On Prayer
The Doctor has a couple of posts that speak clearly to me, an agnostic with troubling intimations of his own mortality. The first, entitled God of Loss and Grace, speaks to dealing with pain. A quote-
A dado blade is a whirling chisel, a specialized blade for a table saw designed to cut precision grooves for furniture joints. A blind dado is a cut where the resulting groove does not run to the end of the board–a tricky and difficult cut for even the best of woodworkers. After cursory attention to the shop instructor’s advice and caution–”hold onto that board, it tends to buck”–I charged ahead, dropping a gorgeous piece of 2 inch square mahogany onto the whining scream of the blindingly-fast steel saw. The sound, smell and feel of a table saw on hardwood is like little else–almost intoxicating, the glorious union of power and precision.
In an instant, my euphoria turned to stunned surprise, as the hardwood board became a missle, soaring across the room to an enormously loud and ungraceful landing. How embarrassing–everyone would be looking at me, wondering who that idiot was. The pain was annoying–not much more than hitting your thumb with a hammer. I shook my left hand, as one would a bruise, muttered “Shit!”–then glanced down at it: it was no longer recognizable as a human appendage. White, red, mangled, grotesque–a horror beyond imagining.
The second is more, well, cosmic- The Prayer of Java-
Now the skeptic will ask–including the skeptic in my own head–how do you know? What proof do you have that these occurrences, these thoughts, these conversations and situations, have anything to do with God? Are they not mere chance, wishful thinking, psychological crutches, neuro-endocrine surges that my highly-evolved cerebrum maps into culturally-molded thought patterns?
Of course, the skeptic’s challenge contains a presumption–one rarely recognized, in fact: that everything which exists, all that is real, can be measured, tested, analyzed, proven, and recorded. But much which is human–perhaps all which makes us uniquely human–is beyond such simple means of measurement and proof. How much does love weigh? What are the dimensions of courage? What is the deceleration velocity of a failing marriage? What color is hope? What formula predicts despair? Why does a rose smell exquisite, but a rotten egg horrendous? Sure, we can speak of neurotransmitters and aromatic organic compounds, but such things touch on the spirit, and the tools of the physical realm are wholly inadequate as inquisitors. The disciplines which come closest to addressing these matters–psychology and social science–are at best mediocre observers–and miserable failures at repairing the damaged spirit. Don’t believe this? Ask your friendly secular psychologist to explain the phenomenom of evil–then sit back and enjoy the blubbering blather of psychobabble which results. Evil will be alive and well–and wholly uncomprehended–when he finishes.
I am in awe at the quality of this- and thoughtfulness helps me towards my own self-realization. It's good to find a man who can speak frankly about his own doubts and questions about his relationship to the Supreme Being; in some ways they parallel mine, though he is MUCH further down that road than I.