How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part IV: Wonder

Until recent years I had never thought much about spirituality, let alone my own, whatever that might be.  Instead, I have spent more time thinking about organized religion, and about my flight from it that evolved over my early decades.  As I have described that journey in the earlier essays in this series, from my teen years onward I increasingly experienced the Catholicism that I had been taught to be a source of personal unhappiness rather than liberation from it.  This experience certainly did not seem in line with the Resurrection story.

But what would fill the space in my life created by my abandonment of the faith of my youth?  That I never thought to even consider this question is itself worth considering.  My exit from religious practice and my growing agnosticism could have left me alone in the existential sense.  What to believe in if not my Church and its creed?   What to think if the Church shamed members for sexual orientations and identities, condemned them for marrying outside of the faith, and forced females into second class status?  If the religious guidance that had been drilled into me since age five was no longer meaningful to me, what was to direct and even comfort me on life’s infirm road ahead? 

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The fact is that I never came to feel unmoored from meaning or purpose as I left the Church behind.  I never felt lost in that way.  I continued to live as best I could according to precepts that distinguished right from wrong, that prescribed justice and mercy.  That embraced human dignity, caring and love.    My life according to these values and purposes has certainly–and too often–been flawed.  But those precepts lay at the core of my identity and have always reminded me of my obligations, even–especially–when I failed to meet them.

I did learn much about these precepts in my Catholic education.  Not, I must say, from the accounts of a distant, often angry, vengeful, and domineering God of the Old Testament of the Bible, nor from the sin and punishment focus of the Baltimore catechism I was taught from first grade.  Instead, I learned from the powerful model of the historic Jesus’ ministry as described in the New Testament.  This was a model of love and charity, mercy and turning the other cheek, caring for the poor and sick, forgiveness.  These were values I found that I could embrace.  It is no coincidence that these were also the values that my mother taught her children by her example.

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Speaking of my mother, when I was a young boy she told me that I was so slow that one day I was going to be hit by a truck as I crossed a city street.  She usually said this just after I had slow-walked across a downtown street, many feet behind her.  But she had a point.  I believe I know what the problem was, because it is a trait that I have carried throughout my life.

I remain a slow walker.  It is as if I am unable to walk to speed up my heart rate or to develop stamina.  I walk deliberately, my head on a slow-motion swivel, looking for things, people, events, colors, seasons in play, weather.  It’s as if I have been afraid that I will miss something.  Something new.  Or odd.  Or strange.  Or interesting.  Or, perhaps, wonderful.

At first it was the variations and uniqueness in basic things of the same sort, like broken sticks from trees, crab apples, rocks, dying leaves, adults’ mannerisms, cats, people’s personalities.  Later it was the discovery of patterns in things, the seasons, family gatherings at holidays, the remarkable work of ants and bees, clothing styles, the use of language, shared habits.  I made mental notes.  I took inventories.

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I also discovered beauty–and mystery.  At least as I saw these.  Often, the mystery was the beauty.  The roll of the incoming tide.  The reach of mountain ranges, the fragrance of forests, or of undulating fields of flowers.  The unbidden joy of a family gathering, or a loved one’s successes.  The pastels of a setting sun. The clear night sky, star-studded and moon-lit.  The surprise welling of emotion at artistic creations, from paintings to plays.  I have wondered:  How do such things work their magic on me, on others?  I did not learn my reactions to these exposures.  I seem “merely” to have experienced them.  Science has no ready answers.  Might not these perceptions, these reactions, be touches of spirituality, emanations from a soul?  And so I wonder.

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While I am agnostic on the existence of eternal supreme beings, there are two realities that strike me as so transcendent as to keep open the question of unseen forces well beyond my self. 

These are music and the universe.

The famed American author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., once wrote, “If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.”  In my experience, good music ranges from country and rock, through jazz, the blues and folk, to classical and New Age, from musical theater to so-called “World” music.   From the simply entertaining to the absolutely mesmerizing.

It can be so magical that it enables time travel.  Completely unbidden, it can transport us backward in time to places of our most moving and vital memories, and even to places we have never been or times well before our existence.  And it can take us forward to sensations and places we have never before experienced–and never will otherwise.

Mathematics and physics are the basis of music.   I have studied both of these STEM subjects in some detail as a university student, but neither has moved me to wonder about unseen dimensions or powers or the divine.  (Some mathematicians and philosophers–for example, Descartes and Gödel–have had the opposite reaction.)  But actual music does so, and not only because of its magical, transformative effects.  I am also in awe of the creativity that music inspires and reflects.  While the number of combinations of musical notes–and therefore also the number of melodies–is virtually infinite, composers of all genres of music “hear” combinations that no one else does.  And then they produce it.  Is there a “voice” behind the music that only they hear?  If so, wherefrom this communication?  To me, this is a marvelous mystery.  And so I wonder.

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The universe is another enormous mystery.  From antiquity to the present, humans have endeavored to understand the nature and source of the universe, its solid elements (its 200 billion trillion stars and their associated planets), and its behavior (its energy and expansion).  The ancient Greek philosophers understood it as the cosmos, as an orderly and complex system with a divine character.  Aristotle’s major work on cosmology was titled “On the Heavens,” published in the 4th century BCE.

Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century Catholic philosopher and theologian, built on ideas from Aristotle and others in developing his own proofs for the existence of God.  One of his most notable explanations is the idea of the “First Mover” or the “Prime Mover.”  Here he observed that we see change in the world, and that something must have caused this change.  And that something must have itself been caused, and so on back through time.  But he asserted that the causal sequence of changes cannot be infinite, so there must exist a first mover that itself is uncaused and unchanging in time, that set the causal sequence in motion. This, he said, is God.

Aquinas’ thinking on this matter has a rough analogue in the “Big Bang” theory of the universe in theoretical physics.  This theory explains that the universe was created some 13.8 billion years ago when an initial small “point” of high density and temperature “exploded” into the first stages of the ever-expanding universe.

With his “First Mover” argument the philosopher Aquinas makes the best case for an eternal force.  But it logically deduces the existence of a supreme being.  It provides no empirical evidence of that existence.  The “Big Bang” theory, on the other hand, begs the key question:  Where did that initial state of high energy come from?  Who or what created it?

Neither the theological nor the scientific explanations satisfies my need for proof of the existence of a supreme, eternal actor, a god.  And certainly they provide no evidence of a punitive (Old Testament), benevolent (New Testament), or neutral god.  Still, the mystery of the origins of the universe leave open the possibility of a supernatural, eternal force.  And so I wonder.

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In the spiritual realm, one thing I know is that there are saints.  No, I am not speaking of the deceased persons that the bureaucracy in Rome certifies as saints every so often.  I don’t know about those.  I am speaking of saints that I have known on earth, those with whom I have shared the planet.  Those whose essential and perpetual goodness shines a special light in the world.  I hope that we have all known some of these people and experienced their glow.  In my experience they are not many, but they leave indelible marks on our lives.  These are folks who give generously from their scarcity, who respond lovingly and wisely to emotional trauma and need, who model calm and patience in the face of crisis, who lighten everyone’s load, who exude authentic empathy.  Who always warm hearts and know just the right things to say and do. They are earthly saviors.

I also believe in guardian angels, again of the earthly sort.  These are the friends who show up just when we most need them, to pull us from the deep or the dark.  They are also strangers who intervene only once with us, but whose intervention rescues the course of our lives.  Sometimes they literally save lives, as when they risk theirs to save a stranger from death, as in fire or in water.  At other times, though they be strangers, they offer words of wisdom that change for the better the trajectory of one’s life forever.  Appearing just in time, they may rescue us from accidents or mistakes, or they may give us the most important advice of our lives, and then they are gone.  I have experienced such people in my own life.

Wherefrom these saints and angels?  And so I wonder.

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My wife, Kathy, who has made much more of an examination of spirituality than I have, calls me a spiritual person.  I was initially very surprised by this, as I did not consider myself to be so.  She said I live a spiritual life.  I didn’t even know what that meant.  So her comments made me think about it more seriously, and that led me to write this essay, an accounting if you like.  I continue to try to work out this mystery.

And so I wonder.

End of Series

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