A Sunday Reflection on Religion and Faith

I've been away from blogging for a couple of months. I first took a break in honor of the holidays. And then I got busy editing my new series of novels for a quicker than normal schedule of publication. I hope you've already seen the prologue to the series, the book The Oasis Within. It's been out for a few months. And just this week, the first numbered volume in the series Walid and the Mysteries of Phi, The Golden Palace, appeared on Amazon. In two or three months, I hope to have volume two out as well, The Stone of Giza. 

I'm almost done in my editing of the eight books I've already written for the series. And today, Sunday, I want to share a passage I just edited. Even though the books are set mainly in Egypt, certain things happen in faraway places, like Tunisia, or Berlin, or New York City. This passage comes from a story line in numbered Book Seven, The Ancient Scroll. The setting is New York City in 1935 at a Methodist Church. The minister, Bob Archdale, is working on a sermon. We get a chance to see into his head and heart as he makes notes. I hope you enjoy this passage.

Bob at the moment was in his office preparing his sermon for the next morning. He was planning to talk on the nature of faith and how it’s more about perception and values and commitment than just belief. He had decided to use as his biblical text the famous meeting at night between Jesus and the Jewish Rabbinical leader Nicodemus, as reported in the Gospel of John, chapter three. At a time when most of the religious establishment either disliked or feared Jesus, this prominent teacher had gone to see him at night, when, presumably his visit would not be public knowledge. He approached the controversial figure and actually said, “Teacher, some of us know that you were sent by God, because no one could do the things you do without divine support.” And then Jesus, rather than acknowledging the scholar’s rare open-minded reasoning and remarkable belief, says something instead that can be very puzzling on more than one level. His words in response were: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus is of course perplexed and says, “How can anyone return to the womb and be born a second time?” And then Jesus answers in such a way as to indicate that his entire ministry and mission aren’t primarily about reasoning and belief, but personal transformation into what’s really a new life, with new perceptions, values, and commitments.

Bob knew that, at almost any time, many of the people in his church were showing up, week-to-week, to make a deal with God. They would believe whatever they needed to believe, and do whatever they needed to do, in order to gain divine favor and everlasting life. Some were likely just hedging their bets and maybe living out the famous Agnostic’s Prayer: “Oh God, if there is a God, please save my soul, if there is a soul.” They were there in an effort to perhaps improve their lot and maybe defeat death. But God wanted them there to defeat spiritual blindness and deafness and idolatry and selfishness. He wanted to see them born anew, raised from the death of alienation and separation and selfishness to a new life of union with him and each other. He wanted an eternal life for them now, which was more about quality than it was about quantity. 

He really wanted to get this point across to everyone who showed up for the service. The faith they were being called to embrace is about new life, new values, and new commitments lived all day, every day. He wanted them to understand that when the insistent felt needs of the untutored ego can be released, its real needs can be met. And then, we can experience the genuine power of humility, compassion, and deep faith. The reverend was hoping to get all this across in a persuasive and illuminating way, so that at least many of the members of his congregation could perhaps see the issues of faith in a new and richer light.

When people approach religion for what they can get out of it, they ironically make it nearly impossible to get the most out of it. It becomes a tool—an instrument the ego is merely using to enhance its own interests, whether those interests are healthy or not. That’s why we’ve had so much war and violence and oppression in the name of religion throughout history. These things have nothing to do with true spirituality, but are perversions or deformations of what faith and the quest of the spirit are supposed to be all about. We often come across people pursuing their own greed, with their own ambitions, and superstitiously seeking to assuage their worst fears under a false patina of religious language, ritual, and sentiment. And this wasn’t just a danger for other times and places, Archdale knew, but it’s a temptation for any of us unless we can come to a true understanding of spiritual things.

Who People Are

I've been reading a lot of Young Adult (YA) fiction recently, just to see what it's like - books such as the Hunger Games trilogy, the Divergent trilogy, The Bell Jar, and three titles by John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns. It's been a great ride. And I've especially enjoyed the story telling techniques of John Green. I loved the characters in his tale about young cancer kids, The Fault in Our Stars (made into a major motion picture), but really disliked the bleak philosophy that he chose to put in, underlying it, a world view which was too easy for the narrative, and in my view, unearned. An Abundance of Katherines is about a road trip two friends take, driving the interstate from Chicago, and they end up in Tennessee. One of them has only dated girls named Katherine. Until now. Hence the title.

Perhaps the most interesting of Green's books is Paper Towns (soon to be released as a major motion picture), set in Orlando. A group of high school seniors is approaching prom and graduation. The narrator is one of them, and is smitten with a girl in his class he's known since elementary school. But he's a geek, and she's super popular, and he mostly views her from afar, until these last days of school, when she suddenly includes him as her driver and support on a long night of revenge pranks aimed toward the boyfriend who has cheated on her, and the girl who lured him away, along with anyone who likely knew and didn't tell her what was going on. She turns out to be a master of the grand gesture and the intricately magnificent prank. She's courageous, intelligent, over-the-top creative, and stunningly beautiful, and our narrator falls deeply in love with her. Or does he? She suddenly disappears, leaving home and school with no explanation, but she sprinkles what look like clues around the neighborhood, using Woody Guthrie lyrics, Bob Dylan songs, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as sources of code and dark hints that seem to point toward an impending suicide. There is a desperate search on the part of the narrator and his best friends, a wild road trip from Orlando up I-95 to New York State, and unexpected discoveries that surprise the reader as much as the kids.

The main theme of the story seems to be as important as it is simple.

We often think we know who people are, and in reality we've just been misled by surface appearances. We come to love, or admire, or respect, or resent, or despise mere caricatures that we mistake for real people. We judge books by their covers, people by their appearances, and situations by their most obvious, and often misleading, interpretations. We think we know, when we don't. We rush, then jump, to conclusions in ways that can eat up our time and mess up our lives.

The book's narrator learns, and shows us, the wisdom of not rushing to judgment or letting our emotions dash about on their own, disconnected from the true realities to which they should be responding. I came away from the book with a renewed sense of the importance of pausing, waiting, and looking twice before passing judgment too quickly on anything that catches my eye. Not a lot in this world is exactly what it at first seems.

Wisdom is not easily misled by surface appearances. Wisdom digs deep. It embraces truth. It can wait to see what's what.

Paper Towns was a fun read, and insightful. You might enjoy it as a light summer book. Click on the title to see it on Amazon.

We Know So Little

We don't know one tenth of one percent of anything. Who first said that? I think it was Thomas Edison who, at least in that remark, knew one hundred percent of what he was talking about.

It's easy to think that our best science already basically understands the world and those of us in it, until you talk to real scientists, or at least the ones who are the pioneers at the cutting edge of their specialities. Human history is a series of misguided certainties. People have always thought that they basically knew what was going on in the world around them. And people have been so very wrong so many times that it should give us pause and instill in us a little humility, along with the measure of confidence that we also rightly need.

Modern medicine is at the brink of discoveries and changes that will so deeply revolutionize everything that it's hard for us now to imagine what health and healthcare will be like in a hundred years. And it may come much sooner than that.

Robotics will drastically alter manufacturing. Bigger, better, and much faster computers - even different sorts of computing - will reinvent business in many ways, only a few of which are already evident.

I suspect that psychology will even make discoveries that will transform our self understanding. And philosophy may make inroads that have been hitherto unanticipated. We're moving into the unknown at a faster pace than we can even guess on our wildest days. The cosmic and epistemic wind is strong at our backs, but we don't always feel it.

There are times on board a plane when it can seem like you're just sitting still in a nice leather armchair. But you're moving at hundreds of miles an hour. I see this as a nice metaphor for the human condition. It can sometimes feel like we're sitting still, when we're all moving forward much faster than we can sense.

When I was in middle school, and even high school, I'd ride for an hour in the family car to visit my grandparents, my father's parents, on their farm. They didn't have indoor plumbing or an electric stove. To wash my hands for lunch, I'd first go out behind the house to a dark metal pump. I'd put a basin beneath the spigot and grab the old rusty handle and pump a couple of times, before the cold, clear water began to flow. With the basin full, I'd take it back into the house and wash up in it, using soap someone had made, and then I'd go eat whatever had been cooked on the wood stove. Later in the day, we'd find leftovers stored in the unrefrigerated white wooden "pie safe" and have a snack. The "bathroom" had no walls, roof, or floor, and was out back behind some bushes. Things have changed, to put it mildly, at least for most of us. But the changes we've seen are nothing compared to what's around the corner.

So, when you're tempted to think you've got it all figured out, remember our kinetically kaleidoscopic context. We all could use a little Socratic self-realization about how little we truly know concerning the most fundamental mysteries of existence, and even the mundanities of everyday life. We need to open our minds a little more than ever before, with genuine curiosity to learn. The pace of change won't slow or stop, apart from a technology ending global catastrophe. The only way to dance with change well is with a humble spirit, an open mind, and insatiable curiosity.

I'm a philosopher who believes that we know many deep truths about life already. But I also think we have much more to learn yet ahead. And this sense impels me to explore, and seek more avidly than ever before. I hope you feel the same.

A Slow Start. A Pause. An Improbability.

Some people come into the world like they've been shot out of a cannon. The rest of us, not so much. Some of us are slow starters. It takes us a while to find our path and to get moving along it. And many of us can find ourselves, after a vivid beginning, in an extended time of pause, where our forward momentum seems diminished, or even gone, and we appear stuck. Many of us struggle, to apparently no avail, and come to view any sort of qualitatively different, and better, future as a sadly immense improbability.

But we have to remember how many slow starters and late bloomers have gone on to tremendous success. It's amazing how often a long pause in life's journey has been the prelude to something great. And, ironically, it's astonishing how much the improbable actually happens, all the time, confounding everyone's expectations.

A book review in a recent Sunday New York Times, tells of a young man who wanted to be an artist, and who ended up, in his twenties, in a psychiatric asylum, which did not exactly bode well for his future. And then, when he was released, he seemed to have absolutely no prospects at all. To quote the reviewer:

"A 30-year-old with no money, no job, and no plan, van Gogh retreats to his parents' home."

Yeah. Vincent van Gogh. And the rest, as we love to say, is history.

There are countless such stories in our past. There will be just as many in our future, or more. So, if you feel that you're off to a slow start, in a job, or in life, or you think that destiny has hit the pause button on your career, or for your life, keep hope alive, keep believing, and keep your eyes wide open, looking for the next development that can make all the difference.

Your Starry Night, and next brightly sunlit day, may be just around the corner.