New Spiritual Musing: "What Does Life Expect of Us?"

What Does Life Expects of Us?

I picked up an old Psychology Today (June 2012) from the stack of magazines by the door of my writing den on my way to the john this morning because I cannot go to the john and not read something. I get some of my best ideas in the john, and as I read an old article, which I had highlighted in blue marker, titled “The Atheist at the Breakfast Table,” by Bruce Grierson, one of my highlights jumped out at me and an old idea for a spiritual musing grabbed me with daemonic intensity because this idea has tried to grab me before but not quite enough to compel me to explore it; but like all of my ideas for poetry, stories, novels, and spiritual musings, when its time has come to be given expression I have no choice but to see it through. So, what was the highlight that set the idea for today’s musing free?

This is the paragraph that grabbed me: “Tepley was raised by observant parents who celebrated the holidays and kept a kosher home. He and his brother were bar mitzvahed. But cognitive dissonance soon ensued. ‘In religious school, God was frequently presented as just and merciful. But how could a just and merciful God allow the Holocaust? I know I wasn’t unique in asking that.’”

“Why cognitive dissonance?” I asked myself, and my idea for today’s spiritual musing was set free. I have put the sentence that liberated the idea for my musing into bold italics, the idea that people are puzzled by a just and merciful God allowing such horrendous suffering in the world like the mind-numbing Holocaust, and when I finished my business in the john I jotted the idea down in my notebook to explore in today’s musing…  

Again, I sense that this is going to be another one of those dangerous musings because it’s going to step so far outside the box of conventional thought that it will make some readers uneasy; but this is what writers do, explore new pathways for the mind to pursue. Isn’t this what Percy Bysshe Shelley meant in his iconic essay “A Defense of Poetry” when he wrote: “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration”?

This is what makes writers dangerous, because every now and then they are gifted with “an unapprehended inspiration” that threatens the status quo, as I was with the idea for today’s spiritual musing that opened a window onto human suffering that defies man’s disbelief that a just and merciful God would allow such devastating suffering like the Holocaust, a cognitive dissonance that paralyzes the mind of man and keeps him a prisoner to himself.

But as serendipity would have it, once I committed myself to writing today’s musing I was blessed with the surprising coincidence of two movies on Netflix which addressed my “unapprehended inspiration” of today’s musing: God’s Not Dead, Part 1, and God’s Not Dead, Part 2 (God’s Not Dead, Part 3 will be released in the spring of 2018), both movies speaking to the issue of God’s existence (just and merciful notwithstanding), which the truculent atheist Professor Radisson does not believe in but which his Christian student Josh does because his faith won’t allow him to deny the existence of God and sign a statement for Professor Radisson’s philosophy class stating that God is dead. All the other students in the class signed the statement denying God’s existence, and Professor Radisson challenges Josh to defend his position to the class; and the ensuing drama makes for a wonderful movie.

So, just what was my “unapprehended inspiration” for today’s spiritual musing? What did I see about man’s relationship with God and suffering that is so far outside the box of conventional thought that it will be sure to make readers uncomfortable?

This insight did not come to me without a history, because no idea is born ex nihilo; it has a history, and its history was born of my long and indefatigable quest for my true self, which I happily realized and wrote about in my book The Pearl of Great Price, a history that delves into the mystery of the evolutionary process of man’s paradoxical nature—our real and false self, or being and non-being as the case may be; because in the resolution of my ego/shadow personality (my real and false self), I came to the astonishing realization that human suffering is Nature’s way of resolving the enantiodromiac dynamic of man’s paradoxical nature and making our two selves into one, which absolves God of all responsibility for tragedies like the Holocaust, and personal suffering like Professor Radisson’s mother’s death by cancer which drove him to abandon his Christian faith and embrace the doctrine of atheism. Which is exactly what happened to a Canadian writer and social activist who inspired the following poem: —

The Making of an Atheist

She stared out her living room window

lost to the world she knew and loved; three

hours later she returned from the farthest

regions of her mind where the great void had

swallowed her whole, and she gave the rest

of her life to helping others, founding a home

for unwed mothers and an AIDS hospice for

gays among many other charitable causes,

and all because a drunken driver had run

over her golden boy. She went to church and

knelt for hours begging God to tell her why

her twenty-year old son had to die, but God

did not respond and she walked away with

her unyielding pride leaving her simple faith

that she had inherited from her caring mother

and philandering father who had abandoned

her when she was twelve behind her. “Saint

Joan,” they called her, for all her good works,

and they named a street after her when

she died of inoperable cancer.

Vanity dies hard. That’s what makes this spiritual musing dangerous, the realization that human suffering serves Nature’s purpose for man’s evolution, which is to realize our individuating self-consciousness to wholeness and completeness.

“As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck,” said Carl Jung; but this can only make sense in light of karma and reincarnation, because man cannot possibly realize his true self in one lifetime alone.

My “unapprehended inspiration” for today’s spiritual musing then came to me again while reading the article “The Atheist at the Breakfast Table” while sitting on the john the other morning, which was creatively consolidated with the serendipitous gift of the two God’s Not Dead movies that delved into the lives of believers and non-believers alike; but as informative as the Psychology Today article and God’s Not Dead movies were, I drew upon my own life to flesh in today’s musing, because the only truth that really matters is the truth of one’s own life experience, and mine initiated me into the mystery of human suffering, a mystery that speaks more to a just and merciful God than it does to the non-existence of God. And what a relief it is to know that even mind-boggling tragedies like the Holocaust serve Nature’s purpose of bringing man’s evolving self-consciousness to spiritual resolution.

That’s the answer that Victor E. Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, was seeking for all the brutal suffering that he and his fellow prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps had to endure, the merciful answer to the haunting question: what does life expect of us? Because through suffering we realize our true self.

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