“Agnostic” we understand as “not knowing”–usually referring to beliefs about God. “Spiritual” is more problematic. If I say I am a “spiritual agnostic” some people think I am claiming to be holier than thou, as if calling oneself a humanist meant one was a better human being than thou. These self descriptions are more about aspirations and outlook than achievements.

What would a “spiritual agnostic” believe about the universe, suffering, or the meaning of life? I am casting caution aside to offer my own case as an example. It says nothing about what others believe.

I belong to a small group at the Oakland Unitarian church that meets twice a month. We talk about our lives, spiritual practices and anything else. I wrote last fall about one of our group who works in a government welfare office, and who learned how to bring her spirituality into the work: it is one of my favorite posts on Tikkun Daily. We have started a practice every quarter of taking the whole evening to hear about and discuss what one of our group believes, our “credo.” It was my turn a week ago, and I had to write out my thoughts so I wouldn’t ramble. Two or three of the group thought I should post my credo here. I am diffident about doing so. What we really believe and live by is so personal. But since one of my conclusions is to be bold, here goes.

Credo. What I believe. 4/15/10. UU Oakland Covenant Group.

This splits easily into two for me: what I’d like to believe and what I really do believe.

I would like to believe that the universe and our human lives in it have some meaning beyond being mere accidents.

What’s wrong with accidents, if they produce something as complex and beautiful as this world? Nothing, if it was all just beautiful complexity. But it is horrible, terrible, unbearable suffering as well. If suffering is pointless it adds to its horror, and raises the question, why go on living, why struggle, above all why bring children into this world? I have never thought I could protect a child of mine from the horror of this world. My beliefs matter to me because without them I would likely be dead and my child not born.

What do I know of suffering, born a white privileged straight male in the heart of the largest empire the world ever knew? My schoolbook maps still had a quarter of the world colored pink, for British. My private school was paid for with money my grandfather made as a contractor in service of the empire: he put the great stone front on Buckingham Palace, consulted for the Queen at Windsor Castle, and in the run up to the First World War got a contract to renovate all the British Navy’s dockyards from Scotland to Hong Kong. Fortunately my other grandfather, a minister and author, was a Christian socialist and pacifist.

Of suffering I knew very little, myself. It was all in the imagination. As a child I would wake screaming in the night from one of two or three nightmares that recurred time and again. In one, the world was blown up: presumably I had heard about the atomic bomb. In another, huge steel I-beams multiplied and grew like bacteria in a Petri dish until they filled the whole planet with their screaming, tearing power. Somehow this connected to the fact that there was a bomb site across the street in front of our home, while behind it, visible from my bedroom, a vast building, the Ministry of Education, was being erected with steel I-beams out of a deep pit, that may also have been a bomb site. War and construction.

I was born four years after the Second World War. Everyone talked about the war. When did I learn about the Holocaust? I don’t know. I heard of dead soldiers first, relatives of friends, and stories of heroic and grubby struggle, not enough to eat. I had a ration card for my sweets (candies). I heard a Frenchwoman tell how the Germans tortured her son to get her to speak, and I already knew of Ann Frank when my friend’s mother told of her many relatives dead in the gas ovens. I assumed very early on that I would have to fight and that I would be captured and tortured, and that I had to get myself ready, soon: because soldiers are young. My grandmother died of cancer in our home when I was quite small, and my mother took in a good friend to also die of cancer in our home when I was a teen. Death, war, torture, inhumanity, and all on a globally destructive scale, were part of my assumptions about the world from very early.

But it was in a sense all right because God took these good victims to heaven – I never heard the slightest hint that my friend’s Jewish relatives had not gone to heaven, and we had many people of other religions in our movement and coming through our home who were fully part of God’s work. There was none of the “only Christians go to heaven” nonsense.

It was all right in a much more active sense, though, because we (my parents’ Christian and interfaith movement), more or less alone so far as I knew when I was a child, were the ones who were saving the world. I had been born in Switzerland and lived there my first three years because my parents were helping create a conference center to end war in Europe. They brought many leaders of postwar Germany and France together and helped them to forgive each other enough to create the political atmosphere for the Schumann Plan–by which the two countries’ economies were so entwined that they could never go to war with each other again–to succeed, and out of this came today’s European Community. At least, that is how I understood the story then. There were other, newer wars our community had intervened in and prevented, and industrial disputes solved, often because some woman’s life was transformed and she resolved marital or family conflict and so her husband was deeply affected and brought the new spirit to the negotiating table. I heard these stories all the time from my parents, and others in our large communal home, which was part of the movement’s worldwide headquarters. I knew that we, all those in my parents’ movement, were the people who were changed by God and directed by God to remake the world, end war, class war, and war in the home.

That was the meaning I was raised with, that God loves us but he is a kind of general directing troops, and we must be obedient and give everything. I resisted giving everything until I was seventeen, and then I went into it full bore. But after five years of going “all out” with our movement (the Oxford Group, MRA, now Initiatives of Change) in India, England, France, Switzerland and Ethiopia I became convinced that if the world depended on us then it was doomed. Our movement was not growing, we were contracting. Population explosion, world poverty, nuclear winter: our work was like a bucket against a forest fire. And our bucket had holes: college, the late 60s zeitgeist, and Ethiopia taught me that our theology didn’t stand up, God was not speaking audibly to us after all (or at least was not contradicting our class-based assumptions), our puritanical ideas of sex were wrong, our culture misogynistic, our politics muddled (because we prioritized conflict resolution over social justice), our internal thought control overly strong, while those wounded by our insensitivities were many: in other words, for all the good we did, we were a much more normal movement than I had thought.

At a certain point, after coming close to suicide just before my twenty-first birthday, I discovered the experience of Jesus as a friend, not God as a cosmic general, and I felt for the first time in my life fully, cosmically loved. It was one of my life’s most joyful experiences. But within a couple of years I came to find it intellectually unsustainable: it felt like a real experience, a reflection perhaps of real things in my life, of parents who loved me even though my mother especially had had great difficulty showing it, but it didn’t feel like proof of the existence of Jesus or God.

Our people used the analogy of a scientific experiment to get people to try to listen to God and ethically clean up their lives in something very like the twelve step process (which was after all an adaptation of our movement’s methods – AA grew out of the Oxford Group). Try it, they said. If it works, you know it’s true. But I realized by the age of 23 that one can never prove God by science, and not even by experience. Perhaps I was then and still am too impressed by the way science knows things: but I “knew” that God was not knowable except by faith. And I could not decide which way to jump, faith-wise. I didn’t want the cosmic general directing troops: that way lay a kind of madness. I longed for the cosmic parent dispensing unconditional love, but my very longing made it suspect. And it didn’t square with the Holocaust: no almighty loving parent would allow such things. Perhaps a Hindu or Buddhist conception would serve me better, or the spirit worlds of First Nation peoples. How could I choose? I chose to say I did not know what the reality was. That intellectual humility still seems right to me. I find atheism as suspect as belief. I accept that I just don’t know if the universe arose from nothing by accident, was created by a distinct God, or by an alien in an experiment (I write science fiction), or by the deep mystical nature of matter and energy themselves.

So this is where I still am, as regards belief. I feel that the whole universe, though violent and destructive beyond belief, is amazingly generative of order, complexity and life, and that these apparent opposites are part of a single reality which at its core is held together by something akin to love. I feel it but I don’t know it. I would like to think it’s true. I think that the beauty of life is so inextricably mixed up with the forces of destruction that there is no separating them. Our bodies are made of stardust from exploding stars. What is an earthquake or tsunami that carries away millions compared to an exploding star, in destructive power? It’s small beer, but it is essentially the same thing. The same things that created us will harm and kill us. In the interim, if we are lucky, careful and look after each other, we can enjoy a stunningly beautiful, awesome, amazing life without being overwhelmed by the pain, except that sometimes we will be and some people will be a great deal, however hard we and they try. We could any of us die tomorrow or be struck down by accident or disease, sudden or chronic. But I don’t any more think the pain is pointless. I think the point is that this is the way everything beautiful and good came to be, by these forces of creation and destruction, by animals eating and being eaten, by the fierce struggle to live and to care. When I got cancer and for a few weeks lived with the diagnosis that it was stage three and probably terminal, I found no desire to ask why, or to rail at my fate: I knew why (not the specific carcinogens but the cosmic context), and I had had a good life, and my regret was only for my wife and son and anyone else for whom my going would cause pain. I had no fear of dying, because I know I will rejoin the whole everything-that-is, the wondrous universe. My atoms will join with other atoms to make new structures, living things, or dust, decay, or some other part of the whole. I find this much more hopeful and restful an idea than going to heaven, as my parents were sure they would. I love recent novels in which the release of people from an afterlife into true death is a critical part of the plot, and am fascinated that two of my favorite writers have celebrated this (Ursula Le Guin in the conclusion of her Earthsea cycle, Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials).

When my first wife’s mother asked me, on my first visit to their home long before the wedding, what I worried about the most, I said I worried what history would think of the choices I made. I think she was shocked at my grandiosity. But I was very concerned that so many good people had endorsed Stalin, and others Hitler (the mother of one of my friends had been a Hitler youth). I had been raised to solve the world’s problems, and I was super sensitive to being judged ethically lacking by anyone who could persuade me they were holier than me: whether an atheist, a left revolutionary, a Maoist Ethiopian student in Addis Ababa, a Sri Lankan Buddhist, a Jewish mystic. I wanted to be right and to be a saint and to be relevant to the world’s problems. But I had realized as a teenager that just wanting to be a saint was probably a disqualifier for the position. I became aware that true believers of the kind I was raised to be were likely to do great harm themselves. I longed for humility. But when I embraced humility in my thirties and forties I seemed to disappear into obscurity and to fail to do much of anything to solve the world’s problems.

It’s not enough to be humble and decent, you have to be bold and wild and grab the chance to change the world and to hell with being wrong, we’re all wrong, and it will all pass away soon enough. Let’s glory in the struggle, which I always resisted and dreaded, and let’s laugh into the rain in our faces.

So although I would like to think the whole cosmos is knitted together by love, I don’t even yet fully believe or “know” it to be so. Yet what I do understand is enough: that there is no separating the destruction from the creation; and that we ourselves and our planet around us do better when we keep choosing to love, when we act as if we knew that love were the central principle of it all.

This is why I keep coming back to certain lines from Dylan Thomas and one particular poem by Elizabeth Cunningham.

Dylan Thomas:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.

THE CLERGY PRONOUNCE ON GOD’S PURPOSE FOR THE TSUNAMI
by Elizabeth Cunningham

If the purpose of the world’s religions
or their clergy
is to explain that we are
bad
and all our suffering
punishment then

we are better off without belief
better to stand stark and staring
in the wake of the terrible wave
better to let disaster knock us
senseless, sensible that we are only
small, strangely here, like all other
living dying things, the stranded fish
the torn up trees, the animals who sensed
the tremor first and fled.

Or if we must take life personally
must make god a person, why not
the god we long for, the one
who sees us hurt and takes us in her arms
or his and murmurs in our ear
I’m here, beloved child, I’m here.


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