Spiritual Scotomas

I had to Google “scotoma” to learn that it is essentially a blind spot. Oliver Sacks reminds us that Orwell called it a “memory hole.”

Sacks describes such blind spots in reference to science and medicine. I wonder how many of you remember Disneyland’s “Carousel of Progress” ride, presented by G.E., in which the audience rotated around various stages of technological progress, contrasting home appliances through the years, with an uplifting theme song that I will probably not be able to get out of my head the rest of the day?!

But in his chapter in The River of Consciousness entitled “Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science,” Sacks demonstrates that the history of science, medicine, and by inference, technology, is not a simple movement of “stages” of discovery, but rather, an uneven back and forth of trial and error, oversight and rediscovery, given blind spots in the scientific perspective. Citing a 1913 paper by Wolgang Köhler, “premature simplifications and systemizations in science, psychology in particular, could ossify science and prevent its vital growth.”

Reading that line, I was struck by how easily that can be said of religion, theology, and spirituality as well. Fresh in my mind was my discomfort with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat dividing religious attitudes in America into three categories: traditional, secular, and spiritual. The first is based on inherited teaching and scripture; the second is “post-religious” and “scientistic”; the third he describes as “religious individualism” that [among other demerits] “blurs the line between the God out there and the God within,” “a do-it-yourself form of faith.” (To get the full story, I encourage you to follow this link.)

Admitting nuance, he writes, “Where the spiritual world blurs into secularism, it’s usually claiming scientific bona fides; where it blurs into traditional religion, it’s usually talking about Jesus.”

I can’t help but think this latter category is where he might place me and this blog.

I admit to some truth in his characterizations, especially his questioning of “health-and-wealth theology,” but I think what’s missing in his analysis is the fluidity of traditional faith. Except for the fundamentalist, biblical literalist, and dogged dogmatist,* traditional religion is no more a locked-down, certain enterprise than science is. We too have our blind spots, our scotomas, which have been noted in every age. We too have ignored wisdom of our own saints, as well as the wisdom of other cultures and religions and of science itself.

According to Sacks and the scientists he cites, anomalies—unexpected exceptions to scientific orthodoxy—in a sense, offer opportunities for reformation: “a phenomenon contrary to the accepted frame of reference” may “enlarge and revolutionize that frame of reference.”

At the risk of columnist Douthat accusing me of pulling Jesus out of a hat, I would say Jesus was such an anomaly, at least for those who followed and follow him.

*See next week’s post, “The Fundamentalist Memory Hole.”

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In the Shadow of the Moon

Solar eclipse at your feet!

The coming solar eclipse on August 21 prompts me to tell a story on myself from a partial eclipse some years back, here in Atlanta. I believe I wrote about this in one of my books, but I can’t tell you which one!

I was out running toward the middle of the day when it seemed a little darker than it should be with a cloudless sky.  Then I remembered that the moon was going to be passing between the sun and earth on this day, and apparently at that time.

As I ran, I noticed on the sidewalk beneath my feet tiny crescent shapes of light that appeared to be coming through the leaves overhead, and I laughed to think I was witnessing the eclipse in miniature. I wrote it off to my overactive imagination; probably the sun always filtered through leaves like that, and I had never before noticed.

Months later, in Madison, Wisconsin, I was in the home of a young lesbian couple. At my feet played two tow-headed children, a boy and a girl, and I learned that each woman had given birth to one, with the help of the sperm of gay partners, friends of theirs living on the West coast. It was a remarkable reimagining of what family could be!

I happened to look over at one woman’s home work space, and noticed pinned above her desk several newspaper photos of crescent shapes of light like I had seen during the eclipse. Her photo appeared in one of the news articles beside this phenomenon. As it turned out, she was a meteorologist and she confirmed that what I had “imagined” was in truth, reality!

“It’s like when you put a pinhole at one end of a shoebox to see an eclipse,” she explained. “The light at the other end of the box is what you saw many times over on the sidewalk beneath your feet.”

In his book, Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore wrote that imagination is the most underutilized spiritual gift. Saint Ignatius believed that imagination is needed in the spiritual life, and those who have tried his rigorous Spiritual Exercises know the necessity of the imagination in accomplishing them.

Every human endeavor requires imagination. Whether you’re bagging your groceries or developing the theory of relativity, creating a work of art or doing a house repair, imagination opens us to new ways of accomplishing our tasks, being creative, and understanding the universe.

Albert Einstein’s imagination prompted him to suggest that light could bend, demonstrated by Arthur Eddington in documenting the “shifting” positions of two stars during a solar eclipse, an early confirmation of the theory of general relativity.

The Psalmist’s imagination prompted an expectation that God is with us, even in “the valley of the shadow.”

And poet Mary Oliver advises us to “Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”

My scientific knowledge is, like all other aspects of my knowledge, probably dated. But a few years ago it was reported that astrophysical and cosmological measurements have suggested that the universe is 4% atoms, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy, a mysterious energy unrelated to dark matter that holds everything together.*

What that says to me is that we are only seeing with our eyes the manifestation of 4% of what’s here, the 4% of the universe that consists of atoms. We can’t see the 25% that is dark matter, or the 70% that is dark energy.

So, in this cosmic “shadow of the moon,” imagination may take us beyond our eclipsed knowledge and awareness, whether our own imagination or that of visionaries: scientists, artists, mystics, prophets, poets, lovers, and children.

  

Solar eclipse reflected through leaves.

*Thanks to Dennis Overbye’s reporting in The New York Times.

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"In Earth"

On my way to Petra, 1981.

Thank you, Huston Smith, for widely sharing your lifelong spiritual quest.

The morning that I write this, I completed my re-reading of the Gospel texts of Jesus’ Nativity, a habit of Advent for me. As I have several posts already prepared, this will be published toward the end of Christmastide, a few days before Epiphany. Given that it’s a “Christmas epiphany” of sorts, that feels just about right. Epiphany and its season have come to mean for me a time to celebrate all glimpses of divinity, including spiritual and scientific, and this “glimpse” juxtaposes both categories.

The reading this morning was the Gospel of John’s famous prologue about the Word, the Word that called creation into being, the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. My blogpost “The Word We Need This Christmas” reflected on this passage, and I had this in mind as I read again John’s very grand interpretation of Jesus’ birth.

But my “a-ha” came when I recited the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, as I do every morning. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth”—and here I stopped, not adding my usual “on earth,” an alternate wording that suggests an alliance of human will. “Thy kingdom come…in earth.” “The Word made flesh.” The connection was obvious and inescapable. From the beginning, God’s “kingdom” and God’s “word” has been embodied, enfleshed, in earth, in matter and energy.

God’s kingdom and God’s will is the spark that began the universe in the eyes of people of faith. “Thy kingdom come in earth as in heaven” is as much about origins as it is about hoped-for destinations. Faith posits that the more we know of our origin—our reason for being who and what and where we are—the better we know our destination, our purpose, our meaning.

The scientific search for the origins of the universe is no less than an attempt to find our place in it, how and why and when we came to be. For most of human history, we have relied on our spiritual imaginations to speculate on our place: myth-making, ritual-performing, story-telling. Now that our scientific imaginations are given a freer reign, we have fact-oriented, experiment-performing, evidence-gathering methods of discerning something like what our spiritual imaginations have sought.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “arc that bends toward justice” may be a way of recognizing that justice (God’s will, God’s kingdom) is built-in. This is a high-view of creation in general and humankind in particular, and would seem to belie the notion of “The Fall,” but to “fall” requires heighth. In my belief, “The Fall” is not built-in, though most Christians probably believe that to be so. As Matthew Fox and others have pointed out, it’s our “original blessing” that is built-in.

Genesis has us created in God’s image, thus in Jesus’ lineage the Gospel of Luke calls Adam “son of God.” The Gospel of John has the Word giving us “power to become children of God,” restoring us to our rightful heritage.

My reasoning will seem sophomoric to some, but the profound sense that matter and energy and we are also incarnations of God’s will and kingdom will not leave me.

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The intense beauty of colors in the stone of Petra 

brought involuntary tears to my eyes.