Seeking Truth
Most of us have experienced a desire for understanding; some of us even seek ultimate understanding (even if we’re not sure what that is). And, if we’re honest enough, we will admit that we haven’t made much progress in our life-long searches.
The myth of Semele warned us of the danger we risk in being too curious about the true nature of the gods (“gods,” for our purposes, represent in symbolic form the ultimate truths we crave).
Maybe we shouldn’t try so hard…
Rubens painted this, sometime before 1640.
The little story, below, was published in Prophet Amidst Losses:
Paradise Lost, then Found, then…
Multicolored sunlight streaming through the church’s stained-glass windows give the crucified figure of Christ a mystic glow.
Ralph squirms in his pew. He knows he is supposed to feel moved by the piteous figure that hangs—transfixed, for all eternity—in the passion of the cross. Instead, the farm boy can’t stop thinking that it looks just like a scarecrow. He wonders, briefly, who, or what, it was supposed to scare off.
He is thirteen, and has finally become old enough to join the church. It makes him feel like a grown-up—or, at least, like more of a grown-up. He sits, by himself, a few pews ahead of his proud parents, soaking in the experience.
Emerging from his thoughts, he hears the minister say something about communion. He knows what communion is. He’s been through all that in Sunday School. He’s now old enough to be allowed to take part in it. He knows all about the bread and wine, and what they symbolize. He also knows that, as Methodists, the “wine” will be Welch’s Grape Juice, and the body of Christ will probably be Wonder Bread. He smiles, reflecting on the appropriateness of the bread selection. A second later, he imagines that the ritual could be improved by slathering the host with Miracle Whip.
An involuntary snort of laughter brings a stern look from Reverend Russell. It causes Ralph to remember something from his preparatory classes. Contrition. There had been something about one’s mental state during the rite of Communion, something about accepting Christ into one’s heart and about forgiveness. There was also something about that forgiveness being conditional upon sinning no more.
That was troubling.
While he hasn’t really accomplished much in the sinning department—the opportunities available to a thirteen-year-old boy in rural Kansas being limited—he isn’t sure that he wants to forgo temptations that might be offered in the future. In fact, he is almost certain that he won’t be passing them up. This makes communion something of an iffy proposition for him.
He watches the usher working his way along the pews, silently inviting each row to go up to the front of the church for a sacred snack of bread and some wine-like fluid. When the usher stops at Ralph’s row, the boy doesn’t move. The usher leans into the pews, trying to get his attention, but without success. Eventually, the boy turns to him and shakes his head.
The gesture confuses the usher, but he soon recovers and moves on to invite the next pew’s worshippers to feast upon The Lord’s flesh and blood. When Ralph’s parents walk to the front of the church, they look his way.
He looks straight ahead.
On their way back to their pew, there was no way he can avoid seeing the looks on their faces. He notes a little anger, perhaps, but much more embarrassment. This was bad. He hadn’t considered how his actions might affect them.
He would try to explain that he wasn’t intending to commit blasphemy. Quite the contrary. He couldn’t take communion because he knew he was not sufficiently penitent. He couldn’t participate because he respected the ritual too much to tarnish it with his adolescent unworthiness. He suspects that they won’t take it well. Certainly, the notion that he might be too religious to take part in their church experience was not likely to fly, either.
He is right about that.
Perhaps the scarecrow was meant to keep people like him away. After this public humiliation, it certainly keeps his family away. His folks no longer make him go to church. In fact, they also stop going. He suspects that they are just too embarrassed to go back, but it was also possible that they had only gone to church, themselves, because they thought that he should go. Once that was off the table, they no longer had a reason to go.
Over the next few months, he spends a lot of time reading about religion and spirituality. He reads Aquinas. He reads The Upanishads. He reads Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. He reads metaphysicians like Henri Bergson. He reads The Koran. He reads sappy books like The Prophet. He reads inscrutable books like Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity. He reads Lao Tzu and Confucius.
He even reads The Bible.
He studies religious art and music from around the world. It is all interesting to him, but none of it really answers his questions. Perhaps he has trouble finding answers because he hasn’t quite figured out what his questions are.
He discovers Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian.
In this, he finally finds something he can believe in. He can have faith in logic and science. It occurs to him that he could, if someone ever asked him about his religion, answer proudly, “Logical Positivist!” Or perhaps, “Utilitarian!” Or even, “Unchristian Scientist!”
He has found the answers to life’s unknowns—or, he trusts, has at least found a method for finding if such answers even exist. There will always be an answer to his questions. If not now, then eventually—at some future date. Logical inquiries can be trusted to lead to solid conclusions, once all the relevant data have been collected and rigorous analysis carried out, followed by appropriate testing of hypotheses.
Life is good. Life is serene. Doubt is banished forever. He lives by the maxim “ontology recapitulates phylogeny,” from which he can extrapolate all manner of understanding. Everything, he believes, evolves, retaining a hidden history of its development in its current form. He could, for example, develop a theory of knowledge by comparing the evolution of ideas with the precepts of Darwinian selection.
And yet, as he grows older, a barely noticeable something begins to irk him.
For all his studies of religious thought and practices, he has never quite grasped why they existed. Oh, certainly there is that whole mortality issue. He suspects that it is only a weakness of mind, or will, that makes people dependent on the sort of nonsense that promises the possibility of life after death. The form any particular dogma suggested was trivial, irrelevant. He was above all that twaddle and couldn’t be bothered with any of it.
And yet, something didn’t quite fit.
He decides to apply an evolutionary model to the problem. The reason all species evolve, purely by chance selection, is that they adapt to existing conditions, effectively capitalizing on some aspect of some particular environmental niche. All he has to do is reverse engineer the impulse to form a religion. “So,” he asks himself, “what aspect of the environment in which early humans evolved might have inspired the creation of irrational belief systems?” What was different, back then, from the world in which Ralph found himself?
“Science, or rather, the lack of a scientific outlook,” is his first thought. It is followed by a flood of others. “Primitive minds had no way to explain the phenomena that encompassed all aspects of their lives. What must it have been like, not knowing how anything worked? People spent their entire lives surrounded by mystery. Everywhere they looked, the unknown—and unknowable—presented itself. Naturally, they tried to fill the voids in their knowledge with myths and legends in an effort to explain the inexplicable.”
He further develops his line of thought. “So, from humankind’s earliest days, we lived with the unknown. We evolved in the presence of mystery. Maybe that explained everything: interacting with the unknown is woven into our DNA. Our scientific, rational approach to the world is far too recent to have altered our DNA. So—at some fundamental level—we might still require the unknowable in our environment.”
In a Zen-like flash of enlightenment, Ralph understands what is missing in his life. The troubling void he feels is, in fact, the void. In having, or expecting to have, the answers to everything, he has eliminated “nothing” from his life. And that nothing is driving him nuts.
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