Finding Religion on Facebook

It is interesting when and where one has religious experiences. Many report having them when communing with nature, others while engaged in charitable work. Some claim that religious worship or sacraments bring an awareness of the divine. Others find God in moments of solitary prayer, or feel a connection with the transcendent when they meditate.

Today, I was surprised by an experience that I would describe as religious, but which came over me while playing around—of all things—on Facebook. A college friend of mine had posted a picture of himself as a little boy, holding hands with his grandfather and looking up with delight into his grandfather’s face. In the picture, the two are on a walk together, both dressed in suits. In my friend’s description of the picture, he notes that this was something they did regularly—putting on their fine clothes and walking together, hand in hand through the streets of Reykjavik.

It’s one of those photographs that captures more than just a visual impression. It evokes a moment in time and the feelings that pervaded that moment. As I looked at it the photo came alive, and this personal exchange—the tender smile on the old man’s face, the unguarded delight in the boy—began to resonate with universal meanings. It was as if I was looking at a clue to the meaning of life, or more than that: the key to it.

I read the comments that had been made about the picture (it garnered a number of them, probably because the picture was so powerful)—and I learned that at the time this picture was taken, the grandfather was dying. But in the moment captured by that photograph, death isn’t written on the grandfather’s face, and there are no hints of anticipated loss in the little boy’s expression. Both are present to each other, in the moment, experiencing it and each other fully. For the space of a breath they’ve left behind the world of time, of transience and finitude.

Or that’s how it looked to me, as I sat in front of my computer gazing raptly at this image, blinking back unexpected emotion. Eventually I began to think about my own grandfather, the Norwegian with a trace of gypsy in his blood, the passionate Baptist preacher who’d once been an atheist and a Marxist, and who in his final years, as cancer ate away at his flesh, lived in stark terror of death (as if he were afraid that all his pronouncements from the pulpit would be proved wrong).

My grandfather had many admirable qualities, but he was far from a perfect man. He was part of the resistance in Denmark during the Nazi occupation, risking his life to do what he could to protect those most in danger from the occupying power. In the aftermath of the war he ministered to a young Nazi sympathizer who’d been convicted of high treason and was slated for execution. My grandfather kept pace with him as the young man was led to the firing squad, sustaining him with words of compassion and hope.

But he was also a man with a volatile temper, at least in his younger days. He beat his children. There’s evidence that early in his ministry, in the anticlimactic years after the great religious awakening he’d led in a small Norwegian town, he cheated on his wife.

But the man I knew wasn’t the child beater. Nor was it the agent of the resistance. The man I knew was the one who, when I was three years old, squatted down and held out his arms to me when I came off the airplane. I remember racing to him and throwing myself into his arms, and him sweeping me up and laughing and pressing his cheek against my hair.

The man I knew was the one who carried me through the forest at a mad run after I’d been stung in the eyelid by a bee. He was afraid I was allergic to bee stings. He was afraid that I might die, there in the woods. And so he ran for all he was worth, clutching me to him.

I can’t remember the pain. I can’t remember screaming, although I was surely squalling so they could hear me miles away. What I remember is the roughness of his cheek against mine, and the strength of his arms, and the scent of him—which in later years I came to know was the smell of cheap Aquavelva aftershave. On him it smelled good.

In these moments with my grandfather I existed in the moment, stepping out of the tide of time, the endless forward rush. It’s no surprise to me at all that this happens when human love is felt most keenly. There is a link, it seems to me, between love and the eternal.

And so I looked at this picture, which I’d stumbled across on Facebook, and I felt abruptly lifted out of myself. I felt that I was looking through a window to the eternal. This is what abides there, I thought. This is what abides in the mind of God.

And for a moment I just stayed in that space, savoring it, feeling it as an ache behind my eyes. And then, below the picture, I wrote my own comment, which included these words:

“Here’s what I think it means, on a deep level, to believe in God: it means that moments like this one, so imperfectly preserved in a picture, are imprinted in eternity, not lost but tenderly and reverently safeguarded by a fundamental reality, something beyond the empirical skin of the world, something that we come closest to in this life when we laugh like a child looking up into a beloved face.”