“The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

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I have always relished philosophical discussions about the nature of God and I have spent a lifetime pondering human conceptions of the divine. If we have a special place in the universe, or are endowed with a unique purpose by a creator, then our ability to reason is one of the things that sets us apart. What good are our beliefs if they can’t stand up to scrutiny? Knowledge and discernment come from having the courage to question our convictions. I say, submit your religious beliefs to the fire of scrutiny. Burn away what is merely convention and the ultimate truth will emerge as polished gold. I have striven to raise my children with this same level of honesty, courage and sensitivity.

I’ve changed a lot since high school, when I ardently embraced Christianity as a born-again acolyte. One of my former Young Life leaders recently asked me about my current faith and ideas about God. I get that question periodically from old friends so I thought it was time to provide a thoughtful answer.

While I am an innately spiritual individual, I am not afraid to admit that many bad concepts pervade our religious traditions, or to acknowledge the inconsistencies and, in some cases, outright atrocities in our holy books. Not only our scientific knowledge, but also our political, social and moral sensibilities have evolved considerably since these books were written. In addition, most modern religions are burdened by centuries of dogma that detract from the core insight and guidance of their founders. While they uphold fundamental virtues and have led many people to do good deeds, in some cases they have become more of a hindrance than an aid to attaining true spiritual insight.

Thus for many years my spiritual quest has involved un-learning as much as learning: stripping away centuries of ideas and traditions to uncover the bare essence of divinity, the nuggets of truth that motivated enlightened individuals to share their experiences in the first place. Rituals, sacraments, liturgies, hymns and volumes of ecclesiastical literature were all designed to help us find the way, but in most cases their meaning has been lost or diluted by convention.

When it comes to Christianity, I am most interested in the authentic words and spiritual teachings of Jesus. Unfortunately, he didn’t write down his sermons, delivered in Aramaic, or if he did they weren’t preserved. The Gospels were written decades after his death, in Greek, and by that time the early church had it’s own interpretation and evangelical agenda—from St. Paul’s zealous attempts to guide the early church to the pervasive institutions of the present day. If you read the Gospels with some discernment, however, you can still detect the genuine message and spirit of what Jesus stood for.

Look closely and without preconceptions and you will see that Jesus’ views are in harmony with the supreme teachings of all the great religions, from the Upanishads to the Tao to the Buddhist sutras to the words of the Zen and Sufi masters.

When Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God, I don’t think he was referring to some future heavenly state or foreseeing an apocalyptic vision. He was talking about a state of being, a way of living in harmony with the way things are, right now. Jesus also put the scriptures in perspective. He cast aside the ancient precepts of the Torah and the tedious legal jargon of ancient Judaism. He put a more loving, tolerant face on the provincial Yahweh of the Old Testament. And he taught us not to equate spirituality with dogma, or belief in a set of doctrines.

It is clear to me through much study that the mystical traditions of the world converge upon a common reality that transcends words and thoughts. Spiritual experience is a natural propensity of the human mind, but we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it. It resides within us and is accessible to everyone. Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened to you.

Clearly Jesus was aware of this fundamental truth. And while some Christian sects and denominations have buried it, others have helped it to flower, such as the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages and some modern theologians like Master Eckhart and Richard Rohr. Introspection and meditation lead us to this fundamental awareness. We apprehend God’s presence by looking within, quieting the mind and becoming one with the groundless source of being.

All of our ideas about God and the nature of existence ultimately arise from the mind. To me this simple truth is at the heart of spirituality. And while we can argue endlessly about whether one religion is better than another, the fact is that some religious traditions acquaint us with this central truth better than others. There are pearls of wisdom in the Bible, to be sure, but when it comes to meditation and direct spiritual insight, the teachings of Buddha, Shankara, Nagarjuna, Lao Tzu and many others far surpass anything we find in the Judeo Christian canon. Jesus echoed their wisdom with his emphasis on personal transformation and his insistence that God can be found in the still, small voice inside of us. That’s why he talked about the natural spirituality of children, saying that to know God you must become like a child. Children naturally embody the divine here and now.

We feel God’s presence in proportion to our openness, and (for me anyway), most of the rituals and sacraments of the modern church stand in the way of that simple truth. The luminous, the compassionate, the treasure buried in the field, the pearl of great price—these allegories point to the overwhelming presence of a God who is here all the time, right beneath our feet. We don’t need to earn this state of being. It is already ours and, if anything, most of us lose it as we grow up. As Jesus said, children don’t need to “enter” the Kingdom of God. They are already in it.

This self-evident truth is often clouded by the unreasonable demands of modern religions and their elaborate systems of belief, some of which are clearly untenable. How can we believe in a rational God who demands us to hold irrational tenets? Must we posit a supernatural world? Isn’t it enough to believe that Jesus was a man who transformed himself and left great examples and teachings? Must we also believe that he was the Son of God, born of a virgin, and destined to return to earth in clouds of glory? Must we accept the abhorrent concept of Original Sin and the exclusionary idea that only certain individuals are saved? Such dogma takes what is good and pure in Christianity – the example of Jesus – and places it forever out of reach. Becoming like Jesus becomes impossible.

I don’t think Life can be reduced to its material constituents or that consciousness can be explained as a series of chemical reactions. However, we can’t ever really know the ultimate nature of reality due to one inescapable fact: read, ponder, and argue as we may, any statement about absolute truth only reflects our puny human conceptions. All of our noblest ideas are bounded by what we can see, measure, and understand. One of these conceptions that we must overcome is the illusion of “self” which encourages a duality between us and everything else and prevents us from contemplating the nature of consciousness, from which all of our ideas about God arise.

I’ve strayed towards Eastern philosophy because it offers clear guidelines about the nature of the mind and the path to spiritual fulfillment through simple meditation and contemplation. The teachings of the Buddha don’t require a leap of faith or acceptance of inscrutable doctrine or belief in the unknown. They simply point the way to a rational exploration of the nature of consciousness—an exploration, I might add, that is in accord with current thinking in psychology, neuroscience, and our honest perceptions of the world around us. They describe the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and body in a way that can be validated by direct experience.

For me, prayer doesn’t involve beseeching the attention of an external deity. It is a personal transformation guided by liberation from the illusion of self. It begins not with sin, but with serenity. We are naturally in a state of grace and we can all apprehend this clear state of awareness, uncluttered by dogma, transcending thought. Meditation not only acquaints us with the groundless source of being. It is also a very practical method of cultivating awareness and refining our attention.  

My simple faith in the God of popular Christianity, which characterized my high school and early college years, has expanded and blossomed. I passed through a dark and nihilistic phase in my twenties but I have arrived on the other side with a meaningful and honest worldview—and a fulfilling spiritual life as well. Abandoning “religion” was step one. Understanding “faith” was step two: not a virtue, but a misguided attempt to justify nonsensical arguments. Faith runs counter to honest intellectual inquiry because it requires no justification and allows no argument. In what other area of human discourse do we permit such nonsense?

My spiritual life is a continuum. And while there have been plenty of reversals and a few outright denials along the way, I can trace an unbroken path to the present. Today I’m agnostic, if pushed, with little need for faith and a low tolerance for nonsense. The kid from Young Life camp is still here and I don’t try to negate any of the experiences that have made me who I am. Most of all, I am untroubled in my soul. I find beauty in simple things and I feel God as a part of me, every day. As the great American poet Wallace Stevens said:

The bird which sings in the palm sings a human song. It wakes me to a world which is enough.

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Bibliography

While I did not want to interrupt the flow of this narrative with citations and footnotes, influential sources include the following:

Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus

Sam Harris, The End of Faith

Matthiew Ricard, The Monk and the Philosopher

Lao Tzu, The Tao Te Ching

Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems

Alan Wallace, Mediations of a Buddhist Skeptic

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: The Transcendentalist

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Nagarjuna, Seventy Verses on Emptiness

The New American Standard Bible

“The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”

– Rumi

For Suzanne Marie:

One August 9 many years ago, you strolled off of a sandy beach and into my life. Who would have thought that the playful summer romance that began that day on Coronado Island would bloom into such a marvelous, enduring relationship?

Beautiful, courageous, passionate, nurturing—you have been my hope and my salvation, my goddess from on high and my girl next door. You swept me off my feet and caught me when I fell. You taught me what it means to be me.

If Coronado is a place where dreams come true, then (as Rumi would say) I must have been dreaming of you. After many years in this uncertain world you remain the only person I have ever truly loved. I am happiest when you are in my arms.

Men take a lot of credit for their physical accomplishments, and most women play along—knowing the fine balance in which our fragile egos hang. They watch with feigned enthusiasm as we lunge for footballs, wrench open mayonnaise jars, and dance up flights of stairs with all the heavy luggage. Yet our greatest physical accomplishments and feats of endurance pale in comparison to the heroic ordeal that women have been facing since the beginning of time. Giving birth.

I was a bit naive about the process until my son Matthew was born. Susie would be in labor for a few hours, I was told, so I packed our bags accordingly: books and magazines, playing cards, a selection of cassette tapes. You know, things to pass the time.

Pass the time—ha! Time stood still during those agonizing hours. I scarcely remembered what day it was. Picking music wasn’t foremost on my mind.

We did manage to play a little gin rummy in the early stages, while we were still at home. The contractions had begun the previous evening (Susie swears it was the hot-‘n-spicy pizza that kicked them off) and continued intermittently throughout the night. By the afternoon of the next day they were coming regularly, about 10 minutes apart. We carefully clocked the onset and duration of each uterine spasm right along side our gin rummy scores. As the contractions mounted in frequency and intensity, as Susie became unable to easily breathe (let alone discard), it became clear that the Big Moment had arrived. The score was 440 to 16. No sense drawing out the card tournament any longer.

Me? I was calm and collected. I didn’t speed to the hospital or leave anything at home. I casually escorted my trembling wife into the emergency room. The baby ought to be here in a couple of hours, I thought. I’ll hold her hand, she’ll push him out, and that will be that.

It was about eight in the evening when we checked into the hospital. The contractions were already getting unbearable for Susie. I likened it to the end of a 10-mile run, when the flag goes up and you know you are heading into the last lap. Her energy must be running out, I remember thinking. Thank God it’s almost over.

Almost over? A sleepless night and 24 hours of contractions were just the beginning. Little Matthew didn’t draw his first breath until 5:00 the following morning, nine hours after we checked into the hospital. Those hours were like none I have ever experienced, or even imagined. They were exhausting. They were frightening. And, in the end, they were the most heart-rending moments of my life. Moments that forever changed my perspective about this strong, giving woman I married.

As the hours passed the labor grew more laborious. My suitcase of music and games and sandwiches sat forgotten in the corner. We huddled together in a private world that extended just a few inches beyond our faces, heeding Julie Andrews’ sage advice to remember our favorite things. But just about the time Susie’s breathing leveled off and a momentary sense of peace settled over her, another contraction would begin.

“Stay with me!” I pleaded. “Hold on! You can do it!” My feeble attempts at comfort seemed worthless as the inexorable rhythms of her body took over. The scene around her faded from view. Her breathing sped up and her back arched as the great, wrenching force inside of her grew more intense. Occasionally she opened her eyes and looked at me imploringly, just as a contraction hit her full force. I would grip her tightly, trying to take away her pain, to will it into me through some herculean psychic effort. But each time I Iost her. Hers was an old battle and it had to be fought alone.

Women have no choice but to embody the virtues men so casually parade around: strength, courage, stamina, the will to continue to the end. Labor is a marathon effort and there is no dropping out. Even after many hours of exhausting contractions, grappling with a force like Ezekiel’s angel, there is still the pushing to contend with.

For Susie there was four hours of it.

Until now she had to simply bear the contractions in her own desperate way. Once her cervix was fully dilated and the baby was positioned for launch she had to take an active role in pushing him out. With the onset of each contraction she was told to grip the rails, bear down with her feet, and PUSH with everything she had.

I thought I would pass out with weariness just watching. The kid was stuck. (Or else he just liked it in there, I reasoned). I manned my post at the fetal monitor, watching the zigzag tracings that represented the activity of Susie’s uterus. As each contraction approached the needle began to jump like the signs of an impending earthquake on a seismograph. My job was to alert her a few seconds ahead of time so she could get her breathing right and push in unison with her contractions.

This went on for a long time. My eyes began playing tricks on me; my brain wiggled with each squiggle of the monitor. Once or twice I even dozed off, a wayward apostle in my private Gethsemane. I’ll never know how Susie stuck with it, where those reserves of strength came from, why she didn’t just roll over and give up the ghost. Women know something that men can’t quite grasp. The victory is sure. A new baby is about to be born.

Many years have passed since that endless night of beauty and pain, but the images remain, especially that final moment: choking back sobs, blinded by tears, digging my nails into Susie’s hand as she gave one last gargantuan push, let out a strange animal howl … and pushed out my son.

“It’s a boy!” I yelled, as his penis slid clear.

A boy. Whining and wet and pink, lying on the belly of his exhausted mother, who still had the strength to smile.

People I am close to tell me I don’t feel anything. I used to tell myself the same thing. For a long time I was numb, just trying to fathom the whirling decades. I feel a lot of things now. Sometimes I feel them so strongly my heart almost breaks. That’s why I started writing poetry. A poem is like a little package that we use to wrap up deep emotions and big ideas.

At the moment I’m sitting outside listening to crickets. I think of them as the heartbeat of the night. Always chirping, they give me a sense of time, like little wheezing metronomes. And the wind is blowing, which expands my sense of space, bringing messages from far away, a warm breeze from the hills or a nostalgic scent from the sea.

Last year I started writing a novel. I spend my life explaining things for other people and I wanted to explain something that matters to me. Mostly people pay me to explain how their gadgets work or why their software is better than someone else’s. They ask me to help them Get the Word Out so they can obtain funding and build a customer base and hopefully reach Critical Mass. If enough people want to buy their products, maybe a bigger company will want to buy them.

I don’t know if any publishing company will want to buy my novel. It’s not written for any Series A shareholders and there is no verifiable market potential. I’m not selling anything other than my thoughtful musings. But it’s full of feeling and heartache and mystery and love and intrigue. I’ve written 70,000 words so I figure I’m about two thirds done. As a reader I abandon many novels before I get to that point so I don’t know why anybody would want to read 70,000 words of mine. Yet I often sit and think about the story during idle moments. Then I have to translate it into scenes and dialogue and characters and plot twists. It’s a lot to keep in my head, especially when I spend most of my day thinking about how to define the latest cloud strategy. I have the occasional hour in the early morning to fashion my thoughts into prose. Please stay tuned.

Tonight I was watching Fareed Zakaria while I was chopping vegetables. He’s a better explainer than I will ever be. Or maybe he just understands things better. He says the American economy is doing fine, comparatively speaking, but we’re running out of things to make. It’s an uphill battle to compete against all the other countries that can make things less expensively.

I don’t know how to make things. Most of the people I know don’t know how to make things either. I interviewed Jaron Lanier once, at a conference in Palm Desert. He had just flown in from Poland and he was very tired. He said we have become a nation of bit twiddlers. We don’t make anything, we just move bits around—financial transactions and marketing brochures and engineering specs. I don’t think we would survive very long after the apocalypse. Most of us don’t darn socks or grow vegetables or forge steel. We just stare at our screens and type. Sometimes it’s a mystery to me, how all this twiddling can translate into an income and a livelihood and an economy, but that’s what we have become.

Tonight instead of coming back up to my studio to move more bits around I got sidetracked by the crickets and the starlight. Floored, really. I plopped down in an Adirondack chair outside my office, unable to go further. I was thinking about the picture that started this post, snapped when I was 15 or 16, when my world was all starry potential and the Poles still cowered behind the Iron Curtain. I remember that exact moment. Supertramp was playing and I was bobbing in place like a happy idiot. And now I remember something else that Lanier told me during that interview, after his red-eye from Poland. “You are lucky,” he told me. “You can write whatever you want to write.”

So I’m sitting outside listening to crickets and talking into this tape recorder, which miraculously is transcribing my words into text. When I’m done I’ll tell the machine to post it to Tumblr, and on to Facebook, so you can read it through whatever app you favor. Unless you get sidetracked by some other bits streaming by.

The crickets have been chirping for a long time and they will be chirping for a long time after we’re gone. Theirs is an old song, the hum and throb of the world. Sometimes I think about the vast expanse of time and the brief moments that include me. Who is this watcher, this wonderer, squinting out at the moon, listening, breathing, feeling? That’s something I can’t really explain. But I’m going to keep trying. That’s in the novel, by the way. It’s all about the subliminal messages that we receive from the world and from each other. And it’s about the dark things that broil up inside that we don’t really understand, messages from the past that define our worlds. It’s about the echoes of hope that we have been hearing since we first started writing and painting and scratching pictures into rocks, striving to connect with something beyond ourselves. That’s why we write and draw and paint and make music, whether we are explaining how a database works or expressing what we feel when we gaze into a lover’s eyes.

So even if it’s just an hour here and a paragraph there I’m going to keep writing. Because I can. Good, bad, or otherwise, at least it’s my agenda. It’s what I see and feel and laugh about and long for. And I hope you will keep listening, and maybe even read my book someday.

Just as long as there’s two of us, I’ll carry on.

Crisis is too strong a word.
For some it is a creeping awareness,
an unvarnished acknowledgment
of mortality, a growing sense
of a receding horizon of possibilities.
Life’s upward trajectory reaches a zenith
as you hover above potential’s plateau—
for some a temporary loss of gravitas
for others a sense of outright freefall.
Time’s relentless blur comes into focus
with a glimpse of your reflection in a sidewalk window,
an unedited snapshot of you, now, minus the delusion.
Desultory desires disturb your slumbers—
the clip of a heel on a distant dance floor,
the ineluctable allure of the girl in the bar.
Dreams that once defied scrutiny are assessed anew:
the life you imagined while making other plans.

And then there are sudden epiphanies
when life’s enduring richness shines through,
glimmers of eternity peeking through
the space between the moments.
Look again at your reflection:
not an aging man but a timeless watcher,
an integral participant in the unfolding drama of existence.
Life fades but the lust for living lingers.
Tiny details come together to hint at the big picture:
a favorite melody from a passing car,
the dip and whirl of bats at twilight,
the last words of a cherished book in a sunny chair.
Each successive moment gains meaning
from the ones that precede it—
threads in an evolving tapestry,
pixels in a luminous display
that gain color through the prism of years.