What We Talk About When We Talk About God (14 page)

Have you ever known that someone was lying but you couldn't give a very articulate explanation of
how
you knew, other than “I just know”? In an interview with
Harper's Bazaar,
Gwyneth Paltrow talked about a boyfriend she'd had who frequently cheated on her, which she said she “knew on a cellular level,” though she “bought his story.”

She knew
on a cellular level
.

We tell ourselves that we are rational, logical people, but we
know
a number of things—things we're sure of, positive of, certain of—because of gut feelings, heartfelt inclinations, cells and molecules telling us what's real and what's true.

It's been estimated that our unconscious influences 70 percent of our behavior. We're picking up signals from people and places all day long. We often know when we're being followed, when someone can or can't be trusted, and even when we're being watched. It's astounding how many women know when they aren't safe, even if they can't tell you how they know this. Much of this comes from what's called
subcortical energy,
coming from a place in our bodies other than our rational consciousness.

We are highly perceptive beings, with layer upon layer of sensory complexity, all finely tuned and precisely calibrated to pick up the millions of messages our personal environment is sending us every single second.

This is why art speaks to us so deeply. If you're in a gallery and you're standing in front of a painting and you aren't moving because what you're seeing is so powerful, chances are if I ask you why you're drawn to that painting, you won't be able to explain it to me, other than in vague terms. As the legendary British theologian Keith Richards put it, “There's something primordial in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it.”

What happened in the Western world several hundred years ago is that the rational dimensions of our being gained a prominence over other ways of knowing—specifically, over intuition. This had a powerful effect on the way we process external stimuli, leading many of us to discount the very real and reliable information our bodies are constantly absorbing from the world around us.

To be open to the integrating power of Jesus in our lives, then, will mean that we are more and more connected with
all
of the ways we know things, from our linear, logical, intellectual powers all the way down to the hairs on the back of our necks and the tightness in our guts. And this isn't just about listening and trusting our bodies, but also about the far more important responsibility we have to honor them as the gifts they are.

It will not stop there, however, because
the more we are attuned to our own depths and shadows and desires, the more God is all in all in our lives, and the more we realize the depths of interaction between us and others in every gesture, conversation, and interaction.

In the early 1990s several Italian neurobiologists were studying monkeys and how their brains work. When a monkey ate a peanut, a certain motor neuron in the monkey's brain would light up. But then the scientists learned something else, something unexpected: when the monkey watched one of the researchers eat a peanut, those same motor neurons lit up again.

Just from watching.

Related research on the
human
brain led to the discovery that when person A watches person B eat a peanut, 20 percent of person A's motor neurons light up as if he's eating the peanut himself.

Your
actions cause
my
brain to act in very specific ways.

Ever find yourself yawning because your friend just yawned? Ever reach for your glass in a restaurant to take a drink and realize that you're doing it because your friend across the table just took a drink?

Same thing.

We deeply impact each other, and we are way more connected and aware of what each other is doing than any of us realize. We're patterns and relationships of energy, moving through space and time, made of millions of cells that are dying and being replaced every second, along with the trillions of swirling, frenetic atoms that comprise us in this second but in the next will go on to be others.

When we say that we had a draining conversation with someone, who knows what kind of exchange was going on at a subatomic level? That person may actually have been draining us. It may not be just a figure of speech.

When we talk about how that person took a piece of us, did she really?

When we say that somebody sucked the life out of us, how do we know that he didn't do exactly that?

What the modern world did in its fascination with parts and pieces is teach us that we are individual, isolated human units, talking and conversing and interacting but not much more than that. What we intuitively know, however, and what we're learning more and more from current science, is that there's way more going on between us than we first thought.

So when Jesus calls us to love our neighbor, this is more than just a command or an ethical statement or a rule of life; it's a truth about the very nature of reality. We are deeply connected with everybody around us, and our intentions and words and thoughts and inclinations toward them matter more than we can begin to comprehend.

There are different kinds of engagement and drain, and they affect us in much different ways. When a high school student walks out at the end of taking the SATs, her brain is cooked. When you finish a five-mile run or an hour-long weight-lifting session, your muscles ache and you're drenched in sweat. But when your friend's mother dies and you go to the funeral, that's a different kind of fatigue. It drains not so much your brain or your muscles as it drains your
spirit
. Some events exhaust us at a spirit level, in the same way that some people can crush our spirit if we let them. Learning to be present to our depths means paying attention to all interactions and the toll they exact or the life they bring to that most mysterious, elusive aspect of ourselves we call
spirit
.

Remember Einstein's discovery that matter is locked-up energy, and energy is liberated matter? You exert a gravitational pull on every object around you, including people. And they're doing the same, at the exact same time.

When we encounter someone inspiring, it may be way more than words or actions that she gives us. Likewise, when someone makes something for us and then gives it to us and it means something to us and moves us, we feel like a part of that person is present in the gift. It's not because we're superstitious; it's because a part of him may actually be in the gift.

When we talk about the vibes somebody gives off,

or the not-so-good feeling we're getting from someone,

or we're sure that somebody is jealous,

or harboring bitterness,

or distracted,

our bodies are doing the job that highly sophisticated radar systems do, picking up signals and processing them in real time.

Deep, as we know, calls to deep.

Our body language and facial expressions and changes in posture when we're interacting with each other are so vast and varied that some of them can't be consciously noticed until they're videotaped and played back
in slow motion
.

When you have the sense that someone has more to tell you but you don't know how you know that, there's a good chance that her body sent your body that information faster than your mind could notice it.

The brain alone is stunning in its endless ability to process and morph and transform in response to external stimuli. This is called
neuroplasticity,
and from it we learn that how we focus our attention actually shapes our brain.

Joy is contagious,

and despair brings everybody down,

and when positive energy is present and flowing,

we all benefit.

This is why we find so many writings in the scriptures about the fruit of the spirit and not complaining and rejoicing and again rejoicing and being grateful and saying thanks and remembering where we've been. As we are more and more open to Jesus's integrating work in our lives, we are more and more aware that these clichés about positive energy and good vibes and joy being contagious are true facts about how the world works.

Events and environments act on us, and the more we are experiencing God bringing together all the dimensions of our lives, the more we'll be aware of the powerful effect our surroundings and interactions are having on us.

One quick example involving architecture: You are a phototropic being, drawn to light, for a number of biological and physiological reasons. But you also have legs that get tired if you have to stand for too long. So when you enter a room, you are drawn to the window, but you are also drawn to the chairs. You want light, and you also want to sit down. Which is all fine, unless the chairs are not arranged in front of the window. When that happens, the room draws you to two places at the same time. This creates tension in your being, very real forces within you that are unresolved.

Now think about those contending forces on a larger scale. As modern consciousness built a head of steam over the past few hundred years, very real dynamics such as these were often pushed to the side, because people saw the universe as more and more of a machine, engineered to be productive and efficient. Design and aesthetics and how things look and feel were often relegated to lesser status, rendered irrelevant because they were seen as having very little to do with what can be empirically measured and demonstrated, like profit and cost and productivity and efficiency.

But we are integrated beings, and aesthetics matter. The Bible itself begins with God taking great joy in how things
look
. Color and layout and feel and landscape and furniture arrangement and shape and form and line and curve all matter, because they affect us in powerful and sublime ways.

Beauty matters, and as we are more and more alive to the divine
ruach
at work in the world, the more and more aware we will be of the importance of all dimensions of our being, because Jesus is at work saving and rescuing and redeeming and reconciling all of us, uniting us, bringing us more and more into the full and joyous life God intends for us.

 

Back once more to that table with the bread and wine on it. There's a reason why people have been taking the bread and wine and remembering Jesus's life and death and resurrection for the past two thousand years.

We need reminders of who we are and how things actually are.

And
so
we come to the table exactly as we are, some days on top of the world, other days barely getting by. Some days we feel like a number, like a machine, like a mere cog in a machine, severed and separated from the depth of things, this day feeling like all the others. Other days we come feeling tuned in to the song, fully alive, hyperaware of the God who is all in all. The point of the experience isn't to create special space where God is, over and against the rest of life where God isn't. The power is in the striking ability of this experience to open our eyes all over again (and again and again) to the holiness and sacred nature of all of life, from family to friends to neighbors to money and breath and sex and work and play and food and wine.

That's God all in all, bringing together all of our bodies and our minds and our souls and our spirits and all the parts and pieces that make us
us,
as our eyes are opened in

the good,

the bad,

the ugly,

the beautiful,

the inspiring,

and the

gut-wrenching

to the presence in all of life of the God who is with us,

for us,

and ahead of us.

EPILOGUE

One last thought.

In the new testament there's a letter that one of the first Christians, a man named Paul, wrote to his friends in a church in a city called Philippi. In that letter he tells them that the god who
began
a
good work
in them will be sure and certain to
complete
it. Paul does something really, really clever here in this letter that many of his contemporary Jewish writers often did: he uses particular words in a particular order so that he can say multiple things at the same time. Paul uses the words
began
and
good work
and
complete
very deliberately: those are loaded words, because they're used in that same order in the genesis creation poem that begins the Bible, a poem about a massive bang that brought the world into being, bristling with explosive creative potential and possibility. So when Paul, a man thoroughly versed in the ancient Hebrew scriptures, uses those particular words in that particular order in his letter to his friends, he's connecting their story to the creation of the universe.

His point is that
the same creative bang that formed the universe is unleashed
in us through our trust in what God is doing in the world through Jesus.
His insistence is that this extraordinary energy in all its diverse and expansive forms is
deeply
personal
and
readily available
and
on our side
.

I believe this is true.

I believe you and I are only scratching the surface of what's possible.

We're these strange, exotic cocktails of dust and quarks and blood and soul and all that can't be named, containing infinite depth and dimension and spirit, featherless bipeds arguing and dividing ourselves up about all sorts of things that are, in the end, completely meaningless.

I sometimes wonder if it's as simple as saying
yes,

over and over and over again,

a thousand times a day.

It's not a complicated prayer, less about the words than about the openness of your heart, your willingness to consider that there may be untold power and strength and spirit right here, right now, as close as your next breath. This isn't about the same old message of making something happen; it's about waking up to that which is already happening, all around you all the time, in and through and over you, trusting that god is with us and for us and ahead of us.

 

One morning recently I was surfing just after sunrise, and there was only one other surfer out. In between sets he and I started talking. He told me about his work and his family, and then, after about an hour in the water together, he told me how he'd been an alcoholic and a drug addict and an atheist and then he'd gotten clean and sober and found god in the process. As he sat there floating on his board next to me, a hundred or so yards from shore, with not a cloud in the sky and the surface of the water like glass, he looked around and said, “and now I see god everywhere.”

Now
that's
what I'm talking about.