Funny you should ask. For my October-December
2002 “Through the
Editor’s Eyes,” I offered “Assumptions in the Nexus,” a piece that
explored the core “tenets” — for lack of a better word — shared by
Christians and New Agers, assumptions that give rise to a vastly
similar perspective. And taking it one step further, I ventured that
while these assumptions seem self-evident to the believer, they are
not self-evident to all, myself included. Still, I wrote, I would
choose to adopt them as my own if only I could. As I worded it then,
“This way of belief gives meaning to the troubling times, lends
hopefulness and optimism to even the ordinary moments of routine.”
Simply put, these assumptions promote a healthy, wholesome, joyful
lens through which to view the world.
In response, N.M. Landaiche wrote that he would be interested in
“what beliefs I actually live,” rather than the “more hopeful lens”
through which I’d prefer to orient my life. In short, he asked,
“What view of the world do you have and how would you characterize
that particular lens?”1 And I pondered that question,
intending, at some point, to write an editorial in response to
Mick’s interest.
That question took a fresh turn in the spring of 2003, mid-April
to be exact. You see, we had a new addition to our family, Luke, the
sweetest puppy one could ever hope to find. Rescued by a shelter,
Luke joined us just a few days before Christmas 2002.
Now, Luke is a true mutt in every sense of the word. Nobody can
quite figure out what breeds he has in him. Shepherd, definitely;
schnauzer, probably — but that doesn't account for all his
characteristics, chief among them multicolor fur splaying out in
every wayward direction and a heart of gold. Did I mention clumsy?
The most perfect — the sweetest — dog in this world is also a bit of
a clod.
On the evening of April 13, 2003, I turned in early. After
all, 5:30 am on a Monday morning comes much too quickly and I needed
some sleep to face the workweek ahead. The scene in the next room,
I’m sure, was angelic. My teenage daughter working at the computer;
all twenty-five pounds of little Luke asleep on her bed. Suddenly …
thud! Instantaneously, Elizabeth and Luke dash into my room. “Mommy,
Luke fell out of bed!” Half laughing over his tumble, half concerned
he might have hurt himself, she stands off to the side as Luke leaps
onto my bed and bounces up to my head. I open a groggy eye, check
him out, realize he’s fine, and beg both of them to let me get back
to sleep. She calls him and loyal little Luke goes galumphing toward
her. And for the briefest moment, all those twenty-five pounds of
sweetness shift to that one paw that lands squarely on my open eye.
To make a long story short, after the emergency room, after the
many ophthalmologist visits, I was left with an abrased cornea,
which — me being me — didn’t heal anytime soon. As weeks turned into
months, I saw the world, literally, through a perceptual lens with a
scratch — a bit blurry, a bit clouded. Yes, I knew enough about what
my world looks like to function through my day — but what I knew the
world looks like wasn’t quite what I was seeing.
I have some hesitancy describing the conceptual lens through
which I see the world. If, as I wrote in “The Chameleon and the
Whirlwind,”2 my depression blacks out the light of God in
my life, then the lens I live with is flawed. I find myself crying
out, as did the father of the boy with a dumb spirit, “I do believe,
help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:23). Wanting the “more hopeful lens” is
therefore not quite wishful thinking. Rather it’s an affirmation of
what I would be better able to embrace were I not depressed.
While what I choose to believe, an act of decision and
will, remains stable, what I actually believe is subject to
considerable change — even fluctuations throughout the day. Hunger,
fatigue, or the stress of the most ordinary of days is enough to
affect that conceptual lens, at least for me.
It’s not what you think or feel, but what you do. This
realization has become a guiding principle in my life, so much so
I’ve set the words afloat on the desktop of my computer. What I
think may change — and what I feel can be as capricious as the
colors of the chameleon — but what I do is telling. I can
better observe my deeper inclinations by reflecting upon what I do.
We are, after all, more than our intellect, more than our
emotions. Our inner self often seems motivated by a flow of purpose
other than what originates in our heads or moods. A certain
identifying impetus keeps us steady in our character, despite the
more fluid and readily self-seen thoughts and feelings we
experience. So, as I see it, what of ourselves we glimpse through
interior self-study can often miss the fuller picture, a clue to
which lies in what we do.
So, what are the beliefs with which I ordinarily live, rather
than long to live? I would say I do believe in God and that God is
good. Yet the actuality of God is not self-evident to me and I do
not always find believing easy. As Scripture says, “This is the work
of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (John 6:29). Yes,
I can attest to that statement: to believe is work.
Sometimes it even seems that God is at work within me, invisibly,
hidden from my awareness — God doing the work of believing in God,
so to speak. After all, I do manage, beyond myself, to stay fast on
the goal of faith. Perhaps it is akin to, “For we do not know what
we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself pleads for us
with unutterable groanings” (Romans 8:26).
And believing is work I’ve embraced. Even my dreams are often
fraught with prayer. Amazing how easily my dream self turns to a
deep and faithful prayer life that my waking self rarely attains!
Still, my waking discipline does include bible study and prayer. Of
one point I am convinced: unless one devotes daily time to pursuing
the faith, the minutes and hours will drift away into the more
mundane activities of our routine.
I would also say I believe that “Creation or All That Is, is
neither whimsical nor random in its function, but unfolds according
to an inherent pattern.”3 While my “more hopeful
lens” would cast the glow of beneficent intentionality upon that
inherent pattern, what I actually believe is a bit more prosaic.
Much of nature, even much of human nature, follows an innate order.
Put good soil, ample rain, adequate sun, and healthy seeds together
and one has reason to expect plants will grow. If dark clouds gather
and flashes of lightning closely follow the thunder, it makes sense
to grab an umbrella and listen for the first drops of rain.
Observable patterns run through much of life, but that does not
necessarily indicate an intelligence or intentionality overseeing
those patterns.
Certainly, I used to believe not just in these, but in all of the
premises my October-December 2002 “Assumptions in the Nexus”
suggested were core. Believing them flowed naturally and unbroken
from my faith in God as an actuality.
And it would seem that if we believe in God’s existence — and
that God is good — the rest of the premises would fall neatly into
place. Still, as illogical as it may be, I have become rather
agnostic to the remainder of those central assumptions. Even if I do
not actively disbelieve them, neither can I affirm them as anchors
in my life. In short, I just don’t know.
Does life have a purpose? True, logic would seem to dictate that
if God is and is good, life has a purpose. Yet I am stunned by how
meaningless life often feels to me, sufficiently stunned to find
that inherent logic baffling. I can’t seem to travel the distance
from believing in God to accepting the actuality of a purpose when
life often appears so riddled with senselessness. Indeed, contrary
to the notion of an unfolding divine purpose, any vaguely
discernible hint of intentionality can seem to me almost as if
designed to thwart each nascent hope for meaning.
Nevertheless, I do hope for a purpose, even if that purpose is,
by its nature, forever beyond my grasp. I would choose to believe in
a purpose. But that’s a bit different from assuming it
unquestioningly. And it’s sufficiently different to change the sight
I now see, apart from what I might choose to believe.
More than merely disregarding my sense of meaninglessness, to
truly believe I would need to allow my choice to believe to wholly
undo what I feel, what I see, what I think, what I now apprehend.
Paradoxically, were I to follow that route, once the process was
complete and the undoing done, the beliefs thus engendered would
work to change that lens through which I comprehend — thus making
what I would see an unbroken flow from the belief assumed. That
all-changing effect I have seen time and again: indeed, I have come
to realize it is the very nature of belief. Once one travels far
enough down the path of a belief, one’s perspective melds to
accommodate the truth of the belief.
It’s one of those patterns in life, much like the expectable
development of a plant from a seed. The appearance of a belief’s
truth becomes increasingly self-evident to the believer the farther
he or she journeys into the belief. Initially, one spots particulars
— ideas, events, facts and theories — that support one’s belief,
while overlooking conflicting information. But as more and more
substantiating evidence is observed, and as the implications of
one’s belief expand in range and familiarity, all of life begins to
“fit” with the belief. Especially those belief systems that have a
well-developed, broad theology can fit or bend most every tangent,
most every counter, into the system itself. Hence, even findings
that might suggest contradictions to a nonbeliever work to further
validate the belief system to the believer. All is filtered through
the transformed lens melded to the belief.4
If that is so, how come I seem so wholly unable to make the
transition between choosing to believe and fully empowering that
choice such that it changes my lens, once more making all core
tenets flow unbroken from the first? Why the short-circuit in my
belief process? I suspect the author of Hebrews hit it on the head,
though from a different angle: “For it is impossible for those who
were once enlightened, who have both tasted the heavenly gift and
became partakers of the Holy Spirit, who have moreover tasted the
good word of God and the powers of the world to come, and then have
fallen away, to be renewed again …” (6:4-6). Simply, as I touched
upon in “That Sigh of Peace,”5 at a certain point I met
face to face, quite abruptly, with facts which proved false the
assumptions underlying my beliefs. Ironically, these facts and I
collided in the midst of my pursuing my faith — so unexpectedly, so
suddenly that I just had no time to duck. Stunned, and still seeing
my world as it appeared transformed by my beliefs, my beliefs were
nonetheless cut off at the knees.
That was many years ago. And, gradually, my conceptual lens
reconfigured itself. To be grounded again entailed, however, an
unfortunate tradeoff: the joy and light that came from believing as
I once did.6 Now I find it impossible to transit back, to
allow the process of believing to begin all over again. How,
after all, could I believe the same things, after having seen that
it was the nature of belief itself, rather than the veracity of my
beliefs, that convicted my heart the first time — and that,
similarly, it would be the nature of belief, rather than the
inherent truth of the beliefs, that again would make the beliefs so
convincing?
It’s not that the beliefs I once held are necessarily erroneous —
they may be true, they may be false. In any case, whether true or
false, it was the process of belief — the inclination of the human
being to fall ever deeper, ever more inextricably into seeing the
truth of his or her beliefs — that made my beliefs believable. How,
then, after having experienced such a collision with the power of
belief— as my beliefs, severed from their foundation, suddenly
crumpled — can I see else but the process, else but the lens? As I
put it in “Assumptions in the Nexus,” “I’m still seeing the lens
itself instead of the world as it appears through the lens.” And,
perhaps, rightly so.
Given that I am agnostic to the idea of an intrinsic purpose to
life, the rest of the core tenets are moot. That the purpose will
come to fruition, that each of us can live in accord with the
purpose — these beliefs pivot on the assumption of a purpose.
Without such a premise, they are irrelevant.
It’s not what you think or feel, but what you do. If my
thoughts and emotions vary as easily as the colors of a chameleon,
if I can better observe my deeper inclinations by reflecting on what
I do, perhaps the answer to Mick’s question lies less in interior
self-examination, more in the “doing” of my life — more in the
witness of the outer than the inner.
I live as if there is a purpose and that purpose is good. I work
hard, striving to do most everything to the best of my ability. And
the choices I make are based not so much on pleasure, reward or
gain, but on evoking something deeper, something of intrinsic value.
Why else would I produce Christian*New Age Quarterly?
Especially in regard to C*NAQ, I work as if there’s an
unfolding future, always looking to put into place in the present
what I hope will result in the days to come. I work as if toward
some unknown of deep value — again, not monetary, not personal, but
sufficiently worthwhile that I plow now. I work as if what I do is
significant enough to be worth that work, despite slim reward today.
If I do that, if I work as if toward a future fruition, might
not that belie my claim to agnosticism in regard to a purpose which
will come to pass?
I live as if aligning my life to an often-undefined standard, as
if there is some sort of “inherent good” that I might at least look
to as a compass. Never would I hold myself up as an ethical model,
but, for me, that’s not the point of upholding a standard of ethics.
As I see it, ample enough are the intrinsic reasons to embrace a
personal integrity, an orientation which proves itself useful,
rather than a code adopted merely for the seal of consensus. And so,
I value and hope to abide in honesty, diligence, productivity,
respect and sensitivity toward others, while attempting to
contribute positively to the world we share. If I strive to fulfill
what I see as an inherently wholesome ethical discipline, how does
that essentially differ from believing “each of us can live in
accord with the purpose”?
You see, I am not all that certain that the focus of my
conceptual lens accurately captures the faith I live. I’m not
convinced that what I actually believe, rather than what I wish to
believe, can support a meaningfulness to life that I really hope is
there! But, when all is said and done, the impetus of my life may be
far less reflected in what I think and feel, far more told in what I
do.
What if faith is a bit more complicated than it, at first glance,
appears? What when beliefs and thoughts don’t mirror our actions?
What when some form of blindness, some thorn for the flesh or paw in
the eye prevents us from seeing as we might truly see? Then we might
have to look elsewhere to decipher our faith. As said James, “… and
I from my works will show thee my faith” (2:18). At very least, that
might be a good place to start.
1“The
Letters Library,” Christian*New Age Quarterly, January-March
2003.
2Catherine Groves, “Through the
Editor’s Eyes: The Chameleon and the Whirlwind,” October-December
2003.
3Catherine Groves, “Through the
Editor’s Eyes: Assumptions in the Nexus,” October-December 2002.
4See Catherine Groves, “Through the
Editor’s Eyes: That Sigh of Peace,” Christian*New Age Quarterly,
January-March 2000.
5Catherine Groves, “Through the
Editor’s Eyes: “That Sigh of Peace,” Christian*New Age Quarterly,
January-March 2000.
6See Catherine Groves, “Through the
Editor’s Unknowing Eyes,” Christian*New Age Quarterly,
July-September 2000.
© 2008
Christian*New Age Quarterly.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission, “A
Tale of Two Lenses”
was originally published by
Christian*New Age Quarterly
16:2
(April-June 2004). For more information on Christian*New Age
Quarterly, write to
Catherine Groves, Editor at PO Box 276,
Clifton, NJ 07015-0276 or visit
christiannewage.com.
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