Divine Soundbites or What?

     My wife noticed long ago that I get defensive in situations where “everybody else” knows the rules and I don’t. I have painful memories of being forced to play softball in school. Other boys’ fathers taught them how to swing and throw, but I struck out like clockwork and threw like a girl. As a naive, sheltered introvert, maybe with a whisper of Asperger’s (a syndrome one of my sons developed full-blown), I’ve often run into similar situations. This may explain my foredoomed continuing education program, a futile crusade to learn the Rules of Everything. 

    To rephrase Scarlet O’Hara, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be naive again.”

     In the midst of writing the essay on shape-note hymns about Heaven, I read an essay by Bishop Steven Charleston as part of Education for Ministry, a light-weight equivalent of Episcopalian seminary, and hit another snag of not knowing the rules. I’d be slow to contradict a man with Charleston’s credentials. A Choctaw elder, professor, retired bishop, and interfaith advocate whose daily Facebook meditations have a wide following, his is a voice to be listened to. But in his 2014 lecture “OMG" something struck a nerve: 

     “Finally, spirituality is a message that many of us receive from somewhere else, from Someone else, from a source and power beyond our own intellect or comprehension. We believe we have experienced these messages; we believe that we have heard the voice of God, perhaps only in snippets, in sound bites, in digital flashes of intuition in our brains, but we are convinced it is there and it is real” [italics mine].

      The italicized words told me I was out of synch with “everybody else” again. I have no difficulty with the words not italicized. As a poet, I'm familiar with inspiration out of nowhere. Like Charleston, I describe such inspiration as “flashes of intuition.” I have experienced Beyond. I believe with Pascal that the heart has its reasons. This is all a little woozy, but I can handle it. As a poet and introvert, I follow Charleston all the way until he takes a theological jag. Yes, the springs of inspiration are inexplicable, numinous, and personally authoritative, but are they dictated by the creator of the universe? This seems an unlikely hypotheses. Unable label my intuitions in the terms of orthodox theology, I accept inspiration and let the G-word go.

     I don’t criticize the lucky ones free of this hangup. I seem to be in the minority among religious people (if I am one). Still, casually citing the Source of Ultimate Being for odd happenstances sticks in my craw. Maybe I need a spiritual advisor. If the G-word means what classical theology seems to say it does, at least thirteen billion years ago an inconceivably great power, existing outside of time, created universe of galaxies, gas clouds, and black holes including a billion trillion planets of which the earth is one, itself almost five billion years old. Maybe this Absolute Being is still creating, incomprehensibly active outside of time. Against this vast scale, I am allotted less than a century as a tiny speck in a town invisible even from the moon, inconceivably less significant than a virus on any scale but the human one. 

     I treasure the sense of something transcendent, but it doesn’t take great shakes to transcend me. Certainly not eternal Being. Nothing divine or supernatural (much less infinite and eternal) is required. Any insight suffices outside of my ego, which is big but not that big. If I didn’t think too much, maybe I could conflate the absence of visible edges with infinity, a sense of vast power with omnipotence, mysterious knowing with omniscience, but I can’t force myself to conceive that a vast Sentience would create a billion trillion planets and then lean down, assume a facsimile of a human mouth, teeth, and tongue, and whisper sound bites of life-wisdom into my hairy ears.

     Maybe I’m not alone with this problem. It’s not something many people talk about. Simply bowling them over seems to be enough. The most obvious solution to my problem is give up on trying to judge transcendent impulses if they fulfill me, to quit looking a gift god in the mouth—which would involve ignoring the science, problems of scale, and my viral sense of insignificance--and just harken to knocking and let Whomever in, no questions asked. I stand accused—given that religious language that is metaphorical at best—of breaking good metaphors by overextension. Suppose I just sit comfortably in my own virus-sized skin and yield it all up to a big loving X, which I might as well call God (or, better yet, give it a beard and call it Jesus) rather than imagining the vast, engulfing universe. Others, I think (including Charleston) play fast and loose with the G-word meaning merely intuition, however fleeting and subjective—the still, small voice of Elijah or something like the Greek muses.

     Of course, pride cuts two ways. I seem to be pretty good at feeling inferior, but little ego never dies (until it does), and a prideful backside of inferiority is an exaggerated doubt that others (including God) could care about me. As an early teen, I had a painful inferiority complex and sense of social isolation. My healing began as a fight, not for equality—which is an unstable state—but for superiority, particularly as a writer and junior intellectual in a small college-town. There's no telling what I’d have become without this community and this overcompensation, if I had been raised like my cousins alongside cotton fields. Anyway, knowing more, writing better, and analyzing more deeply was my ticket out of Worthless-Sack-of-Shit-Land. 

     But a residue of inferiority persisted in a belief that nobody really cared about me, only about what I had done to stake out value. It wasn’t until my 40s, ridiculously old for this, that a midlife crisis drove me into the realization—and this was the term planted on it like a flag—that even little Dr. moi had the power to bless. Even when I wasn’t holding a grade book at or home with close friends or family (exceptions), people gave a rat’s ass how I felt. The scoop was that I could say to near-strangers, “You look nice,” “Great to see you again,” or even a simple “Good morning,” and it would brighten their day. I knew that their good wishes brightened mine, but inferiority blinded me to reciprocity. I still have to keep teaching myself this lesson, even in old age. "Speak up, Bill. Express love and admiration. People actually care. You're not chopped liver." But it's really hard to extend this this faith in blessed interconnection out into the cosmos.

      My wife of fifty years, whose religion entails very little wrestling, has a phrase she uses with the the unchurched: “I listen to what the universe is telling me.” By this she means, not just intuited sound bites, but coincidences and chance meetings, synchronicities that imply meanings. “How is that different from the Holy Spirit?” somebody asked her, and she made no distinction. Both terms situate the G-source of Charleston’s message in a more relaxed context. Even though “the universe” is a vast concept, it’s easily understood that my engagement with it is in my own neighborhood. Read this way, the message is local, not a universal edict. It's much easier to imagine chiming my own little tuning fork to local vibrations than to imagine a timeless but anthropomorphic Alpha and Omega broadcasting sound bites to me from Big Bang Studios.

     The Holy Spirit may be Christian theology’s way of finding this intimacy within the paradoxical doctrine of the Trinity. As late as the 4th century, some theologians saw the Holy Spirit as only an angel, a messenger between Christians and the Father-Son in Heaven, something like the Hindu Agni. Even in trinitarian orthodoxy, the Spirit sits at the bottom corner of triangular diagrams. Her tip of an arrow points down, away from the family group on high. Implicitly a lesser among equals, the Spirit is analogically a bird or a flame--something impersonal--and yet she is the source of speaking in tongues. The Spirit is a paradox within a paradox and the source for inner voices from the beyond. I’m not sure that settles anything.

     But what do I know? Charleston’s online references to the Great Spirit, the native American creator god, leave the identity of the source hanging. Professor Virus will try to leave it hanging.