think they're missing the point entirely.

I was raised Catholic. Still find value in ritual. Am finally coming to understand some of the sacraments, through my own life, in some ways. In most ways I'm a nondualist. I can't think of any in which I'm not, actually. It just doesn't really preclude anything else. My chief concerns are to do no harm (truthfully speaking, as little as is reasonably possible. Though I'm frequently very self-critical, I like to try and uphold a standard of reasonableness.) and to love those around me. I find God in other people, when at all. There were moments when I understood the whole thing - Christ rising from the dead - to be true, but in a way that rendered the whole thing irrelevant. But I'm not experiencing those moments now. A favorite line from a song: "or fake your death and only tell your closest friends" and I wonder if maybe the writer was thinking of Jesus at the time, too. The thing that mystifies me is that, given that Christianity was really a pain in the neck for the Romans, proving that their hero was still dead would've put a halt to that, but they didn't. How does this matter to me now? To be honest I'm not altogether sure. I'd like to believe in God the Almighty Band-Aid, Fixer of All Wrongs, but really, I'd only like to. Heaven is here and now. The Kingdom of God is here and now. I don't know if there's an afterlife, but I observe that I have this life, and a damn lot of talents, and that I'm discontent if I'm not using them and truly miserable if I'm wasting my time, so those are some good pointers right there to make good use of what I know I have. As opposed to sitting around waiting. Or as Jewel sang, we are God's hands.

I hung out with Pentecostals in college. This had the potential to make me legalistic and mean. I also got into reading the contemplatives, some of them at least, and this saved me from it, more or less. So I inadvertently got straight into what meditators would consider a more advanced method, and skipped the usual stuff with mantras and that. It's not the same to sit inside as it was in the chapel. (I had a key; it was a separate building.) The closest it comes is being on the water at night. But sometimes just sitting and looking at tree shadows is okay. I have a strong affinity for water; I have a strong affinity for sky. I'm at home with vast, unfathomable expanses.

But none of this, where I stand and what I believe now, hinges on whether or not God exists. The flip side of vast emptiness is a universe teeming with existence. It's all one: there is God, there is no God; The use of theistic language is because the language is familiar to me; it's also an easy enough way of communicating with others. I can't speak easily in the Buddhist paradigm, but the nondual one is somewhat closer.

Nonetheless, there's certainly something to believe as extant. Not wishfully. The occasional verifiable experience that was, at the time, information not known by conventional means, cannot be dismissed, is too specific to be accident. Call it God, the Holy Spirit, the third eye, intuition, a sixth sense, however various people explain things. How that affects life as a daily thing (besides, probably profoundly and constantly) I don't know. But there's always that set of experiences - my experiences - that I can't deny. I don't expect any reasonable person who hasn't had similar experiences to go believing anything based on mine. Fellow travelers, all. Anything I know to be true - some would call this belief but to me it's more internalized and profound - is by my own experience. Dangerous to make oneself the judge; I trust my judgment more than most peoples'. And there's very little, it's not specific, and if anything, it's only made me aware of how little I really understand.

At this point you're either with me or you're not, but if things are going on the table, then there ya go.