Category: creative essays

There is something off kilter with existence. You can’t quite pin down reality.

It is something without a natural context, like a city made of air.

I think that is where belief in God starts, actually, in this intuition that something is amiss with existence, it doesn’t make sense logically, and it all seems like a miracle.

Jesus said that those who had ears to hear, let them hear. I think he was referring to this epiphany of the strangeness of existence. It is more than a feeling, but rather an intuitive appraisal; it is actually an experience of a personal revelation that cannot be shared with somebody else; you realize that existence is an absurdity, that lacks cohesive logic, or any sensible rationale.

You can actually experience this revelation, become confused and disoriented, as if you were just slugged in the face, because you stuck your nose too far into the noisy machinery of reality.

It is a sort of unveiling of a mystery presence. The mystery is that we exist, at all. It is a feeling that all things being equal, we should not exist, nothing should exist. And that only a series of small miracles could get us to where we are now.

But to the point, you come to believe in God through a personal revelation of the truth about existence. Even the Apostle Paul says, in the Bible, that it is better for people to be converted through “demonstrations of power” rather than persuasion, because if you can be convinced that God exists through persuasion, you can equally be convinced that He doesn’t exist, through persuasion, as well.

It is true that the scientist explores the same system of rabbit holes and underground tunnel networks. But he is hampered by his myopia, his materialism-assumption, and the plank in his eye. He is like the man who is ever seeking and never finding. Because he seeks explanations, and not truth.

You can’t find God through science, I think. They have confidence in science itself, instead of their own soul, their own thoughts, their own god-given intuitions and natural appreciations of the world. The method itself becomes a kind of prison.

What I’m talking about is the simple realization that existence is an open question, and probably always will be. Anything is possible, or likely. It starts with an open mind. Faith comes later.

It means to realize that existence is ridiculous, that this whole thing insane and unlikely. It means to realize that the great mystery is more authoritative than our small scoopful of knowledge about it. The mystery itself seems godlike, as big as we can imagine it to be.

The first step is realizing that there is more that we don’t know than what we do know. It is not “God of the Gaps,” however, that I am talking about, because the nature of existence just doesn’t propose a mystery, but an irreconcilable contradiction. It presents an unsolvable, unintelligible singularity of space and time. Those who believe in God cannot accept the contradiction that reality presents to us–to accept the contradiction is to accept a lie.

What I’m saying is that the mystery is impenetrable, and the lyrics to the song of existence untranslatable. Only faith can make sense of the noise and confront it directly. The naturalists are like ships lost at sea in the dark noise of the illimitable ocean of space. They, too, can only listen and wonder at it all.

It is the realization of the absurdity of life. It happens in a flash, comes with a rash of heat over the body, and the man is struck with great fear. It is as if you suddenly find yourself in an alien world, where the sun becomes a giant body of fire and you can actually feel the heat from this sky-fire warming your crush of flesh.

It is the lies of the mind exposed to the light of reality, if only for a second. It is a revelation of timelessness, as if you were lost to a single moment, standing forever there, on one foot, teetering with balancing arms atop a single frozen moment. You realize that you will never make sense of any of it.

I think the search for God starts with this search for the cosmic foundations. I mean, existence is so weird and strange that the idea that we are inside the creative sphere of God’s mind seems reasonable and fully explanatory. It is also exactly what it feels like.

The Bible states that the Spirit of Truth has been sent to convict the world of guilt and righteousness. That is exactly it. He came to convict everyone, not just us. His call is heard by every person. And that, I think, is this pull toward righteousness, toward faith, that I feel. I don’t think anybody is fully without it.

Everybody has ears.

But not everybody has ears that hear.