Gospel & Universe ⏯ Systems

"Open Your Heart" 3

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I have, on numerous occasions, done what my niece suggested: Open you heart! I have said to the thin air: I am setting aside reason, practical or pure. Reveal Yourself, if it be Your Will. But the Will doesn’t show itself. The Miracle doesn’t come. Krishna and Christ stay on the other side. Maybe they visit other people, but not me. My emotions are laid bare — I’m an open door — but no one's walking through.

It isn’t reason that stops the flood of belief. Rather, it’s the lack of incoming feeling, the lack of emotional revelation, the lack of any deeply convincing experience of the Divine. Agnostics haven’t already decided that God or the soul is true or untrue. They haven’t taken belief second hand -- be it the testimony of Christians, Hindus, or Buddhists. It seems genuine, to agnostics at any rate, to insist that belief come on its own — not coaxed by reasons, desires, practicalities, or other people’s beliefs.

Agnostics can come up with all sorts of reasons to believe. There's as much reason to believe in the Dao or in Nature as there is to believe in Jesus or Vishnu. There’s even more reason, at least more pure reason, not to believe in anything at all. Whatever the religious Miracle is, agnostics won’t believe in It until they get some experience of it. But this experience never comes. Not a glimpse of water shifting from transparent to light pink, much less into the dark red of wine. There's no voice that they can identify as God’s. There isn't so much as a faded after-image of a life that’s past. The fifth dimension is invisible, silent. It refuses to be reasoned, coaxed, or threatened onto this side of existence. If there's a fifth dimension at all.

Some might say, Ah, but listen to your conscience! It’s the voice of God! Yet my conscience says alot of things, all of which appear to be variants of the thoughts and feelings that are recognizably inside me already. Alas, I have to claim my conscience as my own.

Others might say, You're putting conditions on God! You're putting conditions on belief itself! I would answer, I'm not the one defining God. You guys seem to be doing that. Maybe it's time religious people starting putting some conditions on belief. Just look at all the strange and contradictory things religious people believe.

Still others might say, You think too much! You’ve cut yourself off from deep human emotion! No wonder you can’t open yourself up to Jesus! (My imaginary interlocutors always speak with exclamation marks at the end of their sentences.) Yet I’m not a stranger to strange visions or deep emotions. In dreams I've flown over mountain ranges, become a buzzing green line of energy, and hovered over a clear river that flowed so forcefully that it felt like our world was funnelling through galaxies. Nor am I an unfeeling person. Tears well into my eyes when I think about the death of a loved one, when I read of a judge in Sicily standing up to the mob, when I see a paraplegic struggling through a door, or when I hear of a priest fighting for social justice in a pueblo. I find beauty in the most mundane things: berries next to a sidewalk, the purple sunset on the far mountains, the white and grey world of clouds that stretch across the sky.

I'm open to experiences of the mystical and religious sort. The art in churches and museums often sends me to places I can't describe. If it weren't for an abusive counsellor at a Christian summer camp, I may have committed myself to Christianity, so deeply did its exalted messages of Love and Meaning appeal to my eleven-year old self. Several years ago I had an experience that I still think of as telepathic: I felt an unaccountable yet piercing sympathy for a friend at the very moment he suffered a great loss, and yet I had no contact with or knowledge of that friend for weeks. For ten years I practiced transcendental meditation, and when I meditated with other people it seemed to me that the room would hum with blissful energy. It seemed to hum. Did it really hum? Can I make any definitive statement about what the neurons in my brain, or what the molecules in the room were really doing? Should I have lit incense and worshipped the blue god?

All I can say is that humans seem to have some deep energies within them, and that there seem to be connections between humans that can't yet be explained by brain-wave meters, physics, and neurology. Whether these types of experiences come from frequencies we can't measure, messages we can't decode, or dimensions we can't confirm, they remain mysterious. So far, without a capital M. They don’t come pre-packaged with a set of Mysteries or Miracles. They don’t announce any Great Truth. At least not to me. If they ever do announce a Great Truth, I will start shopping for sack cloth or a saffron robe. After, that is, I get an MRI scan.

The operation of doubt doesn't stop agnostics from being awestruck by the vibrancy of life, and from feeling at times that it all seems to fall into place. At times it seems mystically, magically still, like when I came back from Marseille and sat drinking coffee in the still of the night. The small sea of coffee had billions of tiny waves of energy splashing along its surface, yet it looked solid, without a ripple. Atoms and molecules went billions of layers deep. Little wisps of steam rose like sun flares from the seething mass. The coffee, like the room, like the apartment building, like the entire city of Vancouver, was whirling at hundreds of kilometres a second through the universe. Yet the bough outside the window was waving only slightly in the wind. 

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Next: ✝︎ Saint Francis: Rapt Angel

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