Deadwood

Thoughts about God, ourselves and our relationship with Him

I started a handful of posts but never got around to finishing them. I hope this post finds you well, I’ve missed writing for each of you and connecting through the words on these pages.

I just finished up my intern year of psychiatry residency and we had our second child just a few weeks ago. I suppose between work and family life, the motivation to write had sort of gone out of my sails.

When I think back on this last year (and even much of medical school) I get the sense that I was in a wasteland of sorts. At least spiritually, I feel that I have been a wanderer, limping along at times with a faith that has taken a back seat to the stresses of my training. The faith that once provided such support and strength waned amidst depression and stress. I think that this was likely responsible for my decreased literary output, more than anything else. It can be difficult to think about theology and philosophy when one is just trying to survive.

I have felt a bit more myself recently and with that have had a little more bandwidth to contemplate those things that I used to love. I notice that I can connect with others, especially my family, and feel loved in ways that seem foreign. The other night, for the first time that I can recall, I stood in my son’s room and just watched him sleep. I just stood there and watched. To feel whole is a wonderful thing.

Amidst this “recovery of myself”, I’ve noticed that I’ve been able to meaningfully connect with God once again and I’ve had a few thoughts about this.

We each have a style of relating to those we know, and over time as they change and we change, the nature of that interaction changes as well. Sometimes though, we might mature but when we see someone with whom we have not connected for some time, we “revert” to the way in which we used to relate to that person and see in ourselves a person we thought we had outgrown.

I bring this up because I think it is much the same with our relationship with God. If our relationship with God has been stagnant, when we again connect with God, we might see in ourselves someone we had forgotten. We have since begun relating to people in other, healthier ways, but connecting with God again may be like connecting with that old friend from high school. We see those parts of ourselves that were maladaptive or perhaps unhelpful. I do not mean to say that it is in any way God’s fault that we related to Him in ways that were less than helpful. Our goal is that our beliefs, such as about what God is like, would accurately reflect reality but this is sometimes not the case.

Imagine that your childhood was quite traumatic, your parents abusive and you were subsequently adopted. Your new parents are loving and affectionate but your early experiences with your biological parents create an unstable attachment toward your new parents and your interactions with them are colored with suspicion and mistrust. Over time (we can hope), you will find new ways of relating to your parents that are healthy, secure and strong. Over time your mental model of your parents shifts from that which was heavily informed by your early traumas to a view that is more reflective of their natures and thus closer to the truth.

It is here that I find Bayesian reasoning to be helpful: We each have mental models, theories and hypotheses about how the world works. Those are formulated with the input of prior experiences (sometimes just called “priors”.) Each new experience should help us modify our theories so they more accurately align with our experience of reality. For example, seeing a flock of mourning doves roosting daily in a neighbor’s olive tree led me to believe that mourning doves might for some reason like olive trees. But then I saw that our neighbors had a bird feeder and a bird bath just beneath the tree and I saw our neighbor scattering bird food in the morning. I tried to update my theory into a model that more accurately reflected my observations of reality: Mourning doves might like olive trees, but they more likely prefer trees that offer easy access to food, water and protection.

I feel that one’s understanding of God and therefore one’s manner of relating to God are especially susceptible to external influence. We (though I may just be speaking to myself here) often do not have evidence of God’s nature in the way that a child is confronted with evidence of his parent’s goodness. In other words, we don’t often have as much data to aid us in updating our priors about God that are inaccurate. I imagine that because of this (though I may be wrong), our ideas about God are far more apt to be colored by relationships we’ve had with others or even our relationship with ourselves.

The Isaac who felt deeply connected to God in college was also an Isaac who expected perfection from himself, was troubled by recurrent, unwanted thoughts and who slept poorly at night, troubled by thoughts of the day to come. I can only imagine how this biased my understanding of God, leading me to believe Him a harsh master who valued my performance above all else. Medical training has been agonizing, but I am thankful for the ways in which it has forced me to confront my perfectionism and other maladaptive patterns. In turn, as I spend time with God, I notice old phrases or ideas that pop up which now seem inconsistent with my updated understanding of God’s grace. At times I feel that unless I am living in perfection (which I now realize is unrealistic), I should not attempt to connect with God. Or perhaps unless I “feel forgiven” then I really haven’t been forgiven by God. As I notice these little ideas, I have to pause and remind myself that they are from an old “era” in my life and need updating.

This is a bit of a digression, but when I hear that someone has resigned themselves to atheism, I wonder what they imagine God would be like if God existed. I would be an atheist as well if I felt belief in God meant belief in a “vindictive sky fairy” (borrowing from Richard Dawkins.) It is intellectually easy to associate God with sexual mores, tee-totaling and the second amendment, but in my experience, God is far more mysterious and grand than any flavor of dogmatism. Though I think there certainly concrete aspects of God’s identity and from which flows a moral code, our need to create a mental model of reality inevitably reduces God to something that can “fit” in our minds and this God is often just an anthropomorphized embodiment of our opinions. I mourn for those who, feeling they understand what God is all about after hearing “God hates fags”, reject any possibility of a God. We tend to project our own idealogies on a God who is often silent, and taking the silence as agreement, create a God in our own image who affirms our prejudices and sits on our side of the aisle.

I think there are many ways of updating our “God priors”, but one manner, Christian contemplation, has been especially helpful to me lately. Christian contemplation has a long history, beginning with the desert hermits of the 1st and 2nd centuries. The best description of Christian contemplation I’ve found comes from Father Walter Burghart, who states “[Christian contemplation] is a long, loving look at the real.” The writings of Thomas Merton, 20th century Christian contemplative, have been quite helpful to me as well. Contemplation begins with an awareness of God’s presence and is often silent. It is difficult to describe and looks different for everyone, but for me, I begin to sense the enormity of God, God’s love, and God’s peace. It is simple yet profound. At times, I begin with a Bible verse, often a passage from the Gospels, and I try to see it in my mind’s eye. I try to imagine Jesus speaking to the crowds or healing the paralytic and just “sit” in the moment. I think the Christian practice of Contemplation is best learned by doing it and allowing God to guide. Other times I just sit in silence and remind myself that God is near.

I am by no means an expert, but I think that honest and consistent engagement with God goes quite a long way toward helping us better understand who God is, who we are, and how we are to relate to God. And at the end of the day, it isn’t so much about Bayesian reasoning or projection as it is about taking a long, loving look at the real.

In those who are most alive and therefore most themselves, the life of the body is subordinated to a higher life that is in them. It quietly surrenders to the far more abundant vitality of a spirit living on the levels that defy measurement and observation. The mark of true life in man is therefore not turbulence but control, not effervescence but lucidity and direction, not passion but the sobriety that sublimates all passions and elevates it to the clear inebriation of wisdom. The control we mean here is not arbitrary and tyrannical control of by an interior principle which can be called, variously, a “super-ego” or a pharisaical conscience: it is the harmonious coordination of man’s power in striving for realization of his deepest spiritual potentialities. It is not so much a control of one part of man by another, but the peaceful integration of all man’s powers into one perfect actuality which is his true self, that is to say, his spiritual self.

- Thomas Merton