If I could again close my eyes

Thoughts of faith and religion have played heavy in my head lately. Yesterday I read that Hassidic rapper extraordinaire Matisyahu shaved his beard. This is unheard of in the Hassidic community but I felt it admirable that he is willing to break with dogmatic restriction on his spiritual journey. As he stated, “[T]oday I went to the Mikva and Shul just like yesterday.” His faith has not changed, merely his personal journey in this world, and I commend him for the courage to do so publically.

Matisyahu is not the only impetus for these thoughts, nor is he the most pressing. I have found myself at a crossroads in life where I wait and struggle and never more have I wished that I could pray- wished that I could cast my concerns to another and wait for that one to answer me. Instead, the divinity I feel in the universe, the meridian lines of energy pulling me to and fro, crossing and uncrossing thoughts and paths in life, is indifferent. I am not beloved by my divinity, nor does it chastise and punish me when I fail. It exists and it works itself through all things, exerting control unseen but unconscious, creating opportunity for growth and success as well as for regret and pain. But how I wish it was a white haired man at whom I could rail should things fail, at whom I could hurl my displeasure at the current state of my little world. That man, the G-d of the Book for many, his physical image in the world is typically derived from Grecian lore, to appear as Zeus. It would be nice if I could be his child again.

I remember when I was. I remember looking to this paternal figure, who was called Father and Lord, and weeping on my knees in His august and unseen presence. Oh, there was such beauty in the breaking of hedonistic Me. I wept, I surrendered, and I became a supplicant to the alter of forgiveness. And I was comfortable there for a time. “Give over your thoughts, your will, your logic, and The Church will guide you.” Ah, well, we see how well the Catholic (and even the catholic) Church has done in the world throughout history (“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”).

But I grew. I had to leave behind dogma but I did not leave behind morality. I did not leave behind a love of ritual and tradition, I simply left behind what I considered antiquated ideas of human interaction. I found instead a philosophy that guides my heart to places that are not always comfortable but are without shame and without punishment. I punish myself quite well, thank you. I am accountable to myself and to that which I choose to be accountable to, not a man in a robe who claims piety. The men (there are only a couple names I would list in this and neither at this time are women) I look up to in my spiritual life and in my relationship with the divine do not claim any piety. They live it. They are examples of it. But they are men. Not divine messengers. They are just like me: fallible, mortal, and walking along a similar but not identical path.

Oh, but I could hope now to close my eyes and have someone else to blame should my world come crumbling down around me. Should I fail, should I lose, should I create chaos… I only have myself to blame… and truly only myself. I cannot even look to others and blame them, for my way through the divine and living world calls for accountability, calls for accepting that only I made these choices, only I had the intention to create and/or destroy, only I could take the leap and hope to fly to the place I wanted to land- but I think Kierkegaard remains correct in saying we must take a leap of faith (though my faith now is different than his). My faith is now in what I have built in my world, the strength in my resolve and in myself and in those around me. I am still an existentialist by and large and I still hold fast to Kierkegaard’s philosophy that at the edge of logic, at the edge of all that we thought we knew, if we step off in faith, we may find ourselves in the existence we so need.

I began writing this on December 15, 2011, and now it is a day later and I find it vaguely amusing that my thoughts on faith and my lack of it were so stirred on the same day as the passing of orator and noted atheist, Christopher Hitchens. As I read some of his work written during his struggle against cancer, I mused that, while I speak of Kierkegaard here, a philosopher of deep religious convictions, it is more often Voltaire, Freud (specifically and only his work, Future of an Illusion), Marx, Aristotle, and Plato that I turn to when I offer up my opinions on the nature of humanity. I have also been known to quote Spinoza and Nietschze and yes, quite often I refer to my beloved Gautama Buddha and his thoughts on the potential for all of us to reach Buddhahood (ie our inherent Buddha nature), but I remember distinctly the last time I prayed. It was also the last time I sat in a pew as a supplicant, though I have sat in pews since as a wedding attendee and in services with friends (notably Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve) but never since as a supplicant to the alter. When ill, I cry out for my momma to care for me, not to a deity to heal me. When loss comes, I accept the shedding of the mortal shell and the release of the energy that animated a loved one but I do not picture them in white robes floating among the clouds. In saying all of this, I would say I am likely somewhere closer to Hitchens than Desmond Tutu (though I highly respect each).

I feel the need to go back to my academic writings spinning my own theology (I was forced to in Divinity School), my philosophical interpretations of theologians and atheists alike, as well as the primary sources to refresh myself on the theories put forth by each. I feel the need to delve back into religious and philosophical study because I feel myself sitting at this odd crossroads, stuck, waiting, and who doesn’t enjoy reading while waiting for time to pass and the world to shift once more into a forward momentum?

With this shift and the passage of a day, it is difficult to reengage thoughts of yesterday. Hitchens’ passing does not change my belief that a leap of faith, even a leap of faith without a deity to catch one in mid-air, bears the potential for the greatest happiness. A faith in what? In ones’ self, in the drive of the heart and the soul to experience the farthest boundaries of love and joy, faith that the self and those surrounding it can create and mold the universe and all its divinity to reflect the good intentions of a soul (I use the term soul but my teacher, SN Goenka, refers to this as our bubble mass- the ever changing entity within that can view the world, the inner thing/ voice that is ‘self’ and has nothing to do with our dying bodies). Faith doesn’t live and die in the deity, it is instead a feeling, the sense in the gut that if we remain frozen in dogma and orthodoxy, we deny ourselves the possibility of reaching our potential and we deny others the same by holding them to ideals that may not reach the true pulse of our humanity. Some would say I am wrong for embracing such freedom but in leaving behind hedonism and never holding to utilitarianism, secular existentialism remains at the core of my being. And this would not be a philosophy based off someone like Ayn Rand- I do not adhere to the ideal that we are all at base selfish, though we hold selfish thoughts and desires. Instead, His Holiness the Dalai Lama provides the modern ideal of a life of peace and happiness: create good spaces, act with good intentions, embrace our personal truths, and we manifest joy.

If this is a meandering treatise, I apologize for a lack of focus. This is not my academic writing. This is not footnoted and shaped into an argument, because I am not arguing this point. I am offering you an opinion. Albeit, it is a well researched opinion, born of 6 years (more if you consider the religious education I provided myself long before I entered university) of intense study. Am I, like Hitchens, an atheist? Absolutely not. Could you label me any particular organized religion? Absolutely not. I am agnostic to the core, and this is not a “fence sitting” position. I am not hedging my bets either way (I was once advised by a Catholic that I should simply believe “just in case”). Through study and contemplation I have come to accept the most unacceptable answer for most: I just don’t know. Uncertainty is an uncomfortable place to exist in but it is by far the most comfortable place for me after hundreds of hours of reading. I can attest to the fact that, in a foxhole or staring death in the face, I still do not cry out for a savior (unless you count saviors among the mortal humans who act to save a mortal existence).

It would be easier to hedge my bets, just in case. But without compelling evidence otherwise, I see no reason in altering my empirical take on the world. Yes, I believe in divinity and in some sense, I find myself believing in some sense of predetermination, which works for me since I had come down on the side of compatibilism in the free will debate under the tutelage of philosopher, Mike McKenna. I consider the world in terms of robust options versus non-robust ones and when I consider those robust options, I feel myself free to choose among them and yet I still believe that there are people in my life I am “meant” to know and be shaped by and places (in the metaphysical sense) I am “meant” to go. These are not contradictory to me.

So, I find myself at some end with this mental ramble. My soul remains troubled but secure in its beliefs. It is troubled by the workings of mortal beings in a divine world, with the divine being simply that which we do not understand, cannot fathom, in its workings. The meridian line that pulls me strongly remains a robust option. I can choose it, as can others. The question is, will I? Will others?

Here is a very brief list of readings that shape some of these thoughts:

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Plato, The Republic

Sigmund Freud, Future of an Illusion

Fischer, Kane, Pereboom, and Vargas, Four Views on Free Will

Voltaire, Candide

Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Karl Marx, Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts and The Communist Manifesto

Also, websites: www.dhamma.org and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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