Wednesday, December 3, 2008

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.”

3 comments:

  1. “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.”

    First, I'm glad to know your father's surgery went well, and I hope he's on his way to a full recovery.

    Re the quote above: it expresses a common human hope, that what's good and beautiful can somehow be preserved against dissolution. There's actually good empirical reason to believe that all events simply *are* in a four-dimensional spacetime. It's only consciousness that creates the illusion of time passing, that things go out of existence. In reality, according to Minkowski's 100 year old insight which builds on Einstein's special relativity, everything always *is.* See here for instance.

    So we don't need God to eternalize things, they are already. Unfortunately, it's not just the good things that are eternalized. This is why science-based naturalism probably won't catch on!

    best,

    Tom

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  2. Tom,

    The quote at the end of my post is an attempt to offer a poetic articulation of what I discuss in (somewhat) more prosaic and philosophically careful terms in my book, under the rubric of “the ethico-religious hope.” This hope has more elements to it than hope for the perdurance of that which we value. The deepest element is that the good perdures because the universe is in some fundamental way on the side of goodness. I define “God” in my book as that whose existence would constitute the fulfillment of this hope.

    As you point out, there is a sort of permanence that an Einsteinian picture of time lends to treasured moments in our life. This is a point that John Leslie makes in his recent book, Immortality Defended (he essentially argues that the Einsteinian “block universe” entails that there is at least one sense in which we are “immortal”); and it is offered up by atheist blogger Greta Christina as a “comforting thought” about death for atheists.

    But, as you also note, the kind of permanence offered by this Einsteinian picture is extended indifferently to the good and the bad. As such, whatever consolation this picture can provide, it does not satisfy the ethico-religious hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness.

    The decision to live as if the ethico-religious hope has been fulfilled amounts to the decision to live as if aligning one’s choices and character with the good brings one into alignment with the deepest truth about the universe. This decision has, in my view, pragmatic value. And while I do not think that any argument can be put forward to establish that the universe is really on the side of goodness in some fundamental way, neither do I think that any argument can be put forward to establish the contrary. And those who choose to live in this ethico-religious hope tend to have experiences (a sense of synchronicity with reality when they live life lovingly) that reinforce the hope.

    It is a mistake, on such a basis, to behave as if one has knowledge, and to respond to those who do not live in the same hope as if they are at odds with what is known. This is the mistake that, I think, generates so much hostility to religion. What I most want to do is ensure that this legitimate hostility does not spill over onto those who, while living in the ethico-religious hope, avoid this mistake.

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  3. "It is a mistake, on such a basis, to behave as if one has knowledge, and to respond to those who do not live in the same hope as if they are at odds with what is known. This is the mistake that, I think, generates so much hostility to religion. What I most want to do is ensure that this legitimate hostility does not spill over onto those who, while living in the ethico-religious hope, avoid this mistake."

    Thanks for this honest assessment of your position. Like yourself, I want to avoid hostilities, and admitting that we don't necessarily have the truth in hand is a great way to avoid coming across as holier (or smartier) than thou.

    best,

    Tom

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