Sometimes an author’s words express your heart and experience better than you could yourself. That was true for me recently when I came across this excerpt from a book I’d read years ago called The Sacred Romance:
“The Sacred Romance calls to us every moment of our lives. It whispers to us on the wind, invites us through the laughter of good friends, reaches out to us through the touch of someone we love. We’ve heard it in our favorite music, sensed it at the birth of our first child, been drawn to it while watching the shimmer of a sunset on the ocean. It is even present in times of great personal suffering—the illness of a child, the loss of a marriage, the death of a friend. Something calls to us through experiences like these and rouses an inconsolable longing deep within our heart, wakening in us a yearning for intimacy, beauty, and adventure.
This longing is the most powerful part of any human personality. It fuels our search for meaning, for wholeness, for a sense of being truly alive. However we may describe this deep desire, it is the most important thing about us, our heart of hearts, the passion of our life. And the voice that calls to us in this place is none other than the voice of God.”
The Sacred Romance by John Eldredge and Brent Curtis
You may not believe in God. I get that position, and I respect it. Regardless of where you fall on the faith spectrum, I’m guessing that most of us can relate to the feelings and experiences described above.
So that begs the question – is that “voice that calls to us” in those moments God or not? As actor Rainn Wilson (Dwight from the TV show “The Office”) said in a fascinating interview on author Rob Bell’s recent podcast, it is THE question – does God exist? Why is that so important? Because the answer affects every part of our lives. Everything else flows from it. Either we’re a random byproduct of matter and energy or we’re not. Either we’re alone in the universe or we’re not. Either there’s a guiding creative force or there’s not. Either there’s an overarching purpose to our existence or there’s not. Our answer to the God question impacts our relationships, how we spend our time, our money, our energy. It influences our work, our play, our search for meaning. It alters our hope for the future or lack of it. It speaks to our sense of identity, our self worth, and what happens when we die. Everything.
So how do we know? There are some rational, logical arguments for God’s existence that I find compelling, like the Moral Law Argument (God makes sense of the existence of objective moral law), the Teleological Argument (God makes sense of the existence of the universe), and the Fine Tuning Argument (God makes sense of the delicate balance of physical laws that allow life to exist) among others. That said, they aren’t proofs. No one can conclusively prove (or disprove) God’s existence.
To believe in God requires an acknowledgment that there are other ways of discovering truth than the logical reasoning of the mind. It’s how we believe in the existence of love. Though love can’t be proven rationally, we see compelling evidence of it and feel the truth of it in our bones. That’s what the above passage from The Sacred Romance is saying – there are feelings and experiences common to virtually all of us that point toward the existence of some type of Higher Power, one that, as crazy as it may sound to our rational mind at times, created us, loves us, and wants a relationship with us.
If that’s true, as I personally believe, then we will only become our highest, most fulfilled selves, only live our most satisfying and joyful lives, when we align ourselves with that reality. We become the best version of ourselves when we acknowledge and work on our spiritual side, as well as our mental, emotional, and physical aspects.
So how about you? Are you developing your spiritual side? Are you open to the existence of a Guiding Spirit, Life Force, Love, Allah, God, or whatever you may call it? Not from a fear of hell or some other punitive punishment, but from a desire to truly thrive, to become your best self, and to experience life to the fullest.
Reason and faith are two sides of the same coin – you need both to discover Truth. Choosing to utilize only your rational mind and reject faith as a means of understanding reality is like viewing a panoramic nature scene with one eye closed or running a race on one leg. You can do it, but you’re missing out on the full experience.
In those deep moments of wonder, awe, pain, mystery, and intimacy, are you in tune with what The Sacred Romance calls “the voice of God”? Will you respond to it? I sincerely believe your best life is found by answering “yes” to that question. Think it through. Weigh the decision for yourself. Experiment with developing your spiritual side. Meditate. Pray. Read spiritual writings. Try out a temple, mosque, or church. Talk with someone who has a spiritual life you respect. If you do, you’ll take another huge step toward Becoming Yourself.
I had an impromptu conversation with a good friend a while ago. She’s in her thirties, highly intelligent and inquisitive about life. She grew up going to church but stopped after high school. Since then, by her own admission, she hadn’t thought much about God until recently. She said she had a question for me. It went something like this:
“When I’m in nature, I feel like there’s something else out there with me. It’s like I’m sensing something bigger than myself but I don’t know what it is. I’m not sure if I think that’s God or something else. How can I tell?”
A clarification before going any further. The point of this post is not to try to prove the existence of God or to convince anyone to believe like I do. I consider myself a “faith and reason” person, meaning that I believe in God because of some very personal, subjective experiences I’ve had and also because of some intellectual reasons that I find compelling. But sharing those is not my goal here. I just want to give one of many potential frameworks that you could use to address the God question if you are like my friend.
Sometimes when we’re wrestling with what we believe about something, having someone else ask us specific questions about that topic can help clarify our thinking. So I asked her a series of questions:
You may read those questions and have different answers than my friend did, which lead you to a different conclusion. Either way, I think the “is there a God” question is an important one for each of us to answer one way or the other. Why? Because it has pretty big implications on your worldview, the way you see life and your place in it. And your worldview has a huge impact on your choices and actions, on how you live and who you become.