I Believe
What do I believe? I believe faith is a choice. At 70 I choose to believe because faith makes life more tolerable.
As I child I attended a Catholic Elementary School. When I graduated Elementary School I won the religion award.
In a public junior high school I lost my faith after my profoundly mentally handicapped brother was born. In Catholic school I learned that we were here to learn to love, know and obey God. My profoundly mentally handicapped brother would never even learn to talk, no less know God.
In high school I decided to give my faith one more chance. It was one of the reasons I decided to attend a Catholic college. I would see if there were a reason to be a Roman Catholic.
I completely lost my faith in the theological courses I took. I found no reason to continue believing in God.
I went through an Atheistic phase, although one of my nun teachers said I was an Agnostic.
My church after college became the library. I would wander the stacks looking for answers. Eastern religion attracted me. But it was when I found the psychology section that I found something I could believe in. I read humanist psychologists, existential psychologists and more.
I put what I read/integrated it in something I wrote and self-published called The Search For Being. I recently pulled the plug on that self-published book.
Today I’m sort of like Ferdinand the Bull – trying to find out how to smell the roses. Zen had a lasting influence. I believe the map is not the territory. Words can’t encapsulate truth.
I started listening to Paula White-Cain. I found her before Donald Trump made her his minister. I made another attempt to believe in God – an anthropomorphic God – which failed again.
But remember I said Faith was a Choice. I, especially, given my introverted intuitive feeling judging personality, need to believe in something.
So what have I decided to believe in? I believe we see through a glass darkly now. My choice is to believe in the Holy Ghost. This is consistent with my introverted intuitive dominant personality function. In my book, The Search For Being, there was a chapter called Moving From Unformulated to Formulated Experience based on the writings of psychoanalyst, Donnel B. Stern.
Like in the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel I believe we use different words/different narratives/different maps to point to the same nonverbal ideas. Unformulated experience and the anthropomorphic idea of the Holy Ghost is, I believe, an example of this.
Christ told us he was leaving us the Holy Ghost. I think this means he and God have left us and now we just have the Holy Ghost. I think, perhaps, the Gnostic Gospels, which the Church Fathers tried to destroy would give a more pantheistic notion of Christ’s message. Love thy neighbor as thyself BECAUSE YOU ARE ONE.
There was the Big Bang and from the Singularity (the One) came the Many. Yet underneath we are still all composed of the same quantum building blocks. The universe expands and then opposing forces set in and it contracts. I like Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Recurrence. I think in that sense life eternal. There is this constant expanding and contraction. This constant Flux as the philosopher Heraclitus said.
I like the Buddhist idea of life as an illusion. We posit ideas like the Self. But there is no Self only this constant change. We invent Narratives and then we believe our own Narratives. I like Zen in that it eschews Narratives – all the tales told by an idiot.
In politics I am particularly skeptical of the Intellectuals, those who believe their own Narratives. Like a philosopher once said I think of ideology as tyranny.
So what do I believe in? I like Martin Buber’s idea that God (remember I’m a pantheist) is found in the Every Day or as I learned in Catholic Elementary School that he (no apologies to the PC Police who I abhor) is everywhere.
I like Buber’s idea that the events in our lives are God’s Address to us. I, for instance, became a Government Gang Stalking Target in 2006 because of a Crazy Fireman Neighbor who didn’t like my brother or myself as neighbors. http://www.StopGangStalkingPollice.com I see that as the Jungians do – as my destiny. I answer God’s address by trying to expose it. My life isn’t about results – certainty that I will expose it. It’s about process – what values do I want to live by. An Idealist my favorite song would be – To Dream the Impossible Dream.
Buber believes in the concrete. This coincides with my preference for Zen. I don’t live with abstract notions like – What is heaven? I live in the concrete reality of the everyday, trying to learn healthy recipes for my brother and myself. Trying to get the things we want for our lives.
I voted for Donald Trump. Before he entered the race I supported Bernie Sanders to make sure Neocon Hillary Clinton wouldn’t win. I think Trump is an Extraverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving Type – my opposite. But he lives in the concrete, isn’t a Map is the Territory Intellectual. So I share his values on noninterventionism. He is not my perfect President, but given the choices we have, I chose him.
Do I pray? Yes. I have a little booklet I got at the Mission of San Luis Rey entitled Catholic Novenas. I choose to pray daily/repeatedly the Novena to the Holy Spirit.
I equate the Holy Spirit with our unconscious. What I see is that creative intelligence seems to suffuse the Universe. It is the closest I have come to the concept of God.
How do we make the unconscious conscious? Donnel Stern said we formulate the unformulated/unconscious through verbalization. We have feelings of tendency. I nurture my feelings of tendency which once gestated can be verbalized by setting an intention in my prayers/ongoing Novenas to the Holy Ghost. As a believer in creative intelligence, including my own, I believe in this process of having a feeling of tendency, dreaming our dreams, setting an intention in prayer and thus kickstarting this process of formulating the unformulated – getting ideas of how to solve our problems, an idea of the paths/actions we need to take.
There is no sugar daddy God the Father in my belief system, perhaps, because I didn’t like my own Father. But I have a belief I can believe in woven of different things that made sense to me.
I was inspired to write this after hearing Jill Biden say in an interview she lost her faith when her son died and God didn’t answer her prayers. I appreciated her openness, honesty, and authenticity. Martin Buber said we live with holy insecurity. But when we share with each other, we don’t have to be alone in that.