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 That’s an outdated concept, and it doesn’t fit the facts.”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
No comments:
Post a Comment