Definition of God II

Here is an hypothesis:

God is the principle defining the divine.  To the extent that things, events unfold in accordance with this principle, we may say that God's will is done.  Many things, unconscious things, appear to evolve in accordance with this principle by default - their behavior cannot detract from the divine. Conscious beings, or more precisely self-conscious beings, appear to have some choice as to whether they behave in accordance with this principle, though this is a matter of dispute, and may be an illusion.

At times, the principle seems to entail moments of synchronicity - moments when one "receives" just the thing one needs at that moment.  Individual such purposive moments suggest to those experiencing them that "everything happens for a reason."  On a larger scale, both within the given person's life and beyond, any overall "design" in the world may be difficult to discern; it may be, as Kierkegaard suggests, a matter of interpretation.  The "principle" may be either non-rational or beyond human intellectual means - or non-existent, after all.

In mere logical terms, however, a principle is both abstract and inactive.  And God would seem properly to be the opposite in both cases:  concrete and active.  Concrete not in the sense of a physical substance, but in the sense of full reality.  And God must be understood not as a mere feature of reality, but as a principle of motion, as Aristotle might say.  God must be capable of inspiring and invigorating life.  If God is real, and if realities are powers, then God is a power, the power of and creating goodness.

So, in nine words, God is the principle and power of the divine.

Definition of God

My sponsor has asked me to define God in three words or less.  He wants a one-sentence summary of my views on my higher power.  These are not unreasonable demands.  They are the kind of demands that I make of my students, saying that if you cannot state precisely what you have in mind, then you don’t have a clear idea in mind.

            My sponsor says that I need to have a more definite idea of my higher power, so that I can call upon Him/Her/It when I need to do.  He fears, I think, that my thinking is too nebulous to provide the kind of help and support that we need from a higher power, the help and support necessary to remain sober.  He fears, too, I think, that an over-intellectualized higher power won’t really be a higher power at all, but an elaborate denial mechanism, a way of thinking about and so not embracing my need for help, my need to give my life over to a higher power.  David Foster Wallace characterizes this problem of giving the will over to something else as follows:

The bitch of the thing is you have to want to.  If you don’t want to do as you’re told – I mean as it’s suggested you do – it means that your own personal will is still in control, and Eugenio Martinez over at Ennet House never tires of pointing out that your personal will is the web your Disease sits and spins in, still.  The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who know how many Substance-drenched years ago.  It’s now shot through with the spidered fibrosis of your Disease.  His own experience’s term for the Disease is:  The Spider.  You have to Starve The Spider:  you have to surrender your will.  – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York:  Back Bay Books, 1997), 357.

            I have a number of sources of resistance to giving up my will to a higher power.  First perhaps is my will itself, which of course experiences relinquishing its grasp on me as death.  Also involved here is a fear of seeming stupid to others.  I have a terrible fear that others will think me stupid for believing in some kind of God.  And also there is my own critical doubt that questions the truth of any proposition about God or a higher power that I may consider.  I think that these forces may be related.  The ego is after all our psychological armor where a primary need for this armor is in the thorny world of social standing and opinion.  My ego, however, is protecting not so much me as itself – typical among alcoholics, I understand, is the ego run rampant, egomania.  So one way of the ego’s preserving itself may be a heightened experience of such fears as require its protection.  If I fear seeming stupid to other, and if my intellect helps me to identify the potential logical weaknesses that faith would bring, where my stupidity would then show, then I would be likely to experience considerable resistance, in this form, to placing my faith in a higher power.

            One thing that I am trying to do is to construct an account of the logic of faith and God that won’t, in fact, be vulnerable to intellectual doubt.  I think in fact that there probably is such a logic.  But as Kierkegaard reminds us, and as my sponsor fears, I don’t want to be in the position of placing my faith in the force of my logic.  However good the logic may be, not only may it be vulnerable to the future discovery of error, but it does not by itself command the act of belief (– Hume saw this, too).  I still have to take the vulnerable step of belief – Kierkegaard’s leap of faith.

            It does help me to reflect on the source of the fear of commitment, so that I can see that for what it is, bring it down to size.  That helps me to feel less fearful, if it doesn’t of course relieve me of the need to take the plunge myself.

            Believe first.  Ask questions later.

Cosmic plan, or not.

In a recent Talk of the Town piece in The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten writes of the soon-to-be-completed 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero and the complex algorithm developed to order the names of the dead in the memorial’s bronze panels.  An alphabetical ordering of the victims’ names would do nothing to summon the complex relationships among the dead, which associations the designers hoped somehow to represent in the arrangement of names in the monument’s parapet.  Some computer scientists doubted that it could be done, but a solution was found, ultimately, and I found the conclusion to Paumgarten’s piece worth comment:

A graphic representation of the computational armature, color-coded on a laptop screen, brings to mind Tetris, but the sight of the names themselves, inscribed in bronze, linked together by happenstance and blood, calculus and font size, is a little like the faint silhouette of a cosmic plan, or else the total absence of one.  –  Nick Paumgarten, The Names.  The New Yorker.  May 16, 2011, 40.

What is the difference between chaos and divine order?  Is the world we live in chaotic or is it ordered, and in either case where and how, if at all, does divinity fit in?  It would be repellent here to suggest that part of the divine plan involves the mad destruction of so many lives (though, of course, any notion of a divine plan faces this challenge).  What I like about Paumgarten’s conclusion is its elegant postulation of the delicate difference between chaos and cosmos.  In faith, many believe that we experience glimpses of this faint silhouette, but the silhouette appears to be consistent with its lack.

Joy

A text search of the Bible yields 154 verses containing the word ‘joy’.  Here are two, one from the Old Testament and one from the New, both selected as generally representative:

Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart:  for I am called by thy name, O LORD God of hosts.  (Jeremiah 15:16)

Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name; ask and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.  (John 16:24)

In my prayers and mediations, I have sometimes asked for a life of joy or remarked upon my joy.  In seeking faith, I seem to be seeking joy in my life, either as a consequence of faith or as a part of it – I am not sure what is the exact relationship, here:  joy does seem to accompany faith.  I would say that it is not joy per se that I seek but rather faith and that joy is the happy companion of faith.

            A doubt sometimes nags at me:  why do you seek the joyful life?  What good is it?  Is it a worthy preoccupation of a man?  Are there not better, more serious goals in life?

            This crabbed, Nietzschean voice (perhaps an injustice to Nietzsche, though I think that he has these unlovely moments) is answerable, if not definitively.  First, we may distinguish joy from the emotion, happiness and from generic pleasure; second, we can note that seriousness is not incompatible with joy (compare Camus’s Sisyphus); third, even in the terms of the criticism it is hard to see any failing in joy.

            First, then, joy is not a selfish emotion in the way that happiness or mere pleasure can be.  I do not seek a self-satisfaction in joy but rather I seek to be good and worthy and find joy in doing so.  This question then resolves to the worthiness of the good and worthy.  Some of the things that we call good and worthy are subject to Nietzsche’s criticism as slavish, but we needn’t be distracted by his benighted family life.  The good I seek to do has no part of repressing either myself or others:  it is respectable, dignified.  And there may be good evolutionary reasons why we experience joy in uplifting ourselves and others.  But we commit a genetic fallacy if we conclude thus that joy in itself has no spiritual significance.

            Second:  perhaps joy is antithetical to seriousness, and perhaps the “subterranean seriousness” to which Nietzsche enjoins us is itself desirable for its worthy, dignified results.  Joy is glad; it is blissful.  There is a bubbling, giddiness in the heart of joy.  Can I be all bubbling and giddy while I concentrate on the analysis of a concept, on pressing with all my might against this great stone the size of my life?  The answer is yes, exactly yes.  To fully master the stone of life is also to master the emotional and spiritual terms of existence.  I cannot, it is true, at every moment, stop to enjoy my giddy joy.  But I can notice it out of the corner of my eye as I strain, and the small smile that crosses my face as I turn back to my task will carry with it a renewed, joyful energy to that task.  If joy and seriousness are antithetical, then I want to preserve that antithesis, the kind of oscillation of opposites whose synthesis creates a being in time – if Hegel and Heraclitus have it right.  This places me at the tippi-tip of existence.

            Third, what is there to object to in joy?  Nietzsche himself recommends the joy of the Blond Beast.  Joy is a healthy animal’s revel in its power.  Joy is the wondrous realization of this world’s ample, generous beauty.  The modern world presents its own dialectic:  we have come to know the terms of the empirical world; but we have also come to recognize the limits of these terms and their world.  The resolution of this antithesis takes various forms.  For the atheist, it takes the form of the absurd.  For the theist, it takes the form of the divine.  The effect on the human heart is the same:  joy.

            Religion, as I understand it, is a means of finding joy in existence.  Joy is not itself our sole goal, but joyful life is, where this means the thrill and bliss of rolling our rock to heaven, creating what we can from what we have.

David Foster Wallace on Intellectuals and AA

David Foster Wallace accurately portrays the experience of the intellectual in beginning stages of recovery.  He obviously has some experience with both being an intellectual and going through addiction recovery.  “It’s the newcomers with some education that are the worst…  They identify their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head.”  – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York:  Back Bay Books, 1997), 272.  Those of us who have developed for years as creatures of the intellect have perhaps succeeded in becoming more purely intellectual in our daily being than we realize.  That there may be requirements of us that are Simple But Not Easy may then come as a rude surprise and a significant challenge to the ego, where this ego, our brainy ways, has been our primary social armor.

            Wallace obviously knows something about the intellectual life.  Though he places this point among things learned in an inpatient recovery program, it is something well-known to the intellectual:  “[t]hat concentrating intently on anything is very hard work”  (p. 203); and similarly, “[t]hat it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds” (p. 204).  But, for us intellectuals, because a significant portion of our selves is centered in the intellect, and because this appears to be a key center of the disease of addiction, “… it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people” (p. 203).

            Those of us who have lived to think of ourselves as smarter than most others will in recovery be forced to confront also this fact, “[t]hat no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that” (p. 201).  (This goes double for anyone regularly teaching Socrates’ theory of wisdom.)  Fortunately, and again much to our chagrin, there is a lot of help available to us in an AA program or at a treatment center, provided that we are able first to recognize our need for it.  It is likely, there, that we will learn “[t]hat you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it” (p. 202), and “[t]hat it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person” (p. 204).   We must hope that once we learn “[t]hat it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak” (p. 204), we can then summon that courage to accept our disease-ridden condition and to begin to recover.

            It is important finally to learn that what seem to be trite and superficial clichés – such as learning to live One Day at a Time and to avoid, for us, the especial danger of Paralysis by Analysis – it is important to learn that these are in fact deep and crucial truths.  It is a particularly galling but vital assault on the intellectual ego to find that these mangy idiots by whom we’re surrounded may have learned this and learned it well before we did.  Don Gately is a low-life thief and addict turned live-in counselor and Geoffrey Day is a recently-arrived client, a sociology instructor at a lower-tier college:

You just have to Ask For Help and like Turn It Over, the loss and pain, to Keep Coming, show up, pray, Ask For Help.  Gately rubs his eye.  Simple advice like this does seem like a lot of cliché’s – Day’s right about how it seems.  Yes, and if Geoffrey Day keeps on steering by the way things seem to him then he’s a dead man for sure.  Gately’s already watched dozens come through here and leave early and go back Out There and then go to jail or die.  If Day ever gets lucky and breaks down, finally, and comes to the front office at night to scream that he can’t take it anymore and clutch at Gately’s pantcuff and blubber and beg for help at any cost, Gately’ll get to tell Day the thing is that the clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do.  To try and live by instead of just say.  – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York:  Back Bay Books, 1997), 273.

Happily, once we do accept this fact, we find that it is indeed possible to be reborn into a life of fruitfulness and joy.

Fear of Work

            I have long struggled with a fear of work.  Since a child, beginning I do not remember when, I have worried that work will somehow destroy me.  I fear losing myself if I devote myself to work.  The fear seems to be of losing my personal conscious self:  perhaps it is a fear of the ego, a fear that the ego self-consciousness will be extinguished.

            In fact, there is a disappearance of the self, or a self, in work.  To work is to devote oneself to something else.  In work, one becomes no longer a receiver but a producer.  The object of one’s experience is not the self but some other, where, further, the end of one’s actions is not the preservation of the existing self but the creation of something else, something new.  Complacence comes to mind in relation to the ego-self – a self pleased with itself and unwilling to part with it.  Work involves giving up this pleasure for something psychologically leaner.

            My fear of work has a relatively distinctive child’s voice and affect:  will I be alright?  Will I disappear?  What will become of me?  A fearful child who needs comforting and reassurance.  I don’t know why no one never took this child by the hand and showed it that it was okay to die – that it was okay for its present self to be extinguished and another to emerge in its place.

            Work requires courage and creative scholars and artists may find that their work requires great courage, where this work is very personal, or involves many aspects of the person.  In such cases, the self that faces annihilation is extensive and deep-seated.  To the extent that one’s work investigates the soul, it may require the courage required for facing death.

            Jesus’ death is an important religious symbol.  He faces the fear of death, overcomes it, dies, and is born again.

Dreams of Crabs

In the first few days of my recovery, I dreamed vividly twice of crabs – teeming, busy, furtive, obscure mounds of crabs with their eyes on stalks and claws opening and closing and legs moving, scrabbling over each other.  In one dream I notice the crabs slowly, seeing them at first dimly and then as I look more closely more distinctly.  They are beneath water, climbing over one another on the walls of a large sea-pool.  They are a wonder to behold and I call the attention of others to see them.  I am excited by and joyful of their appearance and existence.  In the second dream, the crabs are piled on the beach in long, writhing mounds and threatened by bull-dozers clearing them for progress.

            The crabs for me symbolize my unconscious or sub-conscious feelings and desires, old, primitive motivations that I share with such creatures.  In part, I think that the dreams signify my sudden new awareness of parts of myself, my mind and experience, that I have previously been largely ignorant of, both willfully and unwittingly.  My alcoholic behavior, itself a part of a broad set of behaviors and experiences, has suddenly been revealed to me, and I am noticing it for what it in part is – the expression of certain basic and old feelings and desires.  My alcoholic tendencies were in many ways expressions of primitive desires and fears – desires for ascendency, fame, power, and sensuous gratification, fear of scorn, humiliation, subservience, exposure.  These powers are primitive and conscious at a low level, like a crab’s consciousness – awake, but largely ignorant of anything beyond its self and own welfare.

Crabs are interesting, powerful, implacable, relentless, but also smelly, sharp-edged, suspicious, and prone to inflicting a painful pinch, much like the desires that they represent in these dreams.  My alcoholic self was also interesting (perhaps), powerful, implacable, relentless, repellant, sharp-edged, suspicious, and prone to inflicting pain.  It is notable too that I feel affection for the crabs in the dreams – not for these effects but for their beautiful expression of an intricate and exotic form of life.  I can say the same about my primitive life-urges without endorsing their unchecked expression.  At present, however, this is largely an abstract, objective affection.  Having given unchecked expression to these urges, I am now mistrustful of them – of my capacity to express them responsibly, where this responsibility is to both others and myself.  At the same time, I fear their being scraped away in the misguided name of progress.  Don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath-water.

A final point about this pair of dreams:  there is a joy in discovery of the subterranean (or submerged).  It is a joy in the dreams to discover these teeming masses of primordial life, just as it is a joy in my life to discover new depths of my mind and self, even as I work to correct or repair them.  Where we find new, complex and fertile ground, we find opportunity for development and growth.  We experience joy in such discovery, excitement at the prospect of new strength and new joy facilitated by a newly acquired form of being.  This idea recalls Nietzsche’s Will to Power doctrine:  life-forms develop by growth, expansion, acquisition, appropriation.  The object being acquired and appropriated, in this case, would appear to be these powerful, primitive urges.  They are to be assimilated into a more mannered form of conscious, deliberate being.