The Sacred Search to Understand

“I can calculate the motion of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”

                                                            Sir Isaac Newton

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

William Shakespeare

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Humans have always wanted to know the why of things. Curiosity and wonder seem to be wired into our nature, and close behind, the unspoken hope that if we could find the lever at the root, we might pull it hard enough to right the world one small degree.

We watch the parade of human endeavor with all its beauty and virtue, flaws and folly, and we wonder:

Why do we light up and fill with kindness when we see a baby?

Why do we allow people in poor neighborhoods to have higher rates of cancer?

Why does ambition so often degrade into greed?

Why do we stop and stare when struck by the colors of a desert sunset?

Why do we stand speechless at the sight of stars against the blackness?

Why have we not found a way to end the senseless slaughter and devastation of war?

Why do I love my wife? (more baffling, why does she love me?)

Why does the piercing pain of grief swell, break, recede, and return like ocean tides?

Why is there poverty and hunger amid an obesity of wealth?

Why are we capable of both immense generosity and crushing cruelty, yet after all these eons still unable to choose wisely?

We’ve developed a powerful mode of inquiry that helps us understand the world. Logic and reason answer many questions and bring enormous benefits to our lives. When we apply the rational rules of science, we can pose solutions, test assumptions, gather data, and see what works. In the best cases, we can isolate variables and run double-blind trials to increase our confidence in the answer.

This mode of inquiry yields incredible value to society:  cars, computers, X-ray machines, air traffic control, sewage systems, electrical grids, operating rooms, cable TV (well, for some the value is questionable). Logic and reason save countless lives and reduce the suffering of millions when applied within their proper sphere.

But logic is not the only human mode of inquiry because you and I are not merely bits of the planet’s biomass. We are made of more than the physical components of salt and carbon, blood and bone. There is no double-blind trial that can help me decide whether to propose. Or to divorce. Something deeper is running below the surface of plane geometry.

This is what Newton and Shakespeare understood, that there are domains of human experience where the rules of reason lose their power, that the world is bigger than we can measure with those tools. It is a mistake to reduce the cosmos to such a rigid mode of understanding. Our attempts to do so reveal our desire to make life certain and predictable, our wish that we could flatten out the rough spots.  

When we meet those points in life that don’t make sense, usually in times of suffering, love or awe, we yearn to know why, to make sense of the insensible. And we fail because those times are not meant to be deciphered – they are meant to be encountered, questioned, lived, entangled, endured. We pull meaning from them by being pulled through them.

That is where the spiritual impulse is so helpful. It operates in a different domain than logic and reason. When we meditate, or pray, or bow, or light a candle, or gather in fellowship, or participate in any of the many ways we seek the sacred, we are opening to a wider world that lies beyond our rational comprehension. We are not seeking answers we can speak, we are seeking to be changed, surrendering to something greater with faith that understanding will come on its own terms.

Photo by Louis Maniquet on Unsplash