Valentine’s Day, God, Love, and Superstition
Given that this is the month of Valentine’s Day, we on the Worship Team decided to make love our theme this month. So love is what I’ll talk about in this column and at our upcoming worship service, but as I was trying to decide what I might say in this column about this vast topic, I happened to read the beginning of The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan. The book is a collection of lectures about searching for God and Truth through the scientific method. He liked the quote by William James about superstition, which was that superstition was believing in something without evidence.
Recently, along with three other community ministers who are affiliated with Eastrose Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, I spoke to that congregation about my ministry as a chaplain on a two-week detoxification and stabilization unit at Providence Hospital. In my talk, I described something of my path to God, which, by Sagan’s standards, is probably superstitious. Over the years, I said, I moved from feeling a discomfort with words such as “God” and “Jesus,” to finding a comfort with them, to coming to believe in something greater than myself, until finally, I have come to accept, as it were, the notion that I have a personal relationship with this mysterious entity and energy I now call God.
Some of this was through mystical experiences that were more subtle than earth-shattering. The rest of this change occurred through the slow accretion of wonder and wisdom that came from reading, from listening to others, or simply from watching the sky. Regardless, my current understanding of the sacred has come from intimate, unrepeatable, and personal experiences that impressed me with a sense of veracity, even though I cannot prove I didn’t make them up.
Holding Beliefs Lightly
Since this exploration of God was not the point of my talk, I said no more about it, except to honor the journey atheists and agnostics take as they search for a higher power or energy that can help them maintain sobriety. Yet as I prepared to write this column, I happened to have started Sagan’s book. I was reminded of my personal experiences with an energy and a beingness I now call God. I can claim no science underlying my beliefs, although I love scientific exploration, eagerly read insights of quantum physicists, cosmologists, biologists, and more. Certainly this informs my understanding of mystery, evolutionary mysticism, and other elements of my religious experience. Yet I cannot discount the individual and awe-inspiring moments of my life that led me to this place.
In my mind and heart, I know that what I believe about the Universe and God may be wrong. I have no evidence, beyond my imagination, which is not the kind of evidence I suspect Sagan approves of. Yet the connection I feel from these experiences brings me peace. I suspect that beliefs which bring us hope, peace, wholeness, and that encourage us to love cannot be bad. Or perhaps even wrong.
Love and the Holy
And it is the “love” part, that informs the depth of my personal experience with the holy. When I work with patients, I often feel an overwhelming love, I see the person with such purity and clarity that the beauty of the soul before me almost breaks my heart. I do not believe that is my love, at least not my love alone, nor am I seeing the person solely with my own sight. When I work as a chaplain, I believe I see with eyes and with a heart far larger than my own.
Once a patient asked me how I do it, how I listen to and sit with so much pain and yearning. Doesn’t it exhaust me? she wanted to know.
Actually, meeting with patients almost never wears me out. Often, I feel energized. Indeed, I believe that I don’t do my work alone. I find it hard to believe the amazing insights that sometimes arise in my mind, the words that come unbidden from my mouth, and especially the love that flows through me is all mine.
Perhaps they are of me, but only in as much as I, along with everyone else, has a part of God within my soul. For me, that means we are all connected: all humans, all plants, all water, clouds, dogs, horses, fleas, all the stardust. Some few times in my life, perhaps as part of a meditation on the oneness of all, and perhaps because of a random confluence of time and mass, I have felt that sense that all those people wandering around this planet are not only the same essence as I, but actually are me. Incredible.
And in those moments, there is nothing except love.
The Behavior of Love
But those are not the only experiences that lead me to believe in a love so great all can be healed; in a love so vast, no soul can escape its power; in a love so inviting, we will all in the end find our way home. At some of the emptiest, loneliest, most frightening moments in my life, I felt a warmth descend on me, experienced a lifting of my burden. On those moments, a comfort surrounded me, helping me continue on. This, too, I understand to be love. The love of some force that notices, that cares, that holds.
I do not always feel that force. I do not always sense God beside me, in me, or around me. On those days, and in those moments, I am left with faith.
David Maynard, the minister emeritus of Eastrose fellowship, wrote a column a while ago in which he said, “When compassion becomes behavior, we describe it as love.”
I believe that in every moment of time, somewhere (if not everywhere) on the Earth, in the Universe, God’s compassion becomes love through our actions, through our reaching out, listening, holding, crying with, accepting gifts, and doing for and with one another. May you walk with love, and may God grace you with the knowledge of God’s presence.
With love,
Barbara
