A spiritual journey forces you to confront the concept of self-directed motion. The action that you take is of secondary importance to the realization that action is yours to take.
*
Until I was seventeen years old, I thought I believed in God. In retrospect I think I was much too busy at the time wrestling with the complexities of religion—which is not the same thing—to have ever truly given serious consideration to the question of God. Then one day I was in a car accident. My friend Brad was driving. We spun off the road near a curve in the highway, hit the ditch, and flipped. The car rolled three times up a small hill before it finally came to a rest back on its wheels once again. Neither of us was wearing seatbelts. Brad was thrown from the car early on. I stayed in and hit the ceiling, then the dashboard, then the ceiling, the steering wheel, the ceiling again, and so on.
One of the middle impacts was the hardest I have ever been hit in my life. After it happened my sense of consciousness was jolted into what seemed like a long, drawn-out moment (but what really must have been a split second) into a sort of an eye-of-the-storm place of calm. I became aware of shards of glass falling and suspended around me, of my position in the air relative to the seats and steering wheel and ceiling. I knew I was going to hit something again in another split second, and that was when I first truly confronted the question of God. One part of my consciousness said, possibly to God but possibly to nothing at all: “If you do that to me again, you’re going to kill me.” The other part closed my eyes to wait for whatever was going to come next, because outside of that single remaining action, there was absolutely nothing else I could do. The next time I hit something, I did not hit quite as hard as I hit the previous time, and that, simply, is why I am here today. There is no other reason.
Eventually the car came to a stop and I opened my eyes. I did that because of the next series of actions I could take that was the first that occurred to me. The next was to push out the glass in the driver’s side door of the car, because the door itself would not open. But Brad was not in the car with me so getting out was the next thing I chose to do. When I crawled out and hit the ground I realized my head was bleeding badly. Trying to see was like looking through a series of thick ruby-purple rotating prisms. I threw up and fought not to pass out. When some control came back to me, I crawled backwards through the mud—it was raining and we were in a harvested cornfield—because the stench of the vomit itself renewed my nausea, and I wanted to get away from it. I ended up at the crest of a small slope in the field. As I sat there the raindrops fell like bombs from the sky. They were actually painful when they hit my skin. Everything was spinning slowly around me. During one of the rotations I saw my friend crumpled in a heap some forty yards away.
Here I confronted my personal answer to the question of God. That answer was self-directed motion. I’ll soon explain the concept in more depth, but for the remainder of this part of the story, suffice to say “self-directed motion” consisted first, in however distant a way, of exploring and then realizing what my choices were, and then deciding to act or not act upon those choices. I could stay where I was and probably pass out. But then I wouldn’t know if my friend was okay. I could crawl over to him, but I might throw up again and pass out anyway. There was no right or wrong. There were just actions and consequences. Some consequences carried with them the greater potential—not guarantee—for the existence of future choices. In everything there was risk, including the risk of discovering my friend was dead. Whether or not to take the risk was something entirely up to me and, for as long as I remained alive… always would be.
I began crawling forward.
*
Over the years, at one time or another, people have asked me if I believe in God. I respond by asking them: “In what sense do you mean the question?”
This response puzzles some. “In the Christian sense,” they say. Or in the Jewish sense, the Muslim sense, the Save Your Soul, Some-Kind-Of-Supreme-Being-Watching-Over-Us-All sense.
“The validity of specific religions is not something I know how to address,” has been my ongoing reply to this sort of thing over the last decade or so. “When I think about God is, what the spirit is, I think about something much more basic than religion.”
My recent trip to the Devils Tower is a good example of what I mean… specifically the sign I glimpsed there which explained that, according to legend, Native American Indians long ago were told to go to the Tower—obviously not the name they gave it—if they felt a sickness of the spirit. Going there would take the sickness away.
Why do you think that should be so? My answer is entirely scientific: A human being was brought face to face with something that was unexplainable. He was thus presented with the choice to come up with an explanation for it. But an explanation was not possible without an exploration of some sort, and in undertaking this exploration, he embarked upon a journey or quest (which may have been physical, psychological, or both). The search and the answers he discovered set him at ease, and his distress, his “sickness,” went away.
A different example: during the first night of the same camping trip with my friend Andy (mentioned in the first part of this series), we were caught in a massive rainstorm shortly after setting up our tent. Water began leaking in. We had our sleeping mats, which were an inch thick, and thus remained dry, but within hours some of the blankets beneath them began to float.
Andy nervously checked his Droid for updates on the weather reports as the thunder crashed around us. His phone had an app for satellite image tracking. Our campsite was a red dot in a dark green and yellow digital cyclone. “We might have to go sit in the truck,” he said, shrinking the immediate area on the map with his thumb and forefinger to see how far out the clouds stretched. “It’s not going to let up for a while.” Thunder crashed again and he flinched, not overtly, but enough for me to start irritating him a little.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t be such a wuss. What’s the worst that could happen?”
With raised eyebrows he gestured towards the woods outside. “The wind could blow over a tree that will come through the tent is the worst thing that could happen,” he said. And he was right, too. Though neither of us knew it at the time, a young girl in Wisconsin had been killed weeks earlier in that exact manner.
Moments later—and I swear I’m not making this up—the thunder crashed again, so hard I could feel its vibrations in my ribcage. Andy, startled in spite of himself, threw his knees up in the air as if to ward off a tree that was about to crush us both right then.
“Wow,” I said. We both laughed. I mimed the motion of a tree crashing through the tent, its splintered branches positioned perfectly to skewer him through his chest and open, screaming mouth. We laughed again. Eventually the storm blew over. Every tree around the campsite was intact the next day.
Still. I had thought about taking my three-year-old son Jack along with me on the trip. In retrospect I was glad I didn’t because he would have been scared of the thunder. A few crashes like the ones Andy and I sat through the night before, and into the truck we indeed would have gone.
Jack would have been scared for the same reason that a Neolithic human being would have been awed by the sight of the Devils Tower. The problem is that too many of us look at the question of the existence of God from the perspective of someone born in the twenty-first century. What human being a thousand years ago, or even five hundred, would have looked at the Devils Tower through a scientific lens and thought of it in terms of erosion processes, of alluvial flow? What Neolithic human being would have thought about thunder in terms of electrical/static build-up, of wind speed and precipitation levels? Why shouldn’t the Devils Tower have been created by a giant, angry bear clawing at its sides? Why shouldn’t a roar from the sky have been the anger of gods?
A question of even greater importance: If a roar of thunder from the sky was the wrath of God (or of the gods), what then, are we to make of the trembling human willingness to venture forth into that thunder, to study it and question it?
Why shouldn’t that willingness, that courage, be the spirit?
*
When we have explanations, especially if they aren’t our own, we proceed through the world with a sense of bravery a sense of self-assuredness that isn’t really our own. Thus when we’re confronted with situations in which the explanations we’ve always accepted without question no longer apply—such as those moments in which we believe our lives are about to end, or when our marriages collapse, or even something as simple as being fired from our jobs for no reason we can discern—we are forced to seek our own explanations (and our own relationship with those explanations). To not seek these things results in willful ignorance, in denial, in cowardice. In other words, sickness of the spirit.
Every monument and alter ever erected throughout history to God/the gods is proof enough of that search, that struggle to make sense out of the unknown, of the relationship between individual human beings and what was once unknown. This search and relationship is as basic to all religion as it is to atheism (and therefore by definition agnosticism). Without a journey of discovery of some sort in the midst of fear and awe and ignorance, how could a person ever affirm his faith in anything? Or deny faith in favor of evidence and reason?
That journey is the very essence of self-directed motion. What is discovered during that journey (even, paradoxically, if nothing is discovered), because it is something greater than ourselves, is majestic. It is the essence of the true measure of our courage, our need to know, our capability for sacrifice—all in order to find out who and what we are in relation to the world around us, what our choices and options are, what we’re capable of doing and becoming.
The extent of the answers we find is a direct reflection of our willingness to look.
