I’ve often asked myself “Do you believe in God?” but never got an answer, only that it’s an unanswerable question. A better one would be “What do you believe in?” One has to search within oneself, but not for some borrowed ideas and expressions, some flag of convenience to sail under and dodge the challenge. One has to reach a private place within oneselffor an exploration, which doesn’t need to be shared with anybody, probably cannot be shared. Perhaps one hasn’t reached a conclusion. Perhaps one can’t find words to express it.
What do I believe in? A “whispering” recently came to me: guided randomness. Where did it come from? Guidance from somewhere? A random combination of words as from a buzzword generator? It’s a phrase that popped into my head seemingly from nowhere. Can I live my whole life this way? Looking back at my life I think it’s what I’ve always tried to depend on.
When you think about it, randomness is a single-word description of how evolution works. I wouldn’t have had the confidence to summarize the whole of science from the big bang onward, if it weren’t for a Christmas present from my son-in-law, a fat heavy book called A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. If readability has a spectrum, it’s at the opposite end to Hawking’s Brief History of Time. I especially like his “nearly”. What has he left out? He doesn’t say, but I soon saw that it has nothing about Soul, Love, universal oneness or guidance, which together probably add up to a recognition of God, with no attached beliefs.
Whether we call ourselves scientists or not, I guess thinking people want to embrace a rule of thumb “theory of everything” that justifies us in continuing on the path we’re already on, or helps us adopt a better path equally well-lit. Some embrace, others grapple, perhaps in a lifetime struggle with good and evil as perceived.
The Church Times has an article about Michael Curry, Primate of the Episcopal Church in America. He it was who delivered an astonishing sermon at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Astonishing for its length, seriousness and relevance to our troubled world. He relates how he sometimes goes round addressing audiences and was “floored” by a question raised by a young person who asked “But does Love work?” It was in the context of conflict. It’s plain to us that wars, terrorism, bitter wrangling in politics and law, competition between powerful corporations aren’t based upon a common desire for good behaviour, peace, harmony and mutual respect.
Does love work? Curry talks a lot about Jesus, which I cannot help thinking is a shorthand or symbol for something. One could ask a question like this: “If two millennia of Christianity haven’t brought us to something more like a promised land on earth, who can say that love works?”
Curry’s answer as we expect is “Yes, it does work” and much more. He’s a powerful and engaging speaker, and I think the world is the better for his sermons.
What I get from him is similar to the messages in Traherne’s Centuries. The love that’s selective, selfish and narrow—”I love this and therefore I hate that” doesn’t work towards the changes we want to see in the world. All love is love, no matter how it may destroy us or the object of our love, but it has to be large and inclusive, as expressed by Walt Whitman in his Leaves of Grass.
What do you think?
a wayfarer’s notes 
Is “primate” an actual title?
And I have to say, I find questions such as “does love work?” a much richer vein inquiry in the context of Christianity than questions such as, say, the logistics of how Noah got all the animals on the boat and so forth. It gets more to the heart if the matter: “But does it actually WORK?”
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Ha ha! Primate as an Anglican or Episcopalian term, rather than a zoological one; fodder for numerous jokes & cryptic crossword clues.
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Makes me think of Dostoevsky. His faith rested not on metaphysical questions, but on questions like this. Does love work? Does it even stand a chance? In all of his novels Dostoevsky was always putting this to the test. He creates a character like Prince Myshkin, an embodiment of these open-hearted principles of love and forgiveness, and then he drops him into a world where everyone dismisses him as an “Idiot.”
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I don’t use the word “God” because the more I think about the word, the less I understand what it may mean.
The things I revere are wisdom and goodness.
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Blake’s comment ellie will comment later:
SONGS OF iNNOCENCE (E 31)
The Voice of the Ancient Bard.
Youth of delight come hither:
And see the opening morn,
Image of truth new born.
Doubt is fled & clouds of reason.
Dark disputes & artful teazing.
Folly is an endless maze,
Tangled roots perplex her ways,
How many have fallen there!
They stumble all night over bones of the dead,
And feel they know not what but care
And wish to lead others, when they should be led.
Four Zoas, (E 389)
When shall the Man of future times become as in days of old
O weary life why sit I here & give up all my powers
To indolence to the night of death when indolence & mourning
Sit hovring over my dark threshold. tho I arise look out
And scorn the war within my members yet my heart is weak
And my head faint Yet will I look again unto the morning
Whence is this sound of rage of Men drinking each others blood
Drunk with the smoking gore & red but not with nourishing wine
The Eternal Man sat on the Rocks & cried with awful voice
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I can’t make sense of the Blake’s, look forward to Ellie’s in due course.
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Guided Randomness
Your title suggests the paradox of the human situation. We seek the guidance but not the guide. We look for the pattern but are deceived by shiny random objects.
The passages from Blake suggest that there is a image of truth that is always being reborn. We go back to process not product. If we accept the multiplicity as of value we avoid questioning the source and nature of the guidance.
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Yes, I can see now that Blake’s work often expresses in allegory his perception of the human condition.
Your mention of it caused me to question what “the human condition” means to me, and then I was reminded of Hannah Arendt’s book with this title, and my post summarizing her investigations thereon.
And I was glad to be reminded, in that post, of the Vita Contemplativa and how it used to be considered by thinkers the highest form of activity. It’s wonderful to have plenty of time for it. I don’t see contemplation as seeking or questioning, but dwelling in a place of answers; to be aware of being more than the limitations of “we”—i.e. a collection of “I’s”! And it’s from this place that I, along with surely millions of others through the ages, intuit an over-riding guidance, within which we can be eternally safe, if we can only tune to it.
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It’s fun to unpack the ‘tune to it’ imagery. Go back to the electromagnetic spectrum and ask when, and how and why the ability to ‘tune in’ to various portions was developed. We have always been immersed in this field of energy but were ignorant of much of its content until receivers were invented. I’m not saying that spiritual guidance is embedded in the electromagnet spectrum, but that unless one is prepared to receive non-sensory data, messages from the non-material will be absent or, at best, will be only static which confuses rather than informs.
Blake says:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would
appear to man as it is: infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’
narrow chinks of his cavern.”
Time and space are characteristics of matter, eternal and infinite are characteristics of spirit. If our ‘doors of perception’ are only tuned to allow the entry of information about time and space, we will perceive only a narrow band of the available transmission.
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