"If God is real, there’s a better than average chance that he cares what human beings believe about him. The problem is, there’s no way to check your answers."
Steve, thank you for sharing this. I see a lot of myself in this post, in the questions that you are asking. I am reminded of paths that I went down after the breakdown of my first marriage, when I lost all faith for a time, trying to make sense of my broken life. I think for those with an intellectual and mystical bent, especially those who have experiences that seem hard to cohere into a consistent world view, the idea of what is effectively a form of gnostic perennialism (the idea that all manifestations of faith in the world point, at their heart, to the same hidden God, for those with eyes to see) is always going to be attractive. From a certain perspective, even within more small "o" orthodox expressions of the Christian faith (I cannot speak with any deep clarity or knowledge outside of these traditions) such a statement even has a hint of truth about it: the essence of God is hidden, is too big to comprehend, we are given our material human frame in time and space because the ontological reality of existence is too big for us to comprehend as we are now, and the truth of reality's Creator breaks out (fractally, if you will) within all aspects of the created order, even within religious traditions which (may) owe their origin and allegiance to the demonic because the glory of the truth of existence cannot stay hidden and even the demons serve the Master of all in their disobedience.
But within this heuristic, I think we see the seed of why this position is not going to help us in the end. The vision Arjuna receives of Krishna, whatever it represents (I tend to think it represents a half truth at best, but that is another matter), is not something within which he can reasonably abide. What is needful is not just Truth in an absolute ontological sense (though the human yearning for this Truth is real and good) but a subjective, individual, and personal version of this Truth that touches us and reaches us where we are, in the particularities of our own story. Back in my teens my younger self wanted, I think, to figure out a way to touch the Absolute essence of what I have come to recognize as God the Father, unmediated. I now think that's impossible, a fool's errand born of youthful pride (in fact, for me at least, what it represented was the creation of an idol of my pride, which had become my true god). As you say, Christianity is worth a special look because it posits the God who sacrificially inserts himself into the affairs of man. While perennialism tries to weave this story into some semblance of the "dying god mythos", it never seems to fit very well, being too encumbered by historic particularity and (what is worse) an appalling degradation and humility.
I say all of this just to note that, at least for myself, I struggled for a long time trying to meet God in a way that was bound to result in failure. Your quote that I provided above got me thinking in this direction. Your first sentence seems entirely correct to me, but I wonder based on the content of your second sentence, where you suggest that there is no way to check your answers, whether you may have found yourself struggling with something similar? In an abstract sense you are correct, there is no way to create a proof whereby the veracity of any given theological claim can be measured. But I don't think this has ever been the sense via which humanity, whether in the Christian tradition or any of the other traditions you referenced, have experienced the divine (or, quite frankly, how we have ever experienced ourselves). Visions are great, insofar as they go, but they may be entirely beside the point--I may have once had a relatively minor such experience, but frankly it ultimately didn't do much for me one way or the other. What has been surprisingly useful is dwelling on the particularities of my own story--the things I lost, the people I've hurt, the undeserved pain I've seen, the undeserved blessings I've received, the punishments I've been given that turned out to be blessings, and the utter powerlessness I experience when I consider my place in the fabric of creation--and meditating on this while meditating on the the experience of Christ as recorded in the Gospels. The fruits we glean when we approach this process seriously and faithfully, I think, that actually can be tested, and either found true or wanting, as we incorporate them into the particularities of our lived existence.
Again, your point is taken: Lewis's argument is (frankly) not that good as a logical argument (though it does seem to correlate reasonably well to the evidence born via the historical record as we currently understand it), and there is such a grab-bag of competing cosmological dogmas to choose from. And you could probably take the methodology proposed above, apply it to the prophetic figure of another world faith tradition, and yield something via the endeavor. But you're not a cosmic being approaching this as a rational mind separate from the system. You are an individual historical person, born in a particular place, in a particular time, to particular parents, inculcated in a particular tradition, who has made particular choices. We only experience anything as a particularity, and it is to the history of our actual existence that we owe allegiance, wherever it might lead. So the question is, what approach is most likely to allow you to wrestle with the issues that lie at the heart of your pain (at least insofar as you are able to perceive them, this is an unending well)? Whatever else it might be, I doubt the path of the universalizing myth is likely to yield much fruit.
I have rambled too long, but I would urge you to focus in on what meaning there is to be found in the particularity of your experience, and to take care when considering the apparent profundity of the perennialist myth. I wish you well in your travels, both on the road, and into the depths of your soul.
I can't begin to add to or subtract from what you have written. Any effort on my part to pretend I can intelligently write words which might seem like I am on your level would be embarrassing.
Allow me to write a brief story.
One upon a time, in a land filled with people who seemed to believe that there are such things as absolutes, life for a little girl named Debby was good. Her Mommy was very careful to impress upon her throughout her childhood that things called absolutes were unchangeable, and that there were many entities, not necessarily having at heart the best interests of others, who sought to corrupt and ultimately change them.
And so, little Debby lived accordingly, only to encounter hostility and cruelty for believing absolutes were as her Mommy taught her. Truth, she told me, is all that matters and should be fought for at any cost, even if you must die trying.Truth IS the absolute, she said.
It seemed simple enough. How hard could it be? Well, little Debby had a rude awakening.
Walking down a path one day, she came to an intersection of countless paths, each one with a sign pointing to "The Truth". She walked each one..It took her decades.
If all those paths lead to absolutes, then there is no such thing, she concluded. A little bit of truth does not a whole truth make. She remembered a childhood game, where one child whispered words into another's ear and thirty ears later, we all laughed because by the time those words reached the last child, the original words were unrecognizable.
The moral of the story? Little Debby remembered het Mommy's advice and never wandered again.
Wonderfully written, as always! Have you read Hart's "Experiencing God; Being, Consciousness, and Bliss" ? He touches on what you bring up here, and much more.
“If I weren’t so compelled by its authority structure to offer religious obsequience to these things I might still be able to be Catholic.” That’s exactly how I felt, but of course, it’s possible to be Christian without being Catholic. Read Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, or Eric Voegelin. The world needs people who have faith in the Good.
"If God is real, there’s a better than average chance that he cares what human beings believe about him. The problem is, there’s no way to check your answers."
Steve, thank you for sharing this. I see a lot of myself in this post, in the questions that you are asking. I am reminded of paths that I went down after the breakdown of my first marriage, when I lost all faith for a time, trying to make sense of my broken life. I think for those with an intellectual and mystical bent, especially those who have experiences that seem hard to cohere into a consistent world view, the idea of what is effectively a form of gnostic perennialism (the idea that all manifestations of faith in the world point, at their heart, to the same hidden God, for those with eyes to see) is always going to be attractive. From a certain perspective, even within more small "o" orthodox expressions of the Christian faith (I cannot speak with any deep clarity or knowledge outside of these traditions) such a statement even has a hint of truth about it: the essence of God is hidden, is too big to comprehend, we are given our material human frame in time and space because the ontological reality of existence is too big for us to comprehend as we are now, and the truth of reality's Creator breaks out (fractally, if you will) within all aspects of the created order, even within religious traditions which (may) owe their origin and allegiance to the demonic because the glory of the truth of existence cannot stay hidden and even the demons serve the Master of all in their disobedience.
But within this heuristic, I think we see the seed of why this position is not going to help us in the end. The vision Arjuna receives of Krishna, whatever it represents (I tend to think it represents a half truth at best, but that is another matter), is not something within which he can reasonably abide. What is needful is not just Truth in an absolute ontological sense (though the human yearning for this Truth is real and good) but a subjective, individual, and personal version of this Truth that touches us and reaches us where we are, in the particularities of our own story. Back in my teens my younger self wanted, I think, to figure out a way to touch the Absolute essence of what I have come to recognize as God the Father, unmediated. I now think that's impossible, a fool's errand born of youthful pride (in fact, for me at least, what it represented was the creation of an idol of my pride, which had become my true god). As you say, Christianity is worth a special look because it posits the God who sacrificially inserts himself into the affairs of man. While perennialism tries to weave this story into some semblance of the "dying god mythos", it never seems to fit very well, being too encumbered by historic particularity and (what is worse) an appalling degradation and humility.
I say all of this just to note that, at least for myself, I struggled for a long time trying to meet God in a way that was bound to result in failure. Your quote that I provided above got me thinking in this direction. Your first sentence seems entirely correct to me, but I wonder based on the content of your second sentence, where you suggest that there is no way to check your answers, whether you may have found yourself struggling with something similar? In an abstract sense you are correct, there is no way to create a proof whereby the veracity of any given theological claim can be measured. But I don't think this has ever been the sense via which humanity, whether in the Christian tradition or any of the other traditions you referenced, have experienced the divine (or, quite frankly, how we have ever experienced ourselves). Visions are great, insofar as they go, but they may be entirely beside the point--I may have once had a relatively minor such experience, but frankly it ultimately didn't do much for me one way or the other. What has been surprisingly useful is dwelling on the particularities of my own story--the things I lost, the people I've hurt, the undeserved pain I've seen, the undeserved blessings I've received, the punishments I've been given that turned out to be blessings, and the utter powerlessness I experience when I consider my place in the fabric of creation--and meditating on this while meditating on the the experience of Christ as recorded in the Gospels. The fruits we glean when we approach this process seriously and faithfully, I think, that actually can be tested, and either found true or wanting, as we incorporate them into the particularities of our lived existence.
Again, your point is taken: Lewis's argument is (frankly) not that good as a logical argument (though it does seem to correlate reasonably well to the evidence born via the historical record as we currently understand it), and there is such a grab-bag of competing cosmological dogmas to choose from. And you could probably take the methodology proposed above, apply it to the prophetic figure of another world faith tradition, and yield something via the endeavor. But you're not a cosmic being approaching this as a rational mind separate from the system. You are an individual historical person, born in a particular place, in a particular time, to particular parents, inculcated in a particular tradition, who has made particular choices. We only experience anything as a particularity, and it is to the history of our actual existence that we owe allegiance, wherever it might lead. So the question is, what approach is most likely to allow you to wrestle with the issues that lie at the heart of your pain (at least insofar as you are able to perceive them, this is an unending well)? Whatever else it might be, I doubt the path of the universalizing myth is likely to yield much fruit.
I have rambled too long, but I would urge you to focus in on what meaning there is to be found in the particularity of your experience, and to take care when considering the apparent profundity of the perennialist myth. I wish you well in your travels, both on the road, and into the depths of your soul.
Steve,
I can't begin to add to or subtract from what you have written. Any effort on my part to pretend I can intelligently write words which might seem like I am on your level would be embarrassing.
Allow me to write a brief story.
One upon a time, in a land filled with people who seemed to believe that there are such things as absolutes, life for a little girl named Debby was good. Her Mommy was very careful to impress upon her throughout her childhood that things called absolutes were unchangeable, and that there were many entities, not necessarily having at heart the best interests of others, who sought to corrupt and ultimately change them.
And so, little Debby lived accordingly, only to encounter hostility and cruelty for believing absolutes were as her Mommy taught her. Truth, she told me, is all that matters and should be fought for at any cost, even if you must die trying.Truth IS the absolute, she said.
It seemed simple enough. How hard could it be? Well, little Debby had a rude awakening.
Walking down a path one day, she came to an intersection of countless paths, each one with a sign pointing to "The Truth". She walked each one..It took her decades.
If all those paths lead to absolutes, then there is no such thing, she concluded. A little bit of truth does not a whole truth make. She remembered a childhood game, where one child whispered words into another's ear and thirty ears later, we all laughed because by the time those words reached the last child, the original words were unrecognizable.
The moral of the story? Little Debby remembered het Mommy's advice and never wandered again.
We all wear two faces.
The one we hide,
and the one we let the world believe.
We call that faith,
but really it’s just a crack running through belief.
Hypocrisy?
It’s nothing more than being seen.
We bend people’s sight
to fit the picture in our heads.
We tell them their wounds don’t matter,
that bleeding is weakness,
that pain is a story they made up.
That trick—
gaslighting—
it isn’t rare.
We’ve all done it,
whether we admit it or not.
Every heart distorts the truth,
about itself, about others.
Most of the time we don’t even notice.
The real mercy
isn’t in pretending we’re whole—
it’s in saying,
“Yes. I’m flawed. That’s me.”
Wonderfully written, as always! Have you read Hart's "Experiencing God; Being, Consciousness, and Bliss" ? He touches on what you bring up here, and much more.
No but it’s in my library and in queue. I’d forgotten I bought it until someone else mentioned it today.
“If I weren’t so compelled by its authority structure to offer religious obsequience to these things I might still be able to be Catholic.” That’s exactly how I felt, but of course, it’s possible to be Christian without being Catholic. Read Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, or Eric Voegelin. The world needs people who have faith in the Good.