It's funny that so many people say they'll try anything. "I'll try anything once." They will eat any food, try crossfit, try hot yoga, pilates, therapy, support groups, meditation, fad diets, essential oils, herbal medicine, surgery, intermittent fasting, drugs, mountain climbing, buying boats and cars and RVs and motorcycles, second houses, threesomes, foursomes, every kind of strange sex imaginable, tattoos, piercings, mutilation, more horsepower, more acres, a thousand bottles of wine and whiskey, younger women, older men, hunting exotic animals, deep sea fishing, gossiping, inhalants, designer drugs, cliff-jumping, extreme sports. We will try anything. Anything at all. But we will not try one thing. Many of us will do anything, except for one thing. There is one thing we will not try. We will refuse to try turning to God. We will not try prayer. No way. Not a chance will we try that one thing.
Why?
Because it’s different from all of those other activities. The reason we won’t try it is because of the word control. Because it means letting go of something else. What is that thing we can’t let go of? It’s called the self. Because letting go means we are no longer in charge, no longer in control. We've been told we create the way ahead, we create our own reality. Me. You. I.
I get to be the one who decides how my life plays out. I get to pick all the things. I am in charge.
I used to say: "I'll try anything once." But not prayer or faith, or an honest reading of the Gospels using a study Bible. That I would never try. I would try anything except peering into my own heart and possibly facing the fact that maybe, just maybe, I was wired for God. Hell no, I won't go there. Not there. Anywhere but there. Like Sam-I-Am in Green Eggs and Ham, I will do anything, but not that one thing. No, never. No way to that one thing that could actually help. Absolutely not.
I was too afraid to ask for help, to need God, to want God in my life because it meant that I might be wrong about my wager that God was not real.
Here’s another saying: "If it doesn't kill you it will make you stronger." We are fooled by our own "strength." We think strength is what we need, when what we need is to admit our weakness in order to be free, in order to be strong. Our human strength quickly fades. Only an illness or an accident, which is one day coming for every one of us, on a day that we do not know, either of these is all it takes to sap our glorious strength. Anyone who exercises regularly and then misses a week of that exercise know how fast muscles atrophy and weaken. Anyone who feels strong today can surely remember the last bout of the flu they fought off where it made them a puddle of weakness.
My social media feed teems with wonderful stories of people overcoming obstacles, striving to be better, hurdling disabilities, and doing amazing things - These are inspiring and courageous stories. I love to read them. Getting a degree, running a marathon, hitting a sales goal, climbing the ladder. Outstanding. There are so many terrific stories of people’s lives. But never, not once, do I see anyone mention God or a blessing or a grace that helped the person achieve that of which they boast. I was the same in my pursuits of writing or triathlons or accolades at work. Always we hear about the power of the person, the drive of the achiever. We are instructed that only the achievers’ grit and skill earned the prize, and maybe some extra motivation or anger came from someone who told the winner they couldn’t do it, so they climbed that mountain to prove those naysayers wrongs. Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, in his Hall of Fame induction speech mentioned the names of those who had snubbed him or denied him along the way. Even in his success, Jordan was holding onto that list of names, using it as motivation to anger him, to drive him, to strive, to win, to achieve. And wow did he ever achieve. In this world, he has achieved a greatness and fame that few in history could match. We admire his tenacity and talent and merit, and for it he has glory attached to his name. But then you have to wonder why he wanted to prove them wrong so desperately, and it’s clear that he wanted those people to approve of him. Having not received the approval he sought, he showed them what “His Air-ness” could accomplish without them.
Today, God is considered absent from so many lives. Someone once said (I’ve heard it attributed to both Thomas Merton and Joseph Campbell):
“People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”
My accomplishments are pitiful compared to these people on LinkedIn or to Michael Jordan, but that quote is a bullseye for the misdirection I discovered in climbing toward my own goals.
Long ago in his book Confessions, St. Augustine realized his ladder was on the wrong wall. Striving, winning, doing, achieving, pushing the limit, obtaining all that this world has to offer - that's what Augustine was doing. He began to see that those actions were the wrong verbs. Slowly he realized that his ladder was up against the wrong wall. Even after he knew that the goal was incorrect, he struggled to admit it. For years he battled what his heart already was telling him. The tug kept pulling at him until he had to answer.
What we seem to be telling ourselves today is “I'll be happy when...” That's the mindgame that keeps us in our slumber. I'll be happy when I retire. I'll be happy when I graduate. I’ll be happy when I get that next degree. I'll be happy when my kids graduate. I'll be happy when this school year is done. I'll be happy when I get a newer car. I'll be happy when my team wins the SuperBowl. I'll be happy when I get a raise. I’ll be happy when I get laid. And the joke around all of this sleepwalking is that we won't be happy when any of those things happen. We’ll just be done with those things, and we’ll look busy and feel important in the process, but still asleep regarding the bigger question.
When you get the thing you're after you'll have contentment for a while, maybe a month. If you’re lucky, a year. Three things can happen then. The first outcome is this: you get what you want and find out it didn’t fix anything, so you need another something, the next experience, the new thing. Second outcome: you get what you wanted, but you'll be anxious and worried that something will take it away from you. Or the third outcome, you'll lose the desired thing and then be miserable because you had it once; you were happy once but the world stole your happiness away. Then you be the person who says “I was happy when…” Most likely, if you still believe things and experiences will fulfill you, the process will start again. Because it must start again, as that is the flaw in our hearts. "I'll be happy when..." We cling and clutch to "I'll be happy when...dot dot dot."
I tried that. For about 20 years. Because I had already turned away from faith over religious rules that I did not like. Well, that and scientific facts that I knew but Isaiah and Daniel and Jeremiah did not know them.
What bothered me was the Bible, like the covenant of Noah and the rainbow, or Adam being 930 years old when he died. A literal interpretation turned me away entirely, so that I couldn't even read the book. Thousands of years of wisdom, and I discarded it because the book said Adam was 930 years old when he died, when I should have read that to mean, "Adam was very old when he died." I was looking for a book of scientific fact, and that is not what the Bible is, that is not what books of the Bible are. On my bookshelf I have a title named The Big Blue Book of Bicycle Repair. When I need to fix my bike, that is the book I open. Another book title on the shelf is Molecular Biology of the Cell. If I want to understand the inner workings of mitochondria or DNA, I can read that text book. I cannot look in the Bible for information on bikes or biology, just as I can’t look in a book about bikes or a book about cells for answers about the soul. If I read scripture like a rule book or a repair manual or a science book, I will never find what is actually inside it. It will never work. The cell does not explain the soul as much as the soul does not explain the cell. To make it even more interesting, each book in the Bible is a different kind of book so I have to know what I’m looking at before I know what I’m looking for.
To take a different example, Moby Dick is written somewhat like the Bible. The different chapters are written in wildly different styles, so that the novel almost seems like a collection of separate books, but with an overarching story. Melville seems to be playing at this and even confessed to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne that he had written a “wicked book,” a comment that I’ve not yet fully come to grasp, but I have my suspicions why he may have said that.
However, in this novel he wrote chapters in a variety of genres: a sermon, a hymn, a scientific treatise, and a Shakespearian drama. There are opening sections of the book called “Etymology” and “Extracts,” which are definitions and quotes about whales. There are parables and prophecies and mysterious allusions throughout which give literary critics eons of material to fuss over. But here is the funny thing: the chapter called “Cetology,” which is the study of whales, gives a factual, scientific account of whales. This Cetology chapter reads like a dull encyclopedia entry and I can hardly get through these pages. In fact, I have only read it once. I have skipped over it in subsequent readings of the book. A whale biologist of the 21st century would shred this chapter due to its scientific inaccuracies. The 19th century understanding of whales pales in comparison to what marine biologists know today. So if we try to read Moby Dick like many read the Bible, we would throw out the masterpiece because of the errors regarding the science of whales. If Melville’s book is a novel about whaling, but gets so much wrong about whales, then how can we trust anything about whales in this book?
But here’s the important part: no one ever reads Moby Dick for the chapter called “Cetology.” Herman Melville wasn’t writing a book to expound on facts about whales, despite the book being so much about whales and whale hunting. We read this novel because it speaks toward the deepest truths of the human heart, much of which we can’t even put our finger on, hence the literary critics and scholars submit an unending stream of papers and dissertations on this novel. Moby Dick is like the play Hamlet, where the argument over whether Hamlet was insane or only pretending to be insane has produced endless discussion and always will. The question of “Was Hamlet mad or just pretending?” is a battle taken up by each passing generation. In fact, there is so much discussion and writing around the potential insanity of Hamlet, that Oscar Wilde asked a different question: “Are the commentators on Hamlet really mad, or only pretending to be?” Of course, parallels to this arguing can be drawn to the same question of whether Jesus was either insane or who he said he was. “Lord, liar, or lunatic” goes the argument, and the answer we choose for that question has far greater consequences for our lives than whatever we may decide about poor Hamlet’s mental state.
The same happens with Moby Dick, where people scour and search for the meaning, oddly enough, just like Ahab in his search for the white whale. The irony is wonderful. Ahab hunts for ultimate meaning in the whale, while we search for ultimate meaning in Ahab’s hunt. This is why summaries of books about the themes or characters don’t come close to touching the actual experience of slowly reading these works of art. It is the totality of Moby Dick that pulls readers in, decade after decade. Readers attempt to grasp what this book is actually about. The novel is almost impossible to reduce into a tagline or list of bullet points, which is why literary types will likely remain interested in it for centuries to come. In fact, this is one of those books that I read every ten years or so and find that it is a completely different experience each time I come back to it, as the words have not changed, but I have changed. What I think is true has changed, so the book reads differently. This same perspective finally dawned on me about Scripture. Reading it as a child I revered and read the stories in awe, but then I dropped the sacred and it became lower-case scripture, and then later it became mere literature like Moby Dick, and then lastly into a dull history and bad science book. Only when I returned to it once again like a child did I see the profoundness of it and thereby regained reverence for it.
The Bible is a library of 73 different books, of different genres, but all with deep religious and human truth captured like lightning in a bottle. Like Moby Dick, there are wildly different genres and themes and characters. The flaws of humanity are exposed in great detail, so if you want to find ugly things, you can find them in there. In fact, I think the ugly parts are in there because they are supposed to be there. The Old Testament makes Game of Thrones look childish. Bloodshed and sex and the seven deadlies are on full display. Amid those Old Testament books are rules, laws, teachings, tales, and yes, many scientific inaccuracies. But if we only see the rules and facts then we may as well be a dog trying to read a book, because a dog can understand "No" and can be obedient without the added burden of learning to read. Likewise, if we are only looking for rules, then we might as well be a robot reading the book, as a decision tree can be followed by a robot via conditional programming. A robot could also discern whether scientific principles of the modern age are met as well, which we know that they are not. But fortunately, we are neither dogs nor robots. We are complicated human beings. Even if we evolved from other species, we know in our heart and mind and soul that there is something more going on, and that’s why Moby Dick and Hamlet and the Bible capture our attention. We are not just apes wearing clothing. We're not just slightly higher in intelligence and cognition than other animals and plants. We have intellect far beyond the rest of our fellow creatures, so far beyond that we determined how to control or capture every species of plant and animal in this world long ago. Our dominion over this planet is painfully clear, and we have been bad stewards, which actually violates one of our first appointed duties according to the Book of Genesis, but that is a topic for another day.
More importantly, no other animal creates music and art or studies philosophy and math. And no other being builds nuclear weapons or skyscrapers or hospitals. And no other species betrays and fights and envies and kills and shames with such cruelty. And no other species strives and accomplishes and helps and supports and teaches and loves like we do either.
There is something deeper in our hearts and minds happening than in the other living residents of this planet (sorry, pet lovers). Even if science, for all of its awesome findings, discovers life elsewhere, that will not change what we know in our hearts, that there is something beyond this universe, beyond the entire universe. When we reduce the idea of God to be a “Flying Spaghetti Monster” or Bertrand Russell’s teapot or my own “Street Light God” what happens is that we make a gross reduction of God into something knowable and therefore not-God. The fact that ancient Hebrew cosmology held that there was a dome or firmament over us instead of a galaxy, and pillars holding up the earth instead of gravity, does not reduce God any more than our limited understanding of the universe does today. Knowing the shape of this world and universe does not get to the bottom of the greatest questions. Moreover, any attempt to reduce God into being a teapot or plate of pasta or a street light, or any thing of this world, only buries the great questions once again in a childish mockery.
If we find another creature outside of our planet, that doesn’t remove our own question about the union of our body and soul. The suspicion about a sense of divinity touching our souls will not suddenly recede. We will still have the same questions and yearnings whether or not alien life exists. There is clearly something beyond the trifles we chase here on earth, as most of us can smell, touch, taste, see, or hear that calling. Something will also lie beyond what any other creature on another planet might be chasing, because they too live in the same universe that we do. I’ve heard this idea is only a “God of the gaps” theory, where people of faith just keep finding a place for God to hide even as science knocks down walls where God was hiding before. The cosmology of the Hebrew firmament was replaced by Ptolemy, Ptolemy by Copernicus, Copernicus by Newton, Newton by Einstein, and so on. Yet none of these illuminations about the universe resolves anything about the great “whys” of our presence. If anything they should make us more humble before God, more in need of mercy, since we are so small and vulnerable.
For those who feel the tug, or have awareness of a soul, we want to be joined to something higher, beyond nature, beyond cells and atoms or stars and black holes, something that we can't ever touch but constantly yearn to reach. To be indifferent about that yearning is one thing, but to consciously deny the yearning is to say quietly, “I don’t believe” and then the replacement must become "I'll be happy when...," or "I'll try anything once," or "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Those are all ways to ward off the calling in our soul toward a Higher Power.
That is why this idea of "love one another" and “love thy enemy” cannot stand alone without God. There is a reason that Jesus gave two commandments, and the second one, not the first one, was to "love one another." The first commandment from Jesus was to love God. First rule: love God. And the order of these two commandments matters immensely, as the second rule is useless without the first rule. Wealth, honor, power, and pleasure are fine things, if, and only if, they come after the two commandments given to us by Jesus. Everything rests on the keeping the the two commandments of Christ, and these two rules must be followed in order to work.
If you say you'll try anything once, what could possibly stop you from trying prayer when the tug comes? The only thing stopping me was myself. Once I amputated the enormous cyst, the chip on my shoulder, I could at least bow my head. What I thought made me special was what made me plain. When I kneeled to pray, my life began to change.
There is nothing so liberating as admitting weakness and recognizing how finite I am, and to say that "I am not God." To know that I don't have to create the truth, or solve the riddle, or define the meaning of life is like setting down a giant sack of bricks. To say, "Help me, God, I am lost and I don't know why." To say, "I can't fix this myself, I need you, God." It's a hard word to even say today: God. We've attempted to reduce him to a "sky fairy" or "flying spaghetti monster" or "Santa Claus,” all because we wanted to make him small like ourselves, or smaller, or even into a cartoon. And the funny thing is that in trying to make God small, we've made ourselves small. God is so much more than us, so much more than this universe that we can't even fathom it, but the tug in our hearts lets us know that God is there. We make up silly names for him because we can't explain it away, and mocking God is how we shield ourselves from what our hearts already know. So instead of listening, we live in a state of spiritual death, fighting over the rulebook instead of playing the game; picking apart facts and words rather than experiencing what faith can do. We want noise instead of the power of the wordless silence where we can reach for God and he reaches for us. St. Thérèse of Lisieux said:
“For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”
People love and respect St. Therese of Lisieux, the "Little Flower," who died in France at age 24. Why? Because she got it. She knew both the question and the answer. She understood the tug better than anyone. In her book, The Story of a Soul, she wrote:
“All the great truths of religion, the mysteries of eternity, plunged my soul into a state of joy not of this earth. I experienced already what God reserved for those who love him (not with the eyes, but with the heart); and seeing the eternal rewards had no proportion to life’s small sacrifices..."
She had a simple, joyful, deep faith that wasn't quibbling over a passage or rule that she didn't like. She learned by playing the game. She was living her faith and getting more contentment than anything this world could ever give, even calling those dreaded rules of prohibition "life’s small sacrifices." It was St. Therese's famous "Little Way" that amazed people, where "she obediently and graciously served others no matter where she was or what she was doing." This surge of heart toward God, this pure act toward faith, this constant receiving of grace, and this selflessness granted her freedom to be fulfilled beyond anything that we strive for in this world. She was the servant of God and others, just as Jesus commanded us to be. She embodied those two commandments in her entire life, in every action. The modern rock stars who died in their twenties will fade to anonymity long before St. Therese of Lisieux is last spoken of, because she tapped into the fullness of life through humility and it came pouring out of her into this world.
Only two commandments were given, and for many of us we can't even lower ourselves to speak the word "God." We can't even attempt the first commandment because we can't let go of our own pitiful power. Meanwhile, we can see someone like St. Therese who did not start with the rules, but started playing the game, and ended up a starter on varsity, All-American, Olympian, and All Around Champion Gold Medalist. She was and still is the ultimate rock star.
The problem and the solution is simple. The problem is caused by replacing God with ourselves, because we think we know better. Somewhere along the way, after we lost our innocence - maybe in our teens, maybe as a child, maybe as an adult - we decided God was not real. The pain and suffering we've experienced could not possibly be allowed in a just universe, so we killed God off in our mind. But he never left our hearts. We can never shake that presence, that nagging feeling that God might still be there. So we keep looking elsewhere while he stands right behind us, waiting to be recognized again. He's just waiting for us to acknowledge him.
God doesn't need us. He's not the lost one. We are. We are the ones that need God, not the other way around. But we have decided we can't see him while we search everywhere else for a replacement, and these sideshows are pathetic surrogates in the end for what we are really seeking.
