It’s 5:30 in the morning;
I’ve been awake since 3:00. It’s not
often when my restless mind wakes me up in the middle of the night, but it’s
useless to try to go back to sleep.
Night thoughts are too vivid, too alive, for me to sleep.
In the past, when I haven’t listened well to who I am at the
core, I have awoken at night from a terrifying dream to remind me of who I am. Once, many years ago, I argued with God in my
sleep for three nights in a row about creation.
I was sure we got here by chance; he was sure we didn’t. I asked him big questions—ones I knew would
stump him, for they surely stumped me.
For instance, how can evolution and a personal god—the only type of God
I’ve ever been interested in (one of love, kindness and intimate involvement in
my life)—coexist? For if we evolved from
single cell organisms over the eons, at what point was human consciousness born? Could the same type of soul enter our
primitive ancestors? Was there a magic
point where we were human enough to receive human souls? And evolution, I insisted, has to exist,
because our scientific knowledge of the genetic process allows us to clone
sheep. Evolution, at least at its most
basic level, can’t be denied. I was sure
I had God there.
He made a counter-observation though, one I had never
considered, at least not consciously. It
was a reprimand in the form of a rhetorical question. He simply asked, “Who do you think you are,
to believe you can understand a system you are part of better than I, the one
who created it?” But it was a reprimand
from a god who knew me intimately because he understood I was at an
intellectual impasse, that I couldn’t grow because I couldn’t deny science and
I couldn’t make it work with my religion.
That night thought, which came in the form of a recurring
dream, changed my life, for it allowed me to unify my analytical and mythical
mind. And it came to me at just the
right moment, the moment I could not go on living without God even though in my
mind he simply couldn’t exist.
It provided a metaphor.
The fish in the aquarium can learn his aquarium well, but he can’t know
that there is a power plant somewhere generating electricity to be transferred
over hundreds of miles by wires that lead into the house, travel through the
walls, and come out at an electrical socket where the air pump that keeps him
alive is plugged into. And even if he
were to develop an instrument that could trace that charge from the pump all
the way back to the power plant, he still would not know what keeps him alive,
because he wouldn’t know about the railroad that feeds the coal to the power
plant, or the coal mine itself, or the plants that died millions of years ago
to create that coal, because the fish in the fish tank can never know things outside
his system. We are no different. All human thought leads to an impasse. I’ll demonstrate that from both the creationism
and evolution end. Both paths are
terrifying short.
Creationism.
Belief: I am because God created me.
Challenge: Who
created God?
General Theist Belief:
God is eternal
Mormon Belief: God
has parents; procreation and souls are eternal.
Buddhist and Hindu Belief:
Souls are eternal and recycled.
However, none of these answers explain what started the
chain reaction, what exactly is existence. And no human thought ever will. It is impossible to completely comprehend a
system when you are part of it.
Evolution:
Belief: I am because I evolved through a complex
chemical chain reaction that began with the big bang.
Challenge: What
created the instability that led to creation?
Or in other words, who or what declared, Let there be light?
Belief: It was
inherent in the system.
Challenge: Why? There
can be no change without a stimulus.
Inert remains inert unless acted upon.
Therefore, perhaps the ultimate gift of life is that I am free
intellectually to believe as I wish—at least as far as the big questions go. No one has anything up on me. While it is true that I cannot prove the
existence of God, at least not intellectually, it’s equally true that you can’t
prove he doesn’t exist. Our current
academic world would have me believe otherwise. Belief is written off as ignorance—the act
of a lazy mind, a childish mind, one that can’t face the grown-up thought that we
are all alone in the universe.
I can switch that around quickly and say that unbelief is
the act of a lazy mind, a childish one that can’t face the grown-up fact that
analytical thought, though useful, is finite, while existence is infinite. Therefore, to even begin to understand I why?;
Why I? (as my old professor, Dr. Emory Estes phrased it), I must look for tools
beyond scientific thought.
Mormonism is based on the promise that there is in fact such
a tool: revelation. Like all religions,
we recognize there is a veil that keeps us from fully comprehending I why; why I intellectually. But we also believe that the veil can be
punctured, if we sincerely ask God for help with what we need most to survive.
Mormonism is the answer one boy received to that question, I why?; why I?. Young Joseph Smith was searching for his
identity. Particularly, he wanted to
know which church he should join. It’s
best stated in his own words:
While I was laboring
under the extreme difficulties caused by the contests of these parties of religionists,
I was one day reading the Epistle of James, first chapter and fifth verse,
which reads: If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to
all men liberally, and upraideth not; and it shall be given him.
Never did any passage
of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this
time to mine. It seemed to enter with
great force into every feeling of my heart.
I reflected on it again and again, knowing that if any person needed
wisdom from God, I did: how to act I did not know, and unless I could get more
wisdom than I then had, I I would never know…” (Joseph Smith History 1:11-12)
Millions, including myself, have received that same
answer. But this is what I know for
sure. Not only can I not prove to you
that Mormonism is true, I shouldn’t even want to—at least not intellectually. Life’s greatest gift is to truly be able to
believe as you wish about existence. I am is the ultimate mystery, the
ultimate gift—to live, to breath, to interact with the world around us. If thought could take us to the origin, the
Genesis, the active ingredient that moved an infinitely compressed universe to
the infinitely large one that exists that ultimate freedom would be taken away
from us, and with it, all thought. Every
great thought, one way or the other, has at its core—I why?; why I? We think because we seek our beginning.
And yet, the answer cannot fully be revealed, at least not
intellectually, for if it was, mortal existence would become meaningless. We would know exactly what we needed to do to
fulfill our purpose. Striving would
cease, and with it, growth.
And yet we are promised in James, if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men
liberally, and upraideth not; and it shall be given him.
Mormonism has so much faith in that scripture that it is
really all the missionaries ask you to do:
Ask of God, find out for yourself, is this true? Because the one way we are a terrifyingly original
religion is that we do believe God does speak directly with mankind, one on
one.
If what I want to share with you is good, you’ll know
it, through a feeling, a prompting. Not because of my intellect, not
because of my goodness, or my actions (though, of course, these attributes help
if I have them), but because somewhere in your heart, you have already asked
God for the answer.
And if you don’t. That is fine too. We each have the ultimate pleasure of
believing as we wish. So much good has
been added to this world by the simple quest to answer I why?; why I
I blog my religion, not to convert so much, but to keep that
door open—to say, you will not write me off without even knowing who I am, you
will not extinguish me because of my label, I will put my foot in the door,
keep it cracked open, because I have good things to share.
Isn’t that why anyone writes, to bear witness, to say I am.
Perhaps the need to do that is infinitely more important than we can
ever begin to comprehend—whether we be Jewish, Christian, Islam, Buddhist or
Mormon. Maybe the soul, whatever that
is, is that spark that ignited the whole big bang—the great I Am rocketing out, stretching an infinitely
compressed idea into a great dialogue that will never end--infinite choices,
infinite actions and reactions, natural laws, natural consequences, world after
world, creation after creation, molding us into something great beyond our
wildest dreams.
Well, it’s enough to wake you up at night, to say the least.
