Reading Henry Miller makes me think about spiritual experience. My reading program, which is a strict one, has me in me in his works at the moment. I keep coming across the word “God” and references to the deity. I don’t consider Miller a religious man. Rather, he was a profane man who happened to be enlightened, insightful, and inspired. One doesn’t need to be religious to understand the nature of God. Perhaps Miller was so grounded in the physical world that he didn’t need to reach far to touch the eternal.
As I read The Air Conditioned Nightmare, which is one of the great and enduring critiques of American life and culture, he keeps bringing me back to my own notions of the divine. At base, I do not believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present God. Such was the God of the child I once was. I shivered in the presence of that God and all it represented. But I felt this out of obligation, as I didn’t know anything else. Parents, priests, nuns, and brothers gave me this God, which, deep inside, I always doubted, though was too afraid at the time to admit it. Alone in the church basement on an occasion, kneeling at the feet of a statue of the Virgin, I tried to feel what others said they did. I struggled to perceive the awe I thought I was supposed to feel.
But even in these situations, the shivering and the puzzling over the absence of a divine energy, I knew that, for myself, the belief in a loving, all-powerful God was not sustainable. The notion was too limited and limiting. This God, the God of my youth revealed in strict Catholic religious education, thought too much like a human being, too much like a father who might correct or comfort a child according to his perception of the child’s behavior. It was too arbitrary and capricious.
Even so, I wanted to believe, believe in the church’s notions of sin and grace, and the consequences of living with or without them, committing or receiving without ever really knowing why and when one transgressed or transcended. This impulse so pulled me that one day, after mass where I served as altar boy, I drew the monsignor behind a door and asked him very seriously how I was to become a priest.
I was fearful and hesitant. My family thought my overtures to become clergy to be ridiculous, while, at the same time, encouraging me to be more “spirited” in the sense of being holy and reverent. As I stood behind that door, the monsignor smiled but was irritated. “What is it, son? What is it you want to ask that needs such secrecy?”
I told him that I wanted to be a priest. How did a person go about becoming a priest?
He laughed. It wasn’t that he thought I was funny. His laughter was derisive, as if the idea of me becoming a priest was absurd.
I suppose I had unrealistic expectations of how a priest of his stature should act. The disappointment crushed me. At the same time, embarrassment at what I perceived to be my ignorance carved a wound in my psyche that, even now, shows a scar.
Looking back on this and the child’s way of gaining perspective from his educators in life, I see that it really wasn’t a priest I wanted to be. What I wanted was the peace and service that I saw that pious people received for all their hard work at prayer.
By the end of Catholic high school, I’d abandoned the notion of grasping at God. But I didn’t stop looking for the kind of peace, a way to reconcile myself to a world that was obviously out of my control and in no way beholden or obliged to me. It took a long time and much self-abasement and degradation, but I began to understand that God was not, for me, a being, an entity with a personality and human-like thought. Instead, it was beyond my capacity to put words to.
The ineffable is difficult to find, in part because it escapes the grasp of human language. It was only after I sobered up that I began this journey to connect with the eternal. It’s not the eternal of Christian understanding, an eternal of angels and devils and levels of heaven and hell. It is more what I understand as the expanses of time and space and the things that move them.
This is not to say I am completely a man of science, though there is a lot of that underpins my spiritual existence. When I try to comprehend that notion of “billions” in terms of geological or astronomical time, I’m left to wonder. But I don’t need a God to explain that or the intricate processes of natural selection and speciation. Not at all.
When I think of these things, I remember three occasions that might be called, in the terms of William James, spiritual experiences or awakenings. In no particular order, they include sitting on a hillside above the Missouri River in Montana. The night had been stormy, filled with close-striking lightning and chest-bursting claps of thunder. The morning was calm, the sky blue but for puffy clouds here and there. Suddenly, in the quiet, I felt a peace I had never known pervade my being, my physical, mental, and spiritual self. It lasted some minutes. I felt no urge to grasp it, to analyze or understand it. I was one with the earth and sky and the people and creatures under that lived there. When it passed, I felt a cleanliness of being I’d never known before.
Once I was driving to my friend Ken’s house. Descending the hill on 39th Street toward Gillham Boulevard, I was suddenly struck by a feeling of oneness with all that existed. I was a mere mote in the vast expanses of time and space and being. By the time the light turned green, it was over and my life was changed forever. I was relieved of the responsibility to be significant. I knew it then as I know it now. I understood for once that the sunlight that shines on me shines on a guy just like me in Mongolia and every other country. All was one. I was not separate from anything. I wasn’t even a part of something. Everything was me and I was everything.
Again, on the river above the vast Fort Peck Reservoir, I was in a storm so strong it blew my tent down against my back. My candle lantern burned evenly. As the storm increased and I heard tornadoes’ awesome roars, I was suddenly part of everything. Again, not separate but one. Maybe it was true that if I sneezed during a storm in Montana, a child was conceived in China. Could it be true that what I decided, what I did mattered? Certainly. It is a terrible responsibility to be in charge of one’s actions and reactions to outside stimuli. It is yet even more meaningful to know that my action, even puffing out that candle to have darkness to sleep by, affected the universe.
These experiences—neither desired nor expected—may have had a number of physiological explanations. Relief at not being swept away by the storms. Fatigue and lack of human contact in the cases of those experiences in Montana. Untreated mental illness acting on me as I drove to Ken’s. It could be a number of other things, none of which I deny.
Thus, I’m cautious about pinning these experiences on a deity. Rather, it was a connection with the world at large, perhaps an imagining that forces greater than me are always at work. They do not need me. They care nothing for me but never work against me. The most frightening thing we face is that the world and its universe are indifferent to us. Nothing is more comforting than accepting that.
What these “spiritual” experiences and some others have shown me is that I am not in a kettle of lost souls. My salvation doesn’t depend on a all-knowing, fatherly god. My redemption doesn’t come from grace. These things come from just being a human being. One among many. A name that will join the billions of forgotten names in just a few short years.
I like that a lot.
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