Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.40

Every instrument, tool, or vessel, if it does that for which it has been made, is good, and yet he who made it is not there.

But in the things that are held together by Nature there is within, and there abides in them, the power which made them.

Wherefore all the more is it fit to reverence this power, and to think, that, if you live and act according to its will, everything in you is in conformity to Intelligence. And thus also in the Universe the things that belong to it are in conformity to Intelligence.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6 (tr Long)

“I’m a Stoic, but I don’t believe in God. That’s an outdated concept, and it doesn’t fit the facts.”

Now many of my theist friends, especially those who are in love with the ideology of this or that “-ism”, will gnash their teeth at such a claim. I will smile, nod my head, and continue along the way.

If a man sees the effect, but denies the cause, will it help him if I berate him? If a man says he has reverence for Nature, but denies the order and Intelligence in Nature, will it help him if I burn him at the stake?

In life, there is no craft without the craftsman, and there is no tool without the man who made the tool. The man who made the tool may be long gone, no longer anywhere in sight. This does not, however, mean that he never existed to begin with.

Nature is a bit different. The Craftsman is not someone that was then. The Craftsman is someone that is now, because who He is cannot be separated from what He has made, from what He is making.

The old watchmaker analogy only goes so far. I always say that any analogy is inherently weak, precisely because it is an analogy, a similarity, and not an identity. If I am looking for God somewhere up there, I will not find Him. If I simply look around me, and within myself, why, what a pleasant surprise! Here He is! To employ another weak analogy, it’s like looking for my keys all over town, only to find they were in my pocket the whole time.

The Twelve Steps helped me to save my life. I know, the skeptics and the naysayers laugh, but that is because they do not understand the power of the human mind, and the power of the human mind to move beyond itself. It wasn’t because I was a drunk or a junkie, though I have been both at points in my life. It wasn’t AA, or NA. It was about something very different, something much deeper than that. I would ridicule the sense of tribalism, the sense of conformity, and I would call it all a bunch of voodoo for ignorant folks.

Then, one day, I sat down, with a sense of humility for a change, a humility that came from a desperate need. There I was, embracing the First Step.

And the Second Step immediately tripped me up.

“There is no God,” I said in anger. “He was never there for me. If He even made me, He left me to rot!”

And I only said that because I was looking for God in all the wrong places. He wasn’t up in the sky. He wasn’t a product the fancy priests sold me. He wasn’t some invisible force that decided if I was naughty or nice. He, if you choose that term, was immediately present. To be philosophical about it, certainly transcendent, in the sense that what orders the whole is above the whole, but most importantly, from a personal perspective, completely immanent, in the sense that what orders the whole is within the whole.

In my social service days, we had a client who had been clean and sober for twenty years. One of the priests I worked with, a rather self-important fellow, used to make fun of him, because his “God” was the bottle cap from the last beer he ever drank.

The fellow shrugged off the mockery, with the good will and good humor of a decent man.

“Of course that bottle cap isn’t God. It’s a bottle cap. I’m not the first guy to do it this way, and I won’t be the last. It’s just a thing, but it stands for something, and it helps me to remember what all of the things in my life actually mean.”

If I want to remember what a good man is, I try to remember him. If I want to remember “where” God is, I try to remember what he said to me.

Written in 5/2007