We Are Anxious, We Are Afraid, We Want to Fall Back Asleep

It amazes me how many ways we find to run away from ourselves.  The temptations are endless.

What is temptation? Anything that keeps you from becoming who you are, who you were meant to be.  Anything. 

Some temptations confront us with a clear and urgent choice like the one Moshe put before the fledgling nation:  Choose you this day life or death, the difficult freedom of the way of the Teaching or the easy way of the scattered and lost. Emanuel Levinas, in his essay “The Temptation of Temptation” (Nine Talmudic Readings sets before us another like choice like this:  Place ontology, the science of being, first, or ethics, the responsibility to the Other that confronts you, first.  The temptation of temptations is to choose knowledge, for knowledge sets you at the center of the universe.  If your choose obligation, you acknowledge that you stand always already in relation to an Other than has a prior claim on you. That is the way to life.

Some temptations come with the full force of drama, complete with warning lights and sirens and axes falling.  That woman or man who promises to be a better match for us than our current partner.  That urge to hurt the person we love.   The need to push another lower to raise ourselves higher. 

But it is the countless, tiny little temptations we face every day without realizing it that worry me today.  All the distractions of “normal” life that we allow to crowd our lives and dull our attention. We want to pay attention, be present to the Presence, and what do we do?  We watch TV, we exercise harder, we call our friends, we drink wine or beer or smoke, we surf the Web, we frenetically try to keep up and stay in touch on Facebook and Twitter, we read literature meant for consumption, we clean our houses, manage our family’s lives, search out great meals and other pleasures, shop, find new hobbies to “pass the time,” consult the stars and psychics, follow the lives of the gods and demigods we call “celebrities.”  None of these is bad in itself.  But when we do them unconsciously, repeatedly, they keep us from going deeper.  It’s easy to stay on the surface.  Nothing is required of us. 

We know how alive we feel when we wake up from this stupor and are really present, even for a moment, to another person or the natural world or ourselves.  Yet we keep going back to sleep.  We keep sipping that sleeping draught so we will not be fully present. St. Paul said it well:  “The good that we would we do not; and the evil that we would not, that we do.”

Why, when we know gives us life and what numbs us, do we keep choosing what numbs us?  Why do we keep enslaving ourselves to empty habits that drain the blood from our lives?  Why do we keep running away from ourselves?  Why do we keep hiding?  Why are we so frightened of becoming who we are?  So afraid to be free?   So afraid to be found?

Do We Need God?

Do we need God?  This is a question.  It is not a rhetorical opening to an argument for or against the existence and necessity of God. 

Do we need God?  Let’s bracket for a moment the questions of who this “we” is, what “need” means, what “God” means, “need God for what?” and “who wants to know?”

Countless observers of human beings--from all disciplines and traditions--have concluded that part of what it means to be human is to stand in relationship to something greater than ourselves, a reality that goes beyond the corporeal world or the world that appears to us, a reality that is eternal or infinite that we nevertheless sense or participate in. Whether they speak of humankind as homo religiosus, piety as the feeling of the Infinite acting upon you in your finitude (Schleierrmacher)  the sacred dimension (Mircea Eliade), the idea of the holy (Rudolph Otto)  the alone with the alone (Emily Dickinson), the eternal in man (Max Scheler), the religious experience (William James), the Ultimate Concern (Paul Tillich), or the face of the Other (Levinas), they point to the pervasiveness of this experience. A sweep over the millenia of human history confirms this: human beings in every age, in every culture have developed and continue to develop  rituals, texts, and spaces that nurture this relationship.  And today,  even many of those who have stopped believing in God continue to think about God or the Eternal.  Recently, Jacob Needleman put it this way:  “To think about God is to the human soul what breathing is to the human body.” (What Is God?, 3)

Many other observers, acknowledging the pervasiveness of the human concern with God or the Infinite, argue that this failure to cast off believing in or thinking about God by no means proves that God or something like it is essential to human life.  Rather, it proves that most people are still caught in primitive, unenlightened, irrational ways of interpreting reality.  Common religion and God may be, but they are by no means inevitable, essential, or necessary to human life. Quite the contrary, they are distracting at best and destructive at worst.  We don’t need God; we need rationality, we need morality, we need humanism. Read the news for “God-inspired” genocide, terror, torture, abuse. Case closed.

I tend toward the first position.  As long as there are human beings we are going to wrestle with, puzzle over, rail against,  and argue about that reality we cannot fully grasp or control that nevertheless impinges upon our existence or intrudes itself into our lives or awakens us to something beyond the limits of our ordinary minds. Some of us will experience this as “sacred,“ others may call it  the ultimate ideals they live by.  I came of intellectual age in a time when scholars were speaking of the religious dimension of all experience, or the root of faith in all human beings, that which they place their ultimate trust in and give their ultimate loyalty to, whether they identify that center of all value as empiricism, secularism, family, nation, a religious tradition, or the One.  To me the question of faith and God is simply this:  How does one ultimately orient and ground one’s life?  Whatever the answer—and it is a difficult question to answer honestly for even the most self-aware—that is one’s god. 

And yet, I would not argue with a person who claims to be or boasts of being areligious or indifferent to faith and God.  Should I insist that they are religious even though they do not realize it?  Should I prove to them that in the absence of faith in the One that they really worship money? success? That their body or their partner is their idol?  How would that serve?  I am no apologist for the one true faith, however I or anyone else may define it.  Perhaps their denial of faith as they understand it and of God as they have understood that concept is what clears the way for them to experience the depths of the Infinite in the limits of their finitude, whatever they may call it, however they may interpret it.  Maybe my way of asking the question or the language I am using has closed an opening for them.  And why have I made their inner life my goal, when the work on my own remains unfinished?  The question is to me, not them: Who are you?  Where have you been?  Where are you going?  Are you on the way to becoming truly human?  

The power of persuasion lies not in words or arguments, but in the felt experience of the One among us.