Leon Moisseiff had unshakable faith in the reliability of his newly-completed masterpiece. He would have had no qualms whatsoever trusting its dependability in any weather conditions. Yet had he stood upon his own creation on November 7th, 1940, his faith would have been fatal. The object of his faith was unreliable, and the strength of his faith irrelevant.
 
 

Faith has become the diametric of reason … practiced only by deluded fools who reject the graceful catenary and steel-plate certainty of scientific rationalism.

Faith is an idea frequently voiced, but little understood. It is commonly mentioned in the pejorative sense in today’s secular society, where it has become a proxy for belief in the unbelievable, the unprovable, the superstitious and the mythical. Faith has become the diametric of reason — unreasonably so, as we shall see — practiced only by deluded fools who reject the graceful catenary and steel-plate certainty of scientific rationalism.

Yet faith–not love–makes the world go ’round. You exercise faith when you place the key in the ignition and start your car. You have faith when you flip a switch, expecting light to rush forth from a fixture, or music from stereo speakers. You have faith that your coat will keep you warm and dry; your plane will stay aloft; your surgeon will bring you through a heart bypass. The atheist has utter faith in his reason, that belief in God is beyond logic and therefore must be rejected. Such faith is nothing more than trust: a confidence that the object is reliable, the tool is trustworthy, its behavior predictable, its nature dependable. In the physical realm, such trust may be based in part on knowledge — one can study the flow of electrons and principles of resistance which make a light bulb glow — but such erudition is entirely optional, and rarely grasped by those who rely on its behavior. The object of faith may be entirely reliable yet utterly beyond our comprehension — or, as Leon Moisseiff discovered to his great dismay, deeply understood yet profoundly unreliable.
 

We want to understand before we trust – and labor under the pretension that we cannot trust until we understand …

It is in the realm of the immaterial and the spiritual where faith comes most under scrutiny and is the subject of much skepticism. Such skepticism is of course most profound in the materialist, the agnostic, or the atheist — but each of us has a strong strain of suspicion about that which cannot be weighed, measured, seen, or felt. We want to understand before we trust – and labor under the pretension that we cannot trust until we understand, until such trust is “reasonable” to the input of our senses or the perceptions and insights of the mind.

Yet the countless small acts of faith which allow us to move through life are far less frequently grounded in knowledge than they are in experience. We do not think twice about starting our cars, because we have, a thousand times before, turned the key in the ignition and had the engine roar to life. We cross the suspension bridge without hesitating because millions have done so before us — or more proximately, because the cars in front of us are passing over safely. Such experience may be personally acquired, or may be derivative: we trust the surgeon to remove our gallbladder, not because we have directly evaluated his skills and performance, but because others have trusted before us: his reputation about their satisfactory outcome has been imputed to us. Because others have trusted before us, and their trust has been rewarded, we find ourselves inclined to trust as well.

It is common for the skeptic to argue that spiritual or religious faith is “believing things for which there is no empirical evidence.” But contained within this erroneous definition is the very seed of its fallacy: it demands of the spiritual and immaterial realm that it be subject to the measurements, the rules, and the limitations of the material, and presumes the non-existence of anything beyond the empirically determinable. The skeptic and the materialist are boxed in; their world is small indeed, allowing for nothing but that which the eye may see, the hand might touch, the mind may comprehend in its finite measure and the incompleteness of its intellectual grasp.

G.K. Chesterton, in his typically lucid and insightful way, described this straight-jacketed state of mind in his book Orthodoxy:

… [T]he materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion. In one sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow. They cannot be broader than themselves. A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted. He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist. But as it happens, there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism. … The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. … The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

Reason set adrift from the divine logos floats like an airtight bottle on a sea of confusion. It fashions tightly-woven arguments from false premises and faulty knowledge. It rejects the unprovable while proving the irrational. Reason may even conclude that its very foundation does not exist: that truth is a cultural artifact, that there are no absolutes. Such is the basis of the postmoderism which currently infects the lofty heights of academia, an insidious virus now replicating rapidly in the intellectual slums of public education and the irrational irrelevancy of college classrooms.

Furthermore, reason detached from the transcendent — the same reason upon which the materialist and the skeptic rest their insubstantial security — must itself be the subject of skepticism. For in the purposeless, deterministic world of random chance and unordered events, who is to say that reasoned thought and scientific inquiry is anything but the random neural energy of an accidental life-form, no more connected to cause and effect than the spark which shuffled amino acids like cards into something we now call “life”?
 
Again, Chesterton states the problem succinctly:

[The] peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young skeptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old skeptic, the complete skeptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.”

Faith embodies the confidence in that which we do not necessarily understand, but have found to be experientially reliable. One can, almost surprisingly, have a profoundly misguided or erroneous understanding of a trustworthy object — and still that object will remain trustworthy. Cro-Magnon man, magically transported by time machine to the twenty-first century, might well believe that switching on a light is black magic or the work of the gods — but when he flips the switch, the bulb will still emit light. Thus faith depends, not merely in the confidence that its object will be reliable, but on the inherent reliability of the object itself.

Thus the poles of faith are opposite yet complimentary: there must be trust, even without understanding, and the object of trust must be reliable and dependable. This dialectic is at the heart of religious faith: the trust in something unseen and poorly understood, which nevertheless proves experientially trustworthy, because its object is utterly reliable. It is here that reason and faith coalesce: reason, guided and given purpose and boundaries in the transcendent, points to that which exists but is beyond our capacity to comprehend with intellect alone. Faith beckons us to span this intellectual chasm with the bridge of trust, drawing us to experience that which we lack the means to grasp without it. Reason may block us from faith, constricted as it often is by self-imposed constraints — or reason may confirm and reinforce that which we experience by faith. Trust in the transcendent transforms us, expanding the limits and restrictions which we arbitrarily place upon reality.

The man of faith sees an effect, and attributes its cause to the transcendent, while open to the possibility that the cause may be random or material in nature. The skeptic has no such freedom: the cause cannot be the transcendent, for the transcendent does not exist. His viewpoint is “reality-based” only insofar as the reality he trusts excludes the transcendent. The man of faith can afford to be wrong, and may often be so; such is the process of growth in the unseen world. The skeptic cannot be wrong — for if he is, his worldview is utterly demolished.

There is, however, another aspect of faith which must be met, if this trust is to bear fruit in deepening our experience and our understanding of the transcendent. This is the transaction of faith: the trust must be grounded in and bounded by the nature of that which is trusted. A light will not illuminate by flipping a switch unconnected by wires; a car will not start by placing your house key in the ignition, or your car key in the door. The nature of the object demands that the action based on trust be within fixed parameters dictated by the object’s design or character.

There is more to be said about this transaction of faith, integrating reason, experience, and revelation into a working dynamic which broadens our horizons far beyond the restrictive limits of the material and intellect constrained by its finite vision.

Such thoughts must await another post on another day — which I trust will be soon forthcoming.

Reposted from 2007

It was late evening. I was headed for a meeting, at the end of a too-long day, and stopped into Starbucks for a fix. The store was empty except for a single barista. I ordered my coffee, and was stunned when told: “Your drink has been paid for by someone else.” I looked around: no “someone else” here.

The coffee was free, but better yet: I had received a free life lesson on grace.

I was raised with the conviction that one should expect nothing in life for free, and that hard work will ultimately be rewarded. Perhaps as a result, I have always been uncomfortable with complements or gifts received in unexpected contexts. Such awkwardness with gifts or complements seems common in others as well, a discomfort I suspect comes from a deep-seated sense of unworthiness or shame. There is a reflex need to reciprocate, to depreciate oneself, or even to decline the gift itself. I suspect I’m hardly alone with this awkwardness.

But here, at Starbucks, I was left without the opportunity to justify, minimize, rationalize, or refuse the offered grace. The perpetrator was long gone. I was busted.

As a Christian of many years, with hours of Bible study, books and sermons under my belt, I have long believed that I possessed a good intellectual grasp of grace. Grace was unmerited favor, best exemplified by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. And of course, I understood that I was saved by grace and not by my own merit. Yet there is something deep within, at the level of instinct, which resists this notion with great ferocity. I believe I can bridge the gap between myself and God because I have minimized with wild abandon the vastness of this chasm. God saved me, and I pay Him back by living as moral and upright a life as possible. It’s only fair, you know, gratitude and all. It’s also utterly wrong.

A stranger left a few dollars at a Starbucks for someone he or she would never know nor meet, who could not thank them. There would be no reciprocal payback, no Thank Yous, no praise for their generosity or acknowledgment of their kindness of spirit. Pure giving, with only the joy at anticipating that some unknown person would be blessed.

God’s grace is given with His full knowledge of the unworthiness of its object. It is pure love: not intended to get something in return, but rather to change the very nature of the object of grace. The thief on the cross had nothing to give back to God, but his life was transformed moments before his death–and we are the recipients of the grace given to him. I do not serve God to pay Him back for His grace; I serve Him because His grace changes my very nature, into one who in some small measure is an instrument whereby He can pass His grace on to others.

Why does God allow such terrible illnesses to such a kind person? I know there is really no answer as I know all about Job. The thing I am really afraid is that I prayed for his healing, and it did not happen. When I became a Christian back in the 80′s, the health and prosperity gospel was big at the time, and I guess it really influenced me more than I care to admit as I now know it is false. Even though I know it is false, I have become obsessed that God did not answer my prayer because of not being able to get rid of all the sin in my life (as if this were possible to do). One of the teachings of that movement was that if your prayer for healing went unanswered it was either because of lack of faith or sin in your life. I kept thinking that I don’t always put God first in my life, and that I spent more time reading secular magazines than reading my Bible and listening to more secular music than Christian music. These were my “main” sins, at least in my mind and thinking. Can you shed some light on this for me? I would be very appreciative.

The problem of suffering and evil is an ageless one. It poses a particular challenge for Judaism and Christianity, because of the seemingly insoluble tension between a world filled with suffering and evil, and the belief in a God who is good and all-powerful. Solutions to this dilemma, both adequate and inadequate, abound. It is the desperate hope of the atheist that this logical incompatibility proves beyond question the nonexistence of God. Others, less willing to ditch a Divine order, have concluded that God is good, but impotent; or that God is detached and uncaring, or capricious, or moody, or sadistic — and therefore not good.

It must be said plainly that answers to this paradox are neither simple nor entirely satisfactory. The dilemma as it stands may be solved in a global and satisfactory way — as has been done by both Judaism and Christianity — but invariably the lofty principles seem to break down at the moment when a solution is most needed: in the time of crisis when we ourselves experienced the depths, hopelessness, and irrationality of suffering in our own lives. CS Lewis, whose tightly reasoned treatise The Problem of Pain provides an extraordinarily deep and thorough discussion of this dilemna–later in life nearly repudiates his faith and sound theology after the death of his wife, a process painfully detailed in his diaries, A Grief Observed. It is indeed unsettling to watch Lewis discard all of his carefully reasoned and theological understandings of pain and suffering in the brutal crucible of unbearable pain and loss. Nonetheless, he ultimately comes to terms with the paradox, and undergoes an embracing of this profound dilemma far deeper than the intellectual by means of his own trial of fire.

At the heart of this difficult issue lies the human heart. God undertook a vast and dangerous experiment when creating man: He wanted, not merely another animal — of which there were countless — but an animal capable of something He alone understood: love. He gave this exalted animal vast intellect — but this was not sufficient to engender love. He gave His creation powerful emotions, the capacity for both creation and destruction, which He alone had possessed — but this also was not sufficient. For love — the utter, uninhibited emptying of self for another — required that most dangerous license of all: free will. This being thus created, designed with the capacity to love, must of necessity be utterly free to choose — for choice is the very heart, the very essence of love.

It was, by all measures, an experiment gone wildly awry. Having given this creature the extraordinary capabilities required to love fully — intellect, emotion, passion, empathy, the ability to feel intense pleasure and pain both physically and spiritually — he set this creature free to love, first of all Him, and then others of its kind. And the first choice of this pinnacle of creation was the decision to turn away: to replace the intended objects of love with the sterile altar of self. Thus was unleashed the monstrous liability of a truly free creature: the ability to hate, to cause pain, to kill, to destroy.

If we are to be honest, much of the pain and suffering which comprise the evil of the world is due to nothing more than this: that man, having been given the ability to choose, chooses wrongly, and uses the gifts and abilities given for the purpose of love to instead elevate himself at the expense of others, often in ways stunningly malicious and utterly wicked. Look around you, at the world both near and far: pride, selfishness, greed, lust, rage, jealousy — all these things manifest themselves in our lives and those of others, causing great pain and endless suffering. The child abused; the wife abandoned; the drive-by shooting; the greedy CEO who bankrupts the company and rapes the stockholders; the serial killer and the rapist; genocide; wars of conquest; torture; senseless massacres: these are the actions of men and women putting self above others — and each of us does it, to a greater or lesser degree, though we minimize our own roles to justify our own actions. We all wish for a world where God would eliminate evil — but all assume that we ourselves would be the only ones left standing when His judgment is delivered. A world in which God eliminated evil would by necessity be emptied of all mankind.

Yet there also exists those evils which have been called, in days past, somewhat ironically, “acts of God” — those circumstances or events which cause pain and suffering, not directly engendered by human evil. Thus the child is born with a severe birth defect; hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes cause death and destruction; chronic and devastating diseases fall upon those who seemingly deserve a far better fate. It is with this, this seemingly capricious evil, with which we struggle most earnestly, straining to understand, yet to no avail. Judaism and Christianity both imply that some such evil may be consequential, the result of punishment or predictable consequences for the malfeasance of man. A more robust theology is less accusatory and thereby more coarsely granular — maintaining that such evil has entered the world because of the fall of man. Under such design our divine divorce has corrupted not only behavior, but our very natures, and all of creation. Yet such theology is of little comfort to those who are the objects of such seemingly random evil; we demand to know of God, “Why?” — and in particular, “Why me?” Yet there is no answer forthcoming, and we are left assuming a God either powerless to stop such evil or unwilling to do so.

Yet the problem of a good God, an omnipotent God, and an evil world of His creation is not entirely insoluble. Much lies in our projection of human frailty onto the nature of the Divine, and the impreciseness of our definitions of good and omnipotent. When we say God is good, we tend to mean that God is “nice” — that he would never do anything to cause us pain or suffering. Yet even in our limited experience, we must acknowledge that pain and suffering, while not inherently good, may be a means to goodness. We choose to have surgery or chemotherapy, though painful and debilitating, that our cancer may be cured. The halls of Alcoholics Anonymous are filled with men and women who, having faced both personal and relational destruction, have used their former liabilities as a gateway to a new, more fulfilling life — one which could not have taken place apart from their harrowing journey through alcoholism. To a misbehaving child, the discipline of a loving father is not perceived as good, but such correction is essential for the development of personal integrity, social integration, and responsibility. Our inability to discern the potential for good in pain and suffering does not by necessity deny its presence; there are many who, when asked, will point to painful, difficult, and unbearable times in life which have brought about profound, often unexpected good in their lives, unforeseeable in the midst of their dark days. There surely is much suffering which defies our capacity to understand, even through we strive with every fiber of our being to find the goodness therein. But the fact that such inexplicable suffering exists, and that answers are often lacking, does not preclude the possibility that God is good, or that such suffering may ultimately lead to something greater and more noble than the pain endured.

In our egocentricity we often neglect to look for the benefit in our suffering which comes not to us, but rather to others. Caring for someone suffering unbearably provides an opportunity to the caretaker to experience selfless love, compassion, tenderness, patience and endurance — character traits sadly lacking in our selfish world, which routinely turns its back on suffering to pursue an untroubled life of self-fulfillment and self-gratification. It is not inherently evil to be called to give beyond our means and ability — as caring for someone suffering always demands — for in the exhaustion and inadequacy thus revealed, we may discover unknown inner strengths, and come to a richer, and more fulfilling dependence on God. We are, as CS Lewis so accurately described, “not merely imperfect creatures that need improvement: we are rebels that need lay down their arms” — and finding how shallow are our reserves of love, compassion, and strength, we may through this brokenness seek to acquire them, humbly, from their Source.

But surely an omnipotent God has the power to stop suffering — is He not either impotent or evil when failing to use such power to remove our suffering? The omnipotence of God, like His goodness, is but dimly perceived. For the power of God is in perfect harmony with the purpose of God, and is thus used to advance these purposes for the greater good. Thus, the good deed of creating man with free will — and thereby capable of love — by its very nature restrains the omnipotence of God to violate that free will. The evil of the world exists in large part, if not wholly, because this free will has been abused. Yet the abuse of free will must be permitted, that the proper use of free will — the laying down of arms, the surrender to the sovereignty of a wholly good God — may take place, freely and unfettered as required by love. God must tolerate the existence of suffering and evil, that all may have the freedom to choose the good — though many will refuse to do so. Yet he does not merely tolerate the presence of suffering, but provides for its very redemption: that suffering, though itself evil, may ultimately produce good. Thus pain, suffering, death, and evil need not triumph: they may provide the means that some may turn toward the good, or bring forth further good for themselves or others. This is redemption: to buy back that which is destructive, worthless, of no value, evil, and make it worthwhile, valuable, even priceless.

Christianity, throughout its history, has struggled with and largely resolved the problem of pain, within the confines of the mystery of God. Yet Christianity in its many doctrinal eddies has sometimes chosen the wrong path and the wrong answers to this challenge. Such errors generally fall into two broad categories: the concept of suffering as punishment or retribution from God, and the manipulation of God for man’s gratification. The first of these runs counter to the core doctrine of the cross: that God has chosen to provide in Christ a sacrificial lamb — that Christ, through his suffering, may bear the justice of God, so that we may see the mercy of God. Our suffering is not a punishment for sin, as such punishment negates the purpose of the cross. Correction, it may be; discipline, it often is; opportunity, it always is; punishment, it never is.

The countering position — that of God as divine opiate, ever present to kill our pain — is a variant of the faith which has become perniciously widespread, feeding on a culture of ease and self-gratification which creates God in its own image. Thus God becomes a font of wealth, of health, of prosperity, of a trouble-free materialistic lifestyle, a divine vending machine whose coinage is faith. Faith, however, in such a worldview is no longer a profound trust in a God who is beyond understanding and infinitely wise, but becomes instead a means of buying from God all which we demand. Hence, we may be wealthy, if we only have enough faith; we may be healed, if our faith is sufficient; we will not suffer if we will but strengthen and enlarge our faith. Our faith must be prefect, lest our pleas go unheard. The strength of faith matters more than its verity; we charge the gates of heaven with the bludgeon of self-will.

The perniciousness and destructiveness of this perversion of historical Christian faith lies in removing from the hands of God decisions of life and death, health and illness, wholeness and suffering, while burdening us with the hopeless demand that we steel our faith to impossible heights to coerce and manipulate the will of God. That such efforts are typically fruitless seems self-evident: God most surely is capable of healing — and does indeed do so at times — but most surely does so in accordance with his divine wisdom and will. Should His wisdom dictate that suffering, poverty, brokenness, even death and despair would better serve the purposes of drawing men to Himself, what measure of human obstinacy and recalcitrance will change this will? When such “faith” proves futile, it destroys trust in God, and not infrequently leads to utter loss of belief, a bitter agnosticism born in false expectations and misplaced hope. Hence, we demand of God that which we alone deem to be good, then blame Him when He pursues a greater good beyond our understanding. This is the struggle to which Kathleen is alluding, as she questions the goodness of God in failing to heal her husband, blaming her own “sins” for his untimely demise. To us, such a healing seems only good — in so far as it mitigates our pain and loss, as well as that of those we love — but like the surgeon’s knife, sometimes such pain must not be withheld that evil may be conquered by the good. Were he healed, and restored to full health, would he not then face death on yet another day? Our lives have both purpose and a proper time: we live for that purpose, and we die when that purpose is fulfilled. That those who are left behind cannot grasp that purpose — and appropriately suffer profound pain and loss at this separation — does not negate that purpose nor impede its culmination.

We live in a time when our expectations of health, of prosperity, of a pain-free life are increasingly met in the physical realm, while we progressively become sickly, impoverished, and empty in the realm of the spirit. Despite our longer lives, we live in dread of death; despite our greater health, we obsess about our ills; despite our comfortable lives, we ache from an aimlessness and purposelessness which eats at our souls and deadens our spirits. Though we have at our command the means to kill our pain–to a degree never before seen in the history of the world–yet we have bargained away our peace in pursuit of our pleasure. The problem of pain has never been an easy one; in our day, it has not been solved, but rather worsened, by our delusions of perpetual comfort and expectations of a trouble-free life. Until we come to terms with suffering, we will not have comfort; until we embrace our pain, we will never have peace.

The intersection–a T-bone emptying a side street into an urban arterial, controlled by a stoplight–was one I traveled often, almost daily. It was the insider’s way home–the city street longcut which circumvents the crush of rush-hour traffic, bypassing the freeway which costs time even on the best of days. Stopped at the light, I rubbernecked the scene, half-distracted by the mindless verbal patter of talk radio or some burned .mp3 I had heard too many times before. The mind wanders in such places, darting from thought to image, with no strong focus or overarching life crisis to rivet its attention. So the thought was odd, atypical, crisp in its clarity:

“Sometimes other accidents happen at accident scenes.”

The light turned green–my usual clue to pin the pedal and shorten my day by milliseconds while squandering a few extra ounces of too-costly petrol. But I paused: atypical. Was it the thought? Some other distraction? The fatigue of a day too long, the distracted weariness of a profession which sometimes bleeds your lifeblood like red pools on pavement? Who knows–how do you ever know?

My foot off the brake, not yet on the pedal, my car eased lightly into the now-allowed right-of-way. Retinal rods sensed motion without detail on the right–a car stopping at its just-red signal–or so it seemed at first.

He blew through the intersection–40, 45 my best guess–passing within inches of my front bumper. Never slowed, never braked, never aware that my car even existed. No surge of red from the tail lights, as they quickly faded down the dark arterial, undiminished and unaware.

The obligatory expletives rolled off my tongue, with far less fury than fear–it’s incongruous the bodily functions we sometimes call “holy.” The adrenaline leaves you shaken, and shaking, as the reality of what if sinks in.

“Sometimes other accidents happen at accident scenes.”

What is the nature of such intuition–a random thought presaging some disaster, a warning arising from–where? The depths of subconscious? Some long-forgotten experience, or story overheard? Perhaps a higher function of the brain, poorly developed and unrecognized, or some cosmic power, called “E.S.P.” or “paranormal” or “premonition” by those nearer to being charlatans than sages.

It may of course be any of these things, or several, or none: a random thought on a random corner, on a random night, near a random driver motoring recklessly. My sense, however–my conviction, even–is that it was something rather more–a collision, if you will, of two universes.

Such thoughts seem out of place–quaint even–in a technologically sophisticated culture where all that is known is that which is measured, where wisdom is weighed and parsed and packaged, and knowledge grows vaster about things ever more trivial. This vastness of knowledge has left us smaller people, living in a tightly constricted world, where joy and wonder have become the fodder of fools, displaced by cold cynicism and soulless skepticism. Ours is the triumph of gnosticism, the age of salvation through knowledge, fact trumping truth and science slaying the spirit. For in our great knowledge we have lost sight of that which is far vaster still, a universe unseen yet still experienced by many, a cosmos which impacts our lives moment by moment in ways both tiny and tectonic.

Ever since man looked upward at an incomprehensible sky, he has perceived the need for transcendence, to provide not only knowledge of the wonders beheld, but their meaning–to integrate that which is far larger, far deeper than himself into some sort of meaningful whole. Thus the history of man is the history of religion–a history with endless variations simple or sophisticated, from cave glyphs to gothic cathedrals, all pointing to something beyond man himself, whose very nature demands an explanation his nature alone cannot provide.

The fusion of these two worlds–material and spiritual–has had profound effects on human history in ways both great and small: from the lofty musical masterpieces of Bach and Handel, to the soaring architecture of the great cathedrals, to the preservation of ancient literature and culture by the monasteries, to the very roots of Western civilization, with its elevation of the individual and ideas of freedom and human rights, derived from Judeo-Christian insights on the nature of man and his relationship to God. And beyond these large and tangible mileposts lie countless lives transformed through the touch of spirit on hardened hearts, rippling through ages and cultures in ways almost imperceptible yet profound.

Yet Western civilization, so richly endowed with the gifts and benefits of its infusion of spiritual life and principles, has in an ironic twist taken one of these very gifts–the value of reason and logic and curiosity about the workings of a divinely-ordered creation, which gave rise to science–and used it as a wedge between the material and the spiritual. Western culture has bankrupted the very treasure from which its greatness arose, leaving an increasingly fragile shell of process without principles, institutions without inspiration, governance without grace. Steeped in knowledge yet long in shortcomings, our culture increasingly dismisses the spiritual and transcendent as but mere ignorance or malign superstition, and thus strangles its own lifeblood in its frantic rush to solve problems of the soul with the prescriptions of science and sociology. Our sickness is deep, and pervasive, and ultimately deadly–and made even more dangerous by our peculiar denial that there exists any sickness at all. Such malady takes many forms: from evangelistic secularism, seeking to purge all thought or mention of religion from our collective consciousness; to the intellectual miasma of postmodernism, where the only absolute truth is the denial of absolute truth; to the grand charade, where lust for power or corrupt materialism masquerade in the mantle of religious devotion or a gospel of social justice–which is neither just nor good for society; to the spirituality of the self, which seeks to find God within having denied Him without, and ends up worshiping only ego, in all its hideous manifestations.

There are, it is said, many roads to God–a cozy notion for the intellectually lazy and spiritually slothful, a passing nod to a past glory still spoken of but no longer believed. It is a bromide fast dissolving in a world where religious zealots praise Allah while slaughtering women and children; where men sing of Jesus while drinking poison Kool-Aid; where televised con-men fleece the faithful while preaching love and generosity; where men of the cloth speak of killing the elderly and suctioning the young with soothing words of “mercy” and “freedom” and “choice.” We are tossed like ships in a storm because we have lost both rudder and mast: the principles which have steered us, and the power which gives us purpose and direction, have been swept away in the rolling swells of material prosperity and the saturating rains of empty information and worthless knowledge.

It is time to do the hard work, the painful and unsettling job of foregoing easy assumptions and comfortable conclusions, to shine the harsh light of honesty and self-examination on our sated and sleepy souls. The easy road only leads downward, and we have followed it far too long. If all roads lead to God, then no road gets you there: you will spend an eternity seeking that which you do not wish to find.

I am a Christian; this is the road I have discovered, which has led me to God, which has allowed me to glimpse that universe which I understand little and conform to less. I make no apologies for my convictions, for I have found, by grace, a solid path which, while mysterious and tortuous and unpredictable, has proven real, and trustworthy, and tangible ways which only the intangible can be. As G.K. Chesterton said of his own journey into faith, the case for Christianity is rational–but it is not simple; it is an accumulation of countless facts all pointing in one direction. In the coming months, I hope to share something of my own journey into and through this faith. I do so, of course, in the hope that you too may also discover–or rediscover–its depth, and power, and integrity. But short of even this, may we begin to examine truth, and restore the principles, which alone may shine light on our ever-darkening age.

Still others–while perhaps a bit skeptical–were more curious about my motives and rationale for pursuing prayer. One commenter, Dr. Rangle of the excellent Rangle, MD blog, phrased the following question:

I am curious. Why do you pray before each surgery? The obvious answer would be something along the lines of asking God to guide your hands and for her to give you the skill and wisdom to cure this patient and avoid badness etc. etc. etc. But you yourself admit that complications are inevitable no matter how skilled the surgeon. Why then pray for a skill that you already have and for a no serious complication rate that you know is impossible? … Do you pray for the strength and wisdom to admit your mistake(s) and to offer an apology and to ask for forgiveness? To ask for and to grant forgiveness is the most Christian of attributes. This is what I would pray for … if I prayed.

One of the things I enjoy most about blogging is the way a comment, or a post on another blog, can trigger a whole new area of thought and investigation. And since I’m a bit ADD in some ways, I find it interesting the manner in which this writing process seems almost self-perpetuating: just when I think I’ve had my last novel thought–my last creative or intuitive moment–something comes along to jog the process and prompt reflection on things which would have gone otherwise unheeded and unexamined. And thus it was with many of the comments from that post, exemplified by Dr. Rangel’s thoughts above: what is prayer really about? What is its nature, and why do I consider it important? How can a physician–a rational scientist by training and disposition– amalgamate the cold realm of reason–with its theory-test-evaluate-prove methodology–with the far more ephemeral, nebulous world of the spirit which prayer embodies? Man, I hate it when I think of questions even I can’t answer–which of course has never stopped me from waxing poetic and pontificating proudly on that about which I know little or nothing. So set your B.S. alarms to silent (so as not to wake the neighbors), hike up those hip boots, and let’s wade in.

Perhaps one of the most common questions asked when the topic of prayer is mentioned (after the cynics have finished chortling and the intellectuals politely excuse themselves for more Brie and Chardonnay) is this: Does prayer work?

To which I would respond: What a silly question! (You see why I don’t get invited to many cocktail parties).

Why silly? Not because I have assumed the answer–That of course it works!–but rather that the question itself approaches meaninglessness.

Consider this question in its stead: Does conversation work?

Hmmm–if you give that a moment’s thought, you will realize the answer is: it depends.

But of course it works!, you insist. Conversation is the means which people use to communicate ideas, desires, feelings, frustration, love–the entire spectrum of human thoughts and emotions. Nicely put, I must say. And, yes–ideally this may be true–but that is exactly my point. Ever have a conversation with a narcissist, for whom every twist of conversation returns to them, like a compass needle to a magnet? How about the strong, silent type (the stereotypical male, although teenagers of any gender also fit nicely into this genre), who grunts a response in one-word phrases, condensing hours of deep thought and profound insight into a concise “umm-hmm,” or “yeah”, or “nope”, or “dude!”? How about the pull-string doll: repeating the same lines, catchwords, and stale humor–endlessly–wearying all around them with trite phrases and tired truisms? Ever carry on a deep, soulful conversation with someone you despise, or who does not speak your language, or whom you find threatening? How about someone ruled by shame, avoiding eye contact, fearfully awkward, overly obsequious, self-effacing?

Get the idea?

Conversation is far more than the mere exchange of words–it is the sharing of mind and soul, to a greater or lesser degree. And it is not of necessity verbal: the deaf use sign language; the blind, braille. Lovers exchange a world of passion with their eyes, speak volumes with a caress. Your simple presence with one who is suffering or grieving, or a gentle touch, can communicate profoundly–far more powerfully than mere words, which prove shallow shoals in the treacherous rip tides of such emotional typhoons. The value of conversation hinges on the conversant parties far more than their words–on their individual natures, and especially on the nature of their relationship.

And thus, I believe, it is with prayer.

Prayer is–in the sense in which I understand and experience it–a conversation, with all that implies: two-sided, a melding of mind, soul and spirit, the communicative union of two personal beings, each probing the other’s inner thoughts and deepest feelings. But as conversations go, it is, well–unique, to say the least.

This uniqueness arises from the asymmetrical nature of the relationship in prayer. I am physical, God immaterial; I am bound and constrained by time and space, He by neither. Nor are we equals in any substantive way; it is a conversation between incommensurable beings–indeed, vastly so: differences so utterly vast as to make the whole endeavor implausible, unthinkable, preposterous, fantastic. Yet real, nevertheless–amazingly so.

The lingua franca which makes this quixotic discourse a tangible reality has a vocabulary comprised of but two words: love and trust. The love is God’s: not “love” in the mushy, emotional, exploitive, valueless, uncommitted “I’m OK, You’re OK” manner of contemporary culture, but rather in the passionate desire of Creator to commune with creation–not merely to pass the time in idle chit-chat, but to draw the desired closer to Himself through both attraction and correction, admiration and admonishment. The love of God does not merely desire our companionship and discourse–as love between any sentient and sensate beings must–but seeks the best for the beloved–always. But here the inequality of the relationship causes an enormous problem: God, being perfect in goodness, must draw man away from those things perceived as good and desirable in man’s limited, blinkered, self-centered vision, but which in reality are destructive to the beloved and enemies of the intimacy desired by Him. God, seeing the “big picture”–above time and space, infinite in knowledge and wisdom–must convince man of the desirability of such detachment–which likely will prove painful, confusing, irrational, pointless, and even harmful to the very one He desires to attract. And He must do so while preserving the autonomous free will of man–without which there can be no genuine love rendered in return. No small feat, this–given that the attributes which make man a desirable companion and friend–intellect, talents, passion, emotion, willfulness, independence–can work just as powerfully to drive man away from God as closer to Him.

And so the counterweight to the pursuing love of God is trust: without it there can be no relationship, no discourse, no movement, no restoration. The limited sight of oft-deceived man, cocky and overconfident in his own ability to control the world and all that is in it, must begin to trust that which is larger, that which is wiser, that which is stronger, that which is better than he. Without this trust, the relationship goes nowhere, the communication (if any) is empty and one-sided, and man is left to his own pathetic devices, flailing in a hostile, pointless, and meaningless world. But the trust in a God–well-intentioned, loving, powerful, wise, though His nature be otherwise mysterious and inscrutable–while difficult and fear-provoking, is the doorway to a universe far richer than our imagining, a purpose transcending life itself.

And so, to ask if prayer works is to ask a meaningless question, in a sense. Prayer without trust–formulaic, hoping to please some aloof deity by the right combination of words; self-centered, requesting that which will ultimately undermine or destroy the relationship; contractual, demanding a specific request while promising an empty generality in return; apologetic, yet with no real intent to change or conform to that which is better and higher–is prayer where we use God as our own personal stooge. Such prayers–while perhaps answered at times by a gracious God–do little to augment the relationship and bring the parties–man and God–into closer unity and deeper relationship. They are the idle chatter of spiritual superficiality, cocktail party patter avoiding matters of weight and substance.

But if prayer is indeed a conversation, how then shall we hear what needs to be heard, to perceive God’s thoughts and intent? This is where the limits of our nature–physical, time-and-space-bound, self-willed, and largely obtuse to the realm of spirit–pose significant roadblocks–but not insurmountable ones, fortunately, by grace. For we are possessed of spirit–not merely flesh and blood, intellect and emotion: we have, in some small measure, the very stuff of God, His essence, His means whereby deep speaks to deep, evanescent to corporeal. It is that which makes us human, rather than mere beasts. And thus the promptings and reproofs designed to draw us deeper come not in the spectacular–in healings and miracles, lightning bolts and beatific visions–but rather in the quiet realms of thought, desire, intuition, insight, and that inner sanctum where peace should dwell but fear often rules.

Such ephemeral communication is of course impossible to demonstrate to one whose parameters extend no further than the physical, or at most the metaphysical, for it has implications which extend far beyond these limited realms. To deny the practical existence of a personal, good, communicative God is to reject any accountability beyond ourselves. Intellectual accedence–grudgingly rendered–to a sterile, impersonal God-concept is not honesty, but rather evasion: the hope that such a deity, even if existent, requires no allegiance, no submission, no deference beyond cheap thought and intellectual smoke rings. We live in a world of good and evil; to relegate a deity to remote indifference and moral impartiality is to have no god, no rule, no restraints, no boundaries. To postulate a God of pure goodness, who takes no measure of, and offers no guidance and correction to, His own creation, is to make such a God not righteous but heinous, not omnipotent but rather impotent.

And so, to answer Dr. Rangel’s question, I pray before surgery–and at many other times–for many reasons: for the well-being and good outcomes of my patients, of course; for the sharpness of mind and acuity of spirit to put my skills to proper and best use; for the discernment to recognize that which is beyond my skills and control, and handle it wisely; for patience and the strength of character to avoid carelessness and the poor judgments borne of frustration, hurry, or fatigue; and yes, for the attitude of heart which recognizes my own shortcomings, forgives those of others, and seeks forgiveness and reconciliation when harm has been done. The reward thus obtained is not learned helplessness, but rather liberated hopefulness: the experience of being empowered to do that which is my skill and gift while relinquishing that beyond my power, control, wisdom and abilities. God will not rearrange the universe on my behalf because of my prayer: complications, failures, hard times and hardship are the bitter fruit of life in this world. But I can, through prayer, weave myself into a grander plan, in some small way, of one far wiser and more powerful than I.