This
is a chapter from a book I’ve written that haven’t published and may never
publish. I thought it was worth reading, so here it is.
The Reality of the Spiritual
©Thomas C. Sorenson 2023
It’s easy enough to make fun of belief in God. Can’t
you just hear it? Yeah. Sure. There’s an old man with a gray beard sitting up
in heaven in the sky somewhere, and we’re supposed to love and adore him. God’s
an old man, but he controls everything on earth. In fact, he made everything on
earth. He judges all, and most of the time he’s angry and vengeful. And you
expect me to believe all that? I don’t think so!
Well, I don’t think so either. God is not an old man
sitting up above us somewhere in the sky. It is true that God made everything
there is, but it is not true that God is either angry or vengeful. More
importantly, God is not human. There’s a verse in the Bible (not that that
necessarily proves anything) that directs us toward a much better understanding
of God. At John 4:24a we find, “God is Spirit.” Not, “God is an old man in the
sky.” God is Spirit, but what in heaven’s name is Spirit? As I wrestled with
that question for this piece, I reread something by my favorite author (me)
that I hadn’t read for a while.[1] There
I found what I think are some useful insights that I will share in shorter form
here.
God is spiritual. I often refer to God as “the
spiritual.” People conditioned by Enlightenment rationalism and science (and
that’s nearly all of us) assume that there is only one dimension of reality,
namely, the material. For most of us, that is real which we can perceive with
our ordinary senses. We know (or more correctly we assume that we know) that
something is real if we can see it, hear it, touch it, etc. For most people in
the European cultures today (and they aren’t all in Europe by any means),
that’s just how it is.
Yet most people who have ever lived have known that
there is another dimension of reality that is as real, or for many people is
more real, than material reality. It is the dimension of spiritual reality.
Every human culture there has ever been has recognized the reality of the
spiritual and has developed ways of relating to it. We know that to be true
because we know that every human culture has a system of symbols and myths,
that is, a religious system, through which they relate to the spiritual. Some
of those religious systems are quite primitive. Others are the more complex (and
powerful) systems of the world’s great religious faiths. The important point for
our purposes is that every human culture has (or, if the culture no longer
exists, had) such a system.
Theologians and others have used various images,
words, or phrases to convey just what the spiritual is. Paul Tillich called it
the ground of being and pure being. Some have said that it is the “more” in
everything that is. It is the depth dimension of reality. The spiritual is the
reality on which all other reality depends. The spiritual is a reality that is
in and around everything that is, including us human beings, while at the same
time transcending all that is. It is the most real of all realities. The
spiritual is the ground and source of everything that has being. All of the
world’s great faith traditions acknowledge this truth.
Yet most of the time we go on with our lives unaware
of the presence of the spiritual. If the spiritual is that reality on which all
other reality depends, how can that be? Joseph Campbell once explained how that
can be by using the metaphor of scales. We have, he said, put scales over our
eyes (eyes also being a metaphor of course) that keep us from perceiving that
which is always and everywhere present. To see it, all we have to do is remove
the scales.
Yet if we are going to remove them, we need to know
what they are. What is Campbell’s metaphor pointing to? For those of us who are
children of the European Enlightenment—and that’s virtually all of us—the
scales are our denial of the reality of the spiritual and our belief that only
the material is real. We are unlikely to perceive something that we deny is
real. We are unlikely to perceive something we aren’t looking for. In Western
culture, the denial of the reality of the spiritual is grounded in
philosophical materialism. To this way of thinking, the only things that are
real are the physical objects we perceive as being all around us.
This denial of the reality of the spiritual is a
result of the truth that we cannot reason our way to the reality of God. People
have tried to do that time and time again. No one has ever succeeded. No one
ever will. We can understand and order all of physical reality through the use
of human reason. That, after all, is what science does. We cannot understand or
order God, that is, the spiritual. Since the thinkers of the Enlightenment
believed that only reason leads to truth, many of them came to deny that there
is any reality other than the material, that is, physical, reality. That’s why
Karl Marx was a dialectical materialist.
So how do we know that the spiritual dimension of
reality is real? We know it is real because over the long history of humanity,
again and again, people have experienced the spiritual in their lives. Some
have spoken of having visions, that is, of having in some way seen a reality
that transcends physical reality. Some have spoken of having auditions, that
is, of having heard the spiritual somehow speaking to them. Yet in these
accounts seeing and hearing are something different from our ordinary physical
seeing and hearing. Seeing and hearing here are essentially metaphors that
point to experiences something like ordinary seeing and hearing yet not
identical with them. Our experiences of the spiritual somehow transcend our
ordinary sensate experiences.
Perhaps it will help if I share one of my own
experiences of the spiritual breaking, or sneaking, into my life. Before I went
to seminary and became an ordained Christian pastor, I was a lawyer. I began
practicing law in Seattle in 1981. In 1992 I opened my own law office. By 1994
I was beginning to burn out on law. I was clinically depressed and making no
money at all. One day I did a Jungian psychological exercise called active
imagination.[2]
In this exercise you sit quietly and try to still your mind. You have before
you some way of writing down what happens in your exercise. Then you write down
and ask yourself a question about whatever it is that is troubling you. I
asked, “Why am I having so much trouble practicing law?” Immediately, no time having elapsed at all and without my having given the answer
to the question any thought whatsoever, the answer came booming up from somewhere deep
within me: “You’re not a lawyer!” I was stunned. I argued with the answer. Of
course I’m a lawyer, I said. I’m sitting here in my law office with a little
bit of legal work to do. There’s a sign on the front door that says Thomas C.
Sorenson, Attorney at Law. My Washington State Bar Association number is 11977.
Once again the answer came: “You’re not a lawyer!” So I asked another question.
“What am I?” Again, without even a split second having past, the answer came
booming up: “You’re a preacher!” I was stunned. “Preacher” wasn’t even a word I
used. I would refer to my pastor or my minister but not my preacher. I thought
that answer was absurd, but I saw that there was no point in arguing with it,
so I ended the exercise.
In July, 1997, the Seattle University School of
Theology and Ministry, in cooperation with numerous Protestant denominations,
created the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies to provide ministerial
training to Protestant students. Somehow I knew I had to go there and earn an
MDiv degree, the degree many denominations, including my United Church of
Christ, require (or in the case of the UCC then required—don’t get me started
on what they’ve done since) for ordination.
I told my wife I knew I had to do it. She asked how I
was going to afford it. I said I didn’t know. I said I’d go into debt if I had
to (which I did). I knew as certainly as I have ever known anything that I had
to go get that MDiv. At the time I had no idea what I would do with it. I just
knew I had to get it. I got that degree in December, 2000. In March, 2002, I
was called as pastor of the first church I served. In June, 2002, I was
ordained to the ministry of Jesus Christ in the United Church of Christ. Not
long before she passed away from breast cancer my wife said to me: “I’m so glad
you finally are who you really are.” Indeed I finally was who I really am. I
actually was, at long last, a preacher.
Was the spiritual at work in my life directing me to
become who I really am? I can’t prove that it was. That’s how it is with the
spiritual. It so transcends our ordinary existence and experience that its
reality can’t be proven by any method we humans have. Yet I know as certainly
as I have ever known anything that, in those turbulent years of my life, the
spiritual was at work in me. I would never have come to the conclusion that I’m
not a lawyer and need to become a preacher on my own. Like I said, I thought
the idea that I wasn’t a lawyer but was a preacher was absurd. I knew then, and
I know now, that something transcendent was present in my life. The spiritual
was a reality for me in a way I had never experienced it as having been before.
How do I know that the spiritual really was at work in
my life? I know that it was really there because I experienced it being there.
My experience made the spiritual real for me. That’s how any of us know that the
spiritual (or anything else for that matter) is real. We can’t prove the
reality of the spiritual in any scientific or other purely rational way. Yet
over the millennia untold numbers of women and men have had experiences they
could explain in no other way. Human experience. That’s how we know the
spiritual is real.
Knowing that the spiritual is real and seeking to live
out its reality in one’s life is of immense value. Eliminating the spiritual
from our understanding of reality makes life flat. Life loses its depth. It
loses much of its richness too. Without the spiritual our lives are essentially
ungrounded. In particular, our notions of right and wrong hang in thin air with
no existential support. These truths and many others establish our need for the
spiritual, but they aren’t how we know that the spiritual is real. Our
experiences tell us, or at least can tell us, that the spiritual is real.
Do you find this discussion of the spiritual dimension
of reality unsatisfying? Well, in a sense, so do I. But please remember what I
said above about the language of faith. Human language simply cannot fully
grasp God. It cannot describe God completely or without error. So we’re left
with language that only points to something that is totally beyond our
experience while at the same time is part of our experience. That’s paradox,
something we’ll take up in the next chapter.
[1]
Sorenson, Thomas, Liberating Christianity, Revised Edition, Chapter 2,
“The Nature and Reality of the Spiritual.”
[2]
For an account of this practice, and a warning I ignored about not doing it
alone, see Johnson, Robert A., Inner Work, Using Dreams and Active
Imagination for Personal Growth (HarperSanFrancisco, New York, 1986).
