SPIRITUAL “LOGIC”
There are other forms of intelligence besides humans -Spock
My entire life I have followed the tenets of rationality and logic. While I possessed my share of empathy and the understanding of others-as a ‘right brainer’ for sure, I still considered the ideas of love, hope and faith-especially faith to be the ‘soft stuff,’ segregated to a separate compartment in my brain.
I am not in any way a ‘holy roller.’ I am an ethnic, liberal, Jew who not only doesn’t go to synagogue but never saw a Bar Mitzvah. After experiencing enough anti-Semitism as a youth and, even now, I have enough Jewish pride to be a good Israeli, even though I’m an American…for now. I have followed my own path, embracing many of the beliefs of another Jew who walked among us thousands of years ago. No, I don’t know if He is the son of God, and I don’t care. I never found anything in those writings that was not good, kind, and hopeful.
I was raised-like many of us-by dysfunctional ‘children’ impersonating adults. Regardless of their many defects-like all of us have-I learned a few things I could use like logic from my dad and empathy from my mom. About the age of 15 I decided I should probably pull my head out, get focused and try to make something from the one quarter formed lump of clay that I was. I tossed out my childhood dream of becoming a firefighter, put my head down and learned how to study so I could “make something out of myself” as my mother used to say. Fresh out of graduate school, I dived into corporate America, becoming a ‘Captain of Industry.”
Joining the ‘Walking Wounded”
Along the way I not only stumbled morally, but I also spent years climbing a long ladder leaning against the wrong wall. I suffered for 30 years from performance anxiety and depression, often trying to dispel it by running early mornings before work, many times crying like a baby before I experimented with the vast array of antidepressants-that eventually didn’t work. Even after changing careers to work for the “happiest place on earth” I still had to face the fact that my life was nothing more than repeating what therapists call the false self.
Late in life I concluded that something was not working. In fact, nothing was working. I was living the life of a wounded child in a man’s body. Oh, I had all kinds of life philosophies. In fact, I read so many self-help books a friend sent me a cartoon showing a man with a noose around his neck, jumping off a stack of them to his dismal end! I engaged in my share of immoral actions and betrayals, some of which I really tried to justify. There just isn’t a right way to do a wrong thing. Once I admitted my transgressions, I really thought apologies and amends would do the trick. Oh, I called on God many times…but only when I was freaking out. You know, the old foxhole prayer routine.
After I had declared moral bankruptcy, ripping out all my life misperceptions by the roots, I had nowhere else to go, nor nothing to lose. I slowly came to the realization that there are certain things in this life that work even though we can’t see them. I discovered two of them around the age of 65. Some of us are hard learners! Both are pure revelations hiding in plain sight. In fact, they are the firm bedrock of my life’s growth, strength, and security today.
“I Don’t Think You Like Yourself Very Much.”
While I had always been an advocate of psychological therapy, it was not until I was assigned a two-year stint in Paris that I began to unravel a few knots in my life. My therapist was a young man who spoke only basic English and no more. Luckily, his English was better than my French. “Ben, I don’t think you like yourself very much. Why do you think that is?’
Sometimes the blunt truth born of brevity in language without polite diplomacy can work wonders therapeutically. Soon after, I dug deep into recognizing my own childhood trauma, doing my best to bind up those wounds, embracing the little boy in need of a champion. Initially it was gut-wrenching but so necessary. But I discovered something critically important from my journey through the steps of recovery, and that was God. That’s right, a power greater than myself or anyone else. This was the critically operative piece. And it worked just as if a medical doctor had lifted out a cancerous tumor wrapping its tendrils around my heart.
As time progressed through repetition, healing progressed so that I began to see the good, strong man I always wanted to be. I liked the guy I saw in the mirror, realizing that loving myself first opened the door to loving others because now I had something to give instead of trying to take something I thought I needed.
Visual Perception Can Be a Poor Substitute for Discernment
Now, all of this is, of course, invisible. Let me repeat that so it sinks in. This is a life changing procedure of healing that requires no physical surgery or medication with complete abandon to the divine spirit of the universe first and therapeutics second. This is not so unusual nor astounding. Afterall, there are many assumptions, especially in science, that there is evidence but no visual proof. In fact, many times, visual proof is quite weak.
Look at electricity. When you flip a light switch, the room is aglow, or atoms that hold everything together. We know that these forces exist but do not have obvious visual proof to verify them. Let’s take this discussion a bit further. History is replete with this idea. Heck, we understand more of those ideas we can’t see than those we do. Before Columbus discovered the New World the consensus of ‘educated man’ was that the earth was flat, even though an ancient Greek named Eratosthenes postulated that it was a sphere in 240 BC. After all, if you look outside as you go for a walk, even today, the land looks…well…flat. But it isn’t. Is it? How do you know? You don’t until you look at the earth from a very broad perspective in space or you believe the numerical postulate of that Greek mathematician.
I could go on for days discussing things like flight before the Wright Brothers and space travel or, today, when we can have a meeting with attendees from any number of countries on Zoom or some other application. The very thought of something like this just ten years ago was conjecture. Now it’s mainstream.
Why would it be any different relating to the unseen world of the spirit? Is it not contempt before examination? I’m not talking about things like having a positive attitude or delving into books like The Secret to obtain your heart’s desires. This has nothing to do with you or me. It has everything to do with a power greater than ourselves. See, in my case, I do not know what is in my best interest. That higher power I choose to call God does. Carrying around the transgressions of my past along with the achievement or any material goals of a future is a heck of a load. What I have found that works for me is that God has a much better idea of my past and future if I let Him handle it one day at a time.
Now, let’s take this to the final level of mystery: faith. That’s right: faith-belief in an unseen force. I don’t mean religion although if that is a path to bring one to the practice of faith, why not? In fact, there is a snippet from the Bible in Hebrews 11: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we can’t see. (Funny that a Jew would choose Hebrews. God has a wonderful sense of humor. Don’t you think?)
Another way of stating it is that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” I am talking about a faith that works, and, yes, I have found it to be a practice. I don’t mean some manipulative technique to give you what you think you must have. This means that we leap into the unknown of letting God decide what is good and right for us…not us! I am talking about believing that there is something in the universe that provides us a broad highway, asking only one thing: believe. And believe it with all your heart. I don’t mean ‘foxhole prayers’ as in: O God, if you could just see your way to pulling my bacon out of the fire!’ I don’t even mean something like: “Oh God, I leave it to you!” That, my friends, insinuates that you deign to let God handle what you want. You are not running things! He is. Not you and certainly not your ego! He already has it. All we need to do is believe that He does have it.
How to do this? Repetition confirms…faith comes naturally. You may think that this is one man’s “mumbo jumbo.” Maybe. But try this little exercise. Ask yourself some questions. How do you feel about the love of your life over fifty years? If you have children, how do you think and feel about them? Is it your limbic system in overdrive? Do you believe in your ability to think? All I know is that at 74 years old as I look back on my own life, reviewing it from a young age until now, something has been going on in a way that I can’t explain, and the last thing I am going to do is take credit for things I can’t understand. Some people call it grace. I call it God. And for me, that’s a logic that makes sense.
Originally published in The Good Men Project
—
