Plato's Playground
Ah my dear Cervantes, you can ask us and get as many answers as people you've asked. Surely you know this.
Some 20 years ago I might have been asking those questions, and perhaps in a scathing way. To make any headway with the conundrum, I needed to do what I felt was the impossible-- to go ( by the way of unknowing) directly to God with these questions. My first prayer as an adult was absurdly tentative "God, I don't believe in you, but here I am making this ridiculous prayer to you. If there's any reason I should do so, I'll need to be shown the way."
The prayer was completely sincere, and perhaps grace came through the sincerity of my faithlessness. I dunno. All I know is I laid down my defenses for a moment, and in that moment, gently as the dawn, I felt God's love warming me. It takes being vulnerable. Open. Exposed. Just as you are with these questions you ask.
In fact, I'd even be willing to dare you to ask those questions to God...You may be surprised to find that there actually are answers which come back to you.
Well Speechless, as I suggest in the post, if that happens, I'll have no way of knowing that I've dialed the right number. At this very moment, Jerry Falwell, Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush and David Berkowitz are all hearing the straight dope from the cosmic overlord. How do you know they aren't right?
Cervantes,
Jesus said in Luke 6:27-28, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you."
If I had an experience that suggested that I do otherwise, then, for me, that experience would not be from God.
I know what you mean Cervantes, and you're right by the usual sense of things. It's not distinguishable for me, by the usual means. Quakers talk about being Convicted in the Spirit. Conviction or Convincement is a similar term. It's a way of knowing that is distinct and knowable not through one's five ordinary senses so much as some inner experience often described as a sense of unity, of oneness with present past and future, of a sense of one's smallness but connection to a far larger reality.
I had the same question pretty much when a friend convinced me to try praying for insight. I snorted that I'd have no way of recognizing the answer when it came, but as I've found is consistently God's way, the answer came from the direction I wasn't looking in. That unexpected quality, like being tapped on one shoulder and looking and discovering that (in this example) the person tapping you was standing on the other side and had reached around to take you by surprise. Lau
Laughter, a sort of tickling feeling, of delight. That's one of the ways I know God is near.
Yes, there's truly ways of connecting to God through beauty and nature that are really important and ongoing. But when it comes to the big "I need some help in knowing You're with me" that's the time when the surprise answer, the surprise certainty of presence seems to come.
It's a worthwhile experiement if you don't mind feeling like a fool.
good questions.
speechless---i have had a feeling of warmth and connectedness while vulnerable and open that corresponds with much of your description. i have a post up at dharma bums about mystical experience. but i have never sensed a personal god and i have never sensed any direction as to which sublime tradition was involved. there are i think some contradictions in the various scriptures. it does seem to me that most folks go with what they are culturally conditioned, or comfortable, with.
jane---while you (and i) are comfortable with jesus as a moral guide, others use the words of the prophet mohammed. i am not well-informed on the koran, but it seems to me that moral guidance is at least a bit different. infidels may not fare so well. and of course there are scriptures outside the abrahamic tradition.
Pirate, if my God is not a God of love, then he's not for me. Maybe, in some sense, we create our own image of God, but at least walking with my God I'm led to doing good and not causing harm. Maybe I'm deluded, but I'm not hurting anyone in my delusions. I only speak out of my own tradition, so I'm sure moral guidance is different coming out of other traditions.
I know one fellow who has sat waiting for the answer to those questions for years. At the same time, he continues to wrik for justice and peace as he believes that is what he should do. Still, he's sad that he hasn't felt any sense of God's presence all that time.
Some who we name Saints were blessed with some sense of God's presence and then had that sense removed and spent years and years just waiting. Probably lots of others gave up. --I do wonder sometimes if God's attention has turned elsewhere...
I think Cervantes' problem - to the extent that it is a problem - is that he has a hopelessly cartoonish picture of religion. In this country, one comes by it very honestly, of course. But most of the religious people I know - few of whom view God as intervening in the world, or being "in" it, or talking to people, or being a describable personality of any sort - would see these questions as simply ignorant. I certainly see them that way.
Now here you go again calling me ignorant. That is not nice. I don't call you names.
If God does not intervene in the world, is not "in" it, does not talk to people, and is not a describable personality of any sort, then by any definition of existence that I can imagine:
God does not exist. You said it, not me.
Between us there is but a narrow wall,
and by sheer chance; for it would take
merely a call from your lips or from mine
to break it down,
and that without a sound.
The wall is built of your images.
They stand before you hiding you like names,
and when the light within me blazes high
that in my inmost soul I know you by,
the radiance is squandered on their frames.
And then my senses, which too soon grow lame,
exiled from you, must go their homeless ways.--Rainer Maria Rilke
Excertped from a longer excerpt over at RMJ's Adventus blog. Rilke's words speak so well to the condition of heart which might produce all the questions you ask here Cervantes.
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