Getting Nearer To God

"Being a Modern Man, I like to fancy that my spirituality is evolving; it is showing 'progress.' Whether it is in fact or not, it certainly has gone through stages. My first lessons about what a rosary was came from the hardscrabble ethnic Catholic world, primarily from working-class Irish and Italians. My primary Irish influence was my maternal grandmother, who began life as a peasant girl in Cork. My primary Italian influence was her best friend Lill, who lived in the apartment next door. (My grandmother claimed to have a deep prejudice against Italians, yet all of her closest friends were Italian. Attempting to embrace such contradictions played a big role in my early spiritual development.) . . .

I have a theory (of course). If God is everywhere at all times, then we are not really 'summoning' God when we pray. The thing that actually stands between God and ourselves is….ourselves. We get in our own way, because we can’t easily remove ourselves from our thoughts about ourselves and all the trash that constantly runs through our minds. This may mean that anything that facilitates removing ourselves as a barrier to God is prayer. There seem to be many, many ways to do this. Many roads lead to God. What looked to me (and perhaps would still be for me) like the pious superstitions of my grandmother in her prayer was actually a way that she could focus on her prayer, on praying it carefully and removing herself by concentrating on this. Lill’s practices, which to me now resemble almost a form of voodoo, were a way she could sanctify her entire environment — not to my satisfaction, but to hers. . . .

Years ago I spent a night in a Japanese Zen monastery on Mount Koya." More

Spirituality & Health

Sheri Kaplan's faith "is unorthodox, but it's central to her life. She was raised Jewish, and although she claims no formal religion now, she prays and meditates every day. She believes God is keeping the HIV virus at bay, and that her faith is the reason she's alive today.

'Everything starts from a thought, and then the thought creates a reaction,' she says. 'And I have the power to control my mind, before it gets to a physical level or an emotional level.'. . .

Gail Ironson is a professor at the University of Miami. Ironson, an AIDS researcher, runs down a battery of questions.

'During this time have you had any HIV- or AIDS-related symptoms?' Ironson asks.

'Nope,' Kaplan says. 'Nothing.'

'What percent of your well-being do you think is due to your own attitudes and behaviors versus medical care?' Ironson continues.

Kaplan laughs: '110 percent.'

Kaplan has never taken medicine, yet the disease has not progressed to AIDS (and she is not part of the population that has a mutation in the CCR5 gene that prevents progression of HIV to AIDS). In the mid-1990s, when having HIV was akin to a death sentence, Ironson noticed a number of patients like Kaplan never got sick. Ironson wanted to know why. And she found something surprising.

'If you ask people what's kept you going so long, what keeps you healthy, often people would say spirituality,' she says. 'It was something that just kept coming up in the interviews, and that's why I decided to look at it.' Ironson calls the finding extraordinary. Ironson was one of the first researchers to connect a patient's approach to God to specific chemical changes in the body." More

Have You Had A Spiritual Experience? What Does It Mean?

"According to polls, there's a 50-50 chance you have had at least one spiritual experience — an overpowering feeling that you've touched God, or another dimension of reality."

But is all this the result of neurons firing in your brain? Or is it an actual spiritual experience? Put differently, scientists can track neurons in your temporal lobe while you are having the experience, but does this "mean that there's nothing spiritual going on?

'No,' [one scientist, Devinsky,] says simply.

Think about a man and woman who are in love, Devinsky says. They look at each other, and in all likelihood, something fires in their temporal lobes.

'However, does that negate the presence of true love between them?' he asks. 'Of course not.' " More

Science has its own dogma and doctrine, with reductionism as part of them. In terms of scientific reductionism, there is this to consider, which can stand against reductionism without help from the dogma or doctrine of religion, if that is your choice. The writer is himself a secular Jew. His "religious education did not take." Here is what he says:

"Whatever the elementary particles are doing, they are not forming political alliances, or looking on one another with mute incoherent longing, or casting an anxious eye at the clock, or waking with a start in the early hours of the morning, wondering what it all means, or coming to realize that they are destined to fall like leaves of the trees leaving not a trace behind." Found in this.

I don't regard gaps in our knowledge as evidence for the divine; neither do I deny it. (I hold to what John Keats called Negative Capability.) Some gaps, but not all, will be narrowed, not closed, by reductionist methods. The divine? That requires faith and belief, a different approach.

With reductionist investigation a degree of mystery will always remain. Some call the mystery God. Others call it God of The Gaps, to diminish or disappear as they narrow.