"Soul Searching"
This is a story I have been writing in my head for several years – I am pleased to be able to tell it to you.
I think I was about 13 years old when I first began to wonder what I thought about religion – the burning question seemed to be whether or not I believed in God. My thinking was sparked by a school registration form. At the beginning of every school year we had to fill out a form - it had blanks for our name, father’s occupation – stuff like that – including a blank where we had to state our religion.
Nowadays, it is probably politically incorrect for a school to ask about your religion - but this was 47 years ago up in Vancouver B.C, and we had not yet discovered to the wonders of political correctitude.
I had always put Anglican in that blank. I had been baptized in the Anglican Church, and over a period of about 5 years I think my mother and sister and I had actually been to church, maybe, twice. My father was a minister’s son, and by the time he left home, he had more than enough church. So I asked myself: am I really an Anglican? I mean, we almost never go there - I’m not sure what Anglicans believe. I’m not sure what I believe. And I guess you could say that was the beginning of my search for a religious identity.
For high school, I went to a boys boarding school on Vancouver Island - Shawnigan Lake School. There was a chapel on the school grounds and we attended Anglican services on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings - not because we wanted to. I did enjoy the music – I sang in the choir, and I still get a feeling of nostalgia when I hear some of those old majestic Anglican hymns.
Around the end of high school, I heard about people called atheists. There was a famous one in the news at the time – Madelyn Murray – very outspoken – considered very radical. As I understood it, atheists said they did not believe in God. I didn’t think I believed in God, so I decided I must be an atheist. I don’t think I ever had the courage to tell anybody that or put it down on a registration form, but that’s what I decided I was.
When I went to college, I started reading the books of Ayn Rand. Anybody here read Ayn Rand? The Fountainhead, or Atlas Shrugged? In Ayn Rand’s books, the hero is always a very superior, self-reliant, rational thinking individual, working for a society based on perfect laissez-faire capitalism. I was very idealistic and quite taken with this vision – I saw myself as John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, striding through the world, pushing fools aside, and emitting a great white light of reason and truth. Needless to say, John Galt had no time for spooky stuff like religion or spirituality – and that seemed to fit in with my belief that atheism was the right thing for me.
I noticed as I matured, however, that the world was not as black and white as I once thought and that it sort of expanded to reveal more possibilities. I began to ponder atheism, and I remember thinking that although there was no proof that God existed, there was equally no proof that God did not exist - and that it took as much faith to say that God did not exist as it did to say that God did exist. This was my super rational mind at work.
The result of all this mental churning was that I fell back into a state of confusion.
I was rescued a few years later by the discovery of people called agnostics. As I understood it, agnostics said that they didn’t know what they believed. Well, that was certainly me, so I decided that I was an agnostic. I do remember putting that down on some registration form - it seemed harmless enough, and it was a lot better than just writing in "confused".
But even at that moment, I began to be aware of a very faint conversation going on in the back of my head. Over here, a voice saying "you know you really do believe in something – why don’t you admit it?" On the other side, another voice saying: "Hey, I am a super rational individual – I need proof and I don’t see any". And so, on it went.
Around this time, I moved to Honolulu and few years later found myself living in an old house on a hillside above the city. One day in that house, I had what I’ve heard others call a peak experience. Very difficult to describe – the best I can do is say that It was a time when I seemed to be in a different reality.
I had just had lunch on a Saturday and lay down on the living room carpet - when a most profound feeling of peace and calm and contentment came over me. I was totally relaxed yet very alert and feeling a great energy. The first thing I realized is that I normally have a tight knot of anxiety and tension right here - it’s like a fist squeezing inside my chest. I had never been consciously aware of it - until that day when suddenly it was gone, and in its place I was filled with a serene contentment - and something else I couldn’t put my finger on at the time.
I remember a strong feeling of déjà vu as if I had felt this before, but I could not consciously remember any time that I had. I also remember wondering if I had done something or taken something to cause this. I didn’t do drugs so that wasn’t it – I had a beer with lunch and beer does relax me a bit, but no beer had ever done this to me.
I particularly noticed that all my judgments were gone. I was wearing an old pair of jeans with a rip in the knee - usually when I looked a at those jeans, a whole bunch of nagging voices would start up: "You need to fix that rip - or buy a new pair", etc. But when I looked at my jeans this day, they were just jeans – nothing else, no judgments, no considerations - perfect the way they were. When I looked around the room, the same was true of everything. The world was perfect exactly the way it was.
This experience didn’t last very long – I think about 10 minutes. But it changed my life. I now knew that such a place existed, and that regardless of money or the approval of others, being in that place would be living the fullest possible life for me.
A few years later I got married to my first wife - we didn’t know any ministers but she had a friend who had a friend who was the pastor of a nearby Lutheran Church. He married us, and we began attending that church. I didn’t feel any particular connection with Lutheran theology, but I liked the people, the pastor was a very human down-to-earth person, and the church, which was right on the ocean, was a pleasant place to spend Sunday mornings.
And things started to work themselves out in the back on my head.
I had always been interested in macro things (space, the universe and such) and micro things (cells, atoms etc). They seemed to put me in touch with the wonder and mystery of life. I remember when the DNA molecule was first discovered and feeling a great sense of awe at the realization that the blueprint for an entire human being was contained in this one microscopic piece of matter…that millions of complicated instructions for the formation and operation of billions of cells were all there in one tiny molecule.
As I pondered this, I came to realize that I believed in the existence of a creator. I realized that the proof which that voice in my head was looking for was all around me - in every leaf whose every cell contained its own DNA, and in every speck of dirt composed of microscopic worlds of whirling atoms and electrons. For me, there was simply too much perfection and sophistication of design for these things to have just been an accident - too much beauty and elegance for it all to have been caused by some random flash of lightning into the primordial soup.
I don’t think of my creator as someone who specifically created me and is watching my every move. Rather, my creator simply created the universe and set it in motion. I am the natural evolution of that process. But my creator is benign – I have been designed to exist in harmony with the universe around me – all I have to do is learn the truths which are there for me to find.
So I now had my answer about God – but I wasn’t sure what to think about Jesus.
About this time Jane (whom I had met and married at the Lutheran Church after my divorce) and I and our son Matthew moved from Honolulu to the Northwest. We were interested in joining a church and we visited several Lutheran churches – but they seemed so formal and conservative compared to what we had been used to. I mean, they wore suits and ties on Sunday - we were used to shorts and aloha shirts - sometimes even bathing suits..
One day we saw a small ad in the Woodinville Weekly for the Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church. We had no idea what they were all about, but we decided to go and look. From the beginning, we felt a connection. There were tons of kids - Matthew was 4 at the time, and being new to the area, we were looking for a place for him to make new friends. But beyond that, there was a sort of gentleness that we felt. I remember that when the time for the offering came, the minister announced that if we were first time visitors we should be their guests, keep our wallets in our pockets, and please come again. I found that a very gracious statement. I wish we still did that - that sentiment was one of the things which attracted me to this church, and there may be other visitors who feel that way too.
Well, we joined the church, but we still didn’t know much about it, so I started looking to see what I could find out. The first thing I learned was that this is an organization which places a major emphasis on social activism. Now, my interest is in personal enlightenment, not social activism, and I wondered for a while if I was in the right place.
Then I began to notice that some of my burning spiritual questions were getting answered. I heard a sermon which talked about Jesus as a teacher, and I began to think – yes, that makes sense to me. Whether Jesus was a god or just a man or never existed at all is really kind of irrelevant, the important thing about Jesus is the message he taught, and he is worthy of reverence for those lessons.
In another sermon, the minister, Barbara Wells, discussed her personal beliefs about the soul and the afterlife. She envisioned a great serene lake filled with the liquid spirits of all humanity. When we die, our spirit flows back into that lake - when someone is born, some of the spirit essence is taken from the lake and poured into them. I liked this concept a lot and adopted it as my own.
One night, Jane and I attended a circle supper at Bob and Stephana Ditzler’s - Jack and Joni Brand were there too. I remember it as an extremely pleasant evening, but the highlight was when Bob read a chapter out of this book - The Lives of a Cell, by Lewis Thomas. He read a part about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence - where scientists were designing a spacecraft which might encounter intelligent life – and the quandary about what to include that might be intelligible to an alien species and at the same time convey the essence of humanity. Thomas felt we should send music, although he acknowledged that if we sent Bach, we’d be bragging about how good we were.
I was hooked.
I had heard of this book, but never read it. I got myself a copy, and although it is written by a scientist about scientific matters, it has become a kind of spiritual textbook for me. It puts me in touch with the wonder and mystery of life. It talks about those micro and macro worlds - reading it takes me out of myself.
Some time after that, Phyllis organized a discussion group on the subject of Joseph Campbell, and it was in this group that I had another profound insight. We were watching a videotaped interview of Joseph Campbell by Bill Moyers. At one point, Bill Moyers said that it looked to him that what people really wanted was to find meaning in their lives. Joseph Campbell said he didn’t think so - he thought that what people really wanted was to experience the joy of simply being alive.
What a radical concept, I thought. You mean there is joy to be experienced by simply being alive? You don’t have to have anything or do anything – you just
have to be? Then I realized that that is what had filled me up during that experience on my living room carpet many years before. It was a powerful but quiet sense of joy at just being alive. I discovered that Lewis Thomas had talked about this too. He wrote: "Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you’d think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics … You’d think we’d never stop dancing."
Listen to the words of the Christmas Carols we were singing a month ago - "Joy to the World". Here’s a Christmas card we received from some friends – it wishes us Peace, Warmth, Joy.
I think Joseph Campbell was right.
Now, I’m not a preacher, but let me leave you with these words: experience joy - show it to others - and, most importantly, teach it to your children.
Amen.