There is a new group of three elements that I would like to discuss instead of the usual theological emphasis—in Christianity or Hinduism, for example—on, say, Trinity or trimurti (sacred frameworks for showing the order of things). Most of us who are seeking more enduring meaning are also usually just trying to get through the day. There are all kinds of richly traditional and also pop spiritual recipes for linking the two together. I am concerned, however, with avoiding those extremes.
First it is important to clear the room of hate-mongers. If you are one of the exclusivist (or, we could say, “focused”) Christians whose practice proceeds from love, I have no problem with Jesus defining your breath, light and perception. But there are too many other claimants to Christian life and “love” whom Jesus would not recognize, during his lifetime or any other. Love is capable of being humble about what it doesn’t know. But if one is so sure that others are going to hell because they have not embraced one’s Jesus, then surely that person exists himself right now in a particular kind of hell. And there are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, even neopagan versions of that kind of religious wickedness.
So if we clear the air of the “holy haters”—yet do not give up our powers of analysis and discernment—we can discover something about the sacred. First, it was already here before we stepped into the room.
It was here since before time as we normally reckon time. But sometimes its presence is not recognized or further cultivated, nurtured and spread. Now, I should say first, before we address that cultivaton, a few words about fertilizing one’s life for miracles. Atheists and agnostics who do decry the absence of miracles cannot disprove the sprouting of miracles for those who have experienced them. But the absence of a formula for inviting miracles seems to stack the score in favor of the nonbelievers. Yet at another extreme, surely the Puritans did not have it right in the simplistic terms that worldly success was a sign of an appointment with heaven, and worldly tragedy a calling card or token of a hell to come.
Instead of trying to work on formulas or fixed outcomes for the supernatural, we could talk about form. Here is my view in a nutshell: it is mostly folly to play cosmic accountant, and presume we know the ledger or tally sheet for any individual. We don’t and cannot know their spiritual credit score. But we can confidently observe that regardless of any human’s current status—destitute, wealthy, homeless, possessing several home—whatever—that the current moment is largely the result of an incalculable number of prior moments and actions. It is therefore neither savvy nor reasonably modest to take anything for granted, or to change our posture or form radically in response to good for bad fortune. When some incredible stroke of good fortune drops on us—ranging from something as simple as an unanticipated smooth day at the office or an unexpected hug or kiss on the one hand to events of greater magnitude: an unexpected advancement in career; a swift and inexplicable recovery from illness; a “chance” encounter with someone who changes our world forever— we can be confident that our own or someone else’s labor had some direct or indirect work in that process. Even events that some religious would call solely the intervention of God or the Divine often entail the hard work and sweat of human beings somewhere down the line.
I am not going to get into whether these people are “divine agents,” or “angels” or whatever. Sweat is sweat. A feeling of the miraculous does not mean that we don’t wipe the sweat or tears out of our eyes, or that someone else did not do so ten years ago in an act of labor that fed into our current state.
This is the missing link, I feel in my bones, within the age-old Catholic-Protestant war as to whether grace has anything to do with works. Protestants deny this, and Catholics embrace a bipedal project of faith and works. But the reality surely must be be more subtle than either/or—some works or no works. The reality is that even if there is not a direct link between effort and grace, effort feeds into a pool or fuel supply of resources. Those resources can simply be shuffled or redirected by a force much greater. It is not that human energies are inevitably wasted, though many would seem to be. My grandfather, who did not believe in spirituality, meditation or even herbal medicine, nonetheless valued Thanksgiving as a holiday worth celebrating, and rebooted his wish to help the world and his loved ones on that day each year. As a prominent physician in Connecticut for many years, he also influenced medical policy as an officer in the AMA. All of that work trickled immediately or eventually into many lives. It certainly meant that little miracles of the stomach and G-I tract happened for patients under the care of other doctors because of the practice and research of one atheist stomach doctor.
When the very religious speak of miracles, I think they often assume that their God pulls that state out of thin air, like a rabbit out of a hat. But this would imply or even shout a presumption that God has no relationship to the power and energy of this world whatsoever. These fundamentalists want to have their cake and eat it, too, though, because although they maintain that God can suddenly intervene— via a charged interruption of mundane events and/or a prophecy of charged interruptions to come—they otherwise declare that God has nothing to do with the qualities or energies of this world. This implies a spiritual science or economy that has never made any sense to me. For even in the realm of mundane science, conventional physicists and quantum physicists alike tend to concede that there has to be some relationship between quantum mechanics and the laws of our universe. Back in our present conversation, there would similarly have to be some link between he supernatural spontaneity of apparent miracles and the ocean of a pool of human acts (called karmas in Sanskrit), works and labors.
That connection or link is love. Love is what joins the specifics, the minutiae, the details, the calories burnt, the particulars of the day or history—with something abstract and greater. Love has no owner and no single dominion, and does not bow to any known town ordinance or statute or constitution. It has become a cliché for the heartbroken and headstrong, but calling a bluff on its elusiveness or inscrutability does not either impugn love or put it out of business. The vitality or manifestation of love in a given place can indeed be corrupted by confusing it with works, with any kind of balance sheet or quid pro quo. But by purifying, resuscitating and reconstituting the love in our hearts, the larger love can again be courted.
A gifted ballet dancer is called “graceful,” and this designation is not arbitrary. The refinement of her form has invited grace into her world. Her labor has been fed by and in turn fed a growing love. If a shocking injury should somehow prevent her from ever dancing again, she faces choices as to how to reinvite new occurrences of love and grace into her life. Grace may re-emerge in her students. It may continue through a photography business she starts after months of sadness, investing in a forgotten love, an abandoned nascent grace.
This trio or triad or mundanely accessible “trinity” may or not have anything to do with the religious Trinity of Christians or trimurti of Hindus. But I touch on it here because I feel the need in my own heart to be spontaneous, whether or not any supernatural spontaneity will spark. I seek a form of beauty beyond tricks or formulas. Magic is not a dirty word for those who labor and love and are mindfully spontaneous. If this strikes a chord with you, let’s move forward along this track.
friend