Skeptical Faith

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and love God and Science.

I loves me some science. I really do. Science is truth, and when it's not, it's looking for truth and willing to follow it wherever it leads. I love that when science says something I can go out and test it for myself and find out if it's true. I love that whenever science makes a declaration they have reproducible results. If I do it the same way they did, I'll get the same results. Don't get me wrong here; I'm talking about Science as the ideal, not science as practiced by human beings. I honestly think that if mankind is to survive our adolescence science will be a necessary component to our evolution.

I consider myself a skeptic. I tend not to take at face value what I'm told. If someone tells me that they've discovered free energy, perpetual motion, captured a ghost on film, or fought a Chupacabra hand to hand my first reaction is "show me". I've got Occam's Razor in my medicine cabinet and looking at things through a scientific microscope filters SO much bunk out of my life...

And yet...

Maybe some background first. I left the church of my nativity when I was 27. In my heart I had left it about a year or so before that, but that was my official recognition. It wasn't easy. I had spent 2 years in a foreign country serving that church and god at the age of 19 when most people were in college. I had spent countless hours before that in service projects, community projects, church projects. I had paid a tithe of all my income since I was 8 years old. I had given blessings to heal the sick, had blessed my own wife and children. I had spent a lot of time talking to god.

But then one day I needed help. Not wanted help, not desired help, needed it. I was fighting to stay alive. It was really that literal. For the first time in my life I came to my god to tell him that I needed his help. Sure, I had asked for help before, but I had never really needed it, not like I needed this. The more I plead the more I heard only the echoes of my own voice.

One day I went up into the desert alone. I got down on my knees and prayed out loud, asking for the help I needed. While I was there, mid prayer, I was suddenly struck with the absolute certainty that the god I was speaking to did not exist. The realization was so profound that I was litterally stricken dumb. I don't know how to describe it but it was so strong that I felt it physically. I was chokeing on it, I found it hard to breathe.

Some of you might find this situation odd. You have to remember that I was raised to believe in a God that was my literal father. In the same sense that your father is the father of your body, he was the father of my spirit. I was taught that just like a real father he cared about my daily life, and was interested and wanted the best for me. At this point in my life I was suffering so much that I finally reached a point where I could no longer believe that any father could let a child of his suffer so. (In the last few years or so I've also come to realize that I can also no longer belive in a god who would have taken away that suffering just for being asked by the right person.)

I eventually regained my breath. I was horrified. I felt betrayed to the core of me. The sudden realization that I had been talking for 20 something years to a figment of my imagination punched a hole in me. I was furious and grief stricken in turns. I would facilate between hating god and hating myself for hating something I knew was unreal. I felt like a fool. How could I have been decieved for so long? Were those who taught me to blame? How much of the fault was mine. Did I allow myself to be led to this place?

And so for a couple of years I went on like that, but hate makes a crummy Meme filling (cake is much better, FYI). As the hate ebbed away (it was hard to hate something I knew wasn't real) I began to feel more and more strongly the hollow space in me where my faith used to be. I didn't miss being a member of my old church. What I was missing was my sense of what the numinous was. Now when I saw a night sky full of stars like infinite grains of sand I still felt that same sense of awe and wonder, but I no longer knew to what I should attribute that feeling. Before I would have thought that it was my immortal god-child soul, wondering at god's current works and my future ones. But now what? I told myself that Science would be my god now. That it promised me nothing and so could not lie to me. But my feelings of discomfort persisted.

The next part gets a bit harder to tell, but I'll do my best. My problems that I had been asking god for help with went unresolved. I continued to struggle with them. In some ways it was easier knowing I was on my own. In other ways it was much harder because I had a hard time knowing why I should do anything at all.

One night I had a dream. I was walking in a barren landscape. The sky was very dark, like just before a big thunderstorm. There were trees all around, but every one of them was dead. Just a trunk with bare branches. Even the bark was worn from them by the wind. The place was empty, and for what seemed like a long time I wandered randomly through the trees, knowing that there was nothing to see, nowhere to get to, I just walked to do something. After a time I noticed a black speck in the sky. It came towards me rapidly and I eventually saw that it was a crow or a raven (I'm familiar with both species from back home, and in the dream it seemed to grow and shrink, features changing so I could not tell which). It flew down and landed in a tree not far from me, some distance above my head. I held still not wanting to scare it away. As I watched it I noticed that the crow was not entirely black. It would shimmer from time to time, waves running over it like heat waves on a highway. When the waves passed over it and along it I could see that under the black feathers this crow was dead. I could see his bones and the sinews holding them together. He was a ghost. We sat there for what felt like several minutes. I could see that he was examining me, and I him. When he opened his mouth to speak I wasn't surprized.

Crow: "Do you know where you are?"
Me: "Yes. I'm in Hell, or a hell anyway, maybe my hell."
Crow: "Close enough. Are you miserable yet?"

I responded that I was. He cocked his head sideways in the way crows do and looked at me piercingly for a few seconds. Then he jumped from the tree and started to fly back into the sky.

Me: "Wait! Don't leave me here alone! I want to get out!"
Crow-over his shoulder and growing fainter: "Then fly out. You can do it, but you'll have to die first."

His answer stunned me so that I stopped running and shouting and suddenly I understood that the reason he could come and go was that he was already dead, so this place couldn't hold him. I looked back up into the sky to find him and at that moment I woke up.

I have a lot of crazy dreams (ask H). They are often vivid and real, but this one was different. It stuck with me and would not go away.

What happened next is honestly too sacred to me to share here. Suffice to say that Crow was right, both about possibility and method of my escape in a very literal and spiritual sense. I died, but then things got better.

Some time after the immediate crisis ended I had another dream where I talked to Crow in a park. I remember that he jokingly said "Ya'ah'tee Ghost Crow." (Ya'ah'tee is a Navajo greeting) At the time I didn't question what he called me, although since then I've felt by pieces both comfortable and uncomfortable with the name. "Are you "indian" then?" I had asked him. He didn't answer but looked at me in a way that said "What do you think?" I asked him "Are you a god or spirit or are you just some part of my psyche and this is me talking to myself in a way that feels spiritually comfortable to me?" He made a sort of cawing laugh and said "Does it matter really?" I nodded my head and granted him that no, I guessed it really didn't matter, as long as he didn't ask me to do anything crazy. I don't remember his exact reply but I do remember that it was jokingly sarcastic. Something along the lines of "Damn, I'll have to find some other dead crow to burn down the orphanage then."

I remember asking him if I was really dead, and if so, how was I walking around, was I souless now? His answer was something to the effect of part of me had truely died, but it was a part of me that wanted desperately to die, and so I shouldn't mourn it overmuch. After thinking about that for a minute I said "So now what?" and he laughed and said "Round two punk!" He got more serious for a minute and I sat next to him and we talked some more. I can't recall any of that part of the conversation, but I have a feeling that they were instructions of some sort. Not remembering them doesn't bother me, I have a feeling I'll remember if I need to. I woke up feeling better than I had in a long time. It was the same feeling you get when you talk to a friend you haven't seen in a while and just talking to them heals you.

So, where does this leave me? Skeptically Faithful? Is science my wife, with spirituality my mistress? Can they co-exist? I know that I don't want what I had before, Religion having a restraining order on Science. I need harmony.

I've been thinking about it for a long time now, and I'm finally starting to come to some conclusions. I think I can have both. What I need is not compartmentalism, but rather a dual perspective. I can look into the night sky and see the milky way, and marvel at the fact that I'm looking side on at the spiral galaxy in which my sun is the tiniest light, while at the same time feeling the numinous quality of it all, that sense of otherness that helps me define myself.

All of this started as an email sent to me by a friend. He is struggling with many of the same questions. He's a man of science but he knows himself well enough to know that he's something more too. Like me he's feeling a bit caught between two worlds and sometimes the self appointed gatekeepers of both sides make it hard to accept what your heart is telling you. This is too long already, but I want to address this last bit more in the next post.

Next time on "Clever as Crows"! Will our hero find a spiritual label he can be comfortable in? Will he fall into the trap of the evil Plastic Shaman? Will he be overwhelmed by the dread Lord Xenocentrism? Tune in next show, same Crow time, same Crow channel.

~Meme