In the World, Of the World

Back in my college days, our campus Christian fellowship talked a lot about being “in the world, but not of the world.” Being young and confused about prepositions in the spiritual life, I never understood what that meant.

Thirty years later, I think I’m starting to get it.

I have always been in love with my career (specifically, writing ad and marketing copy). It has been a larger part of my identity than I ever cared to admit. I adored playing with words and being in demand for doing it well. Running my own business served as a vehicle for healing some of the major issues in my early life.

As I began to respond to a different call, though—the call that brought this blog into being—my zealous attachment to career suddenly faded. I began to see everything that appalled me about the advertising industry: the bending of truth, the overwhelming clutter of public life, the quest for awards. Perhaps because I wanted to leave advertising behind, the call to spiritual writing began to feel like a call to a career of spiritual writing.

I might be called to that career someday, but it’s not the case for now. Instead, as far as I can tell, my calling right now is precisely to what I’m doing right now: spiritual writing as part of my workday, copywriting as most of my workday.

As I’ve settled into that, something amazing has happened. I’ve learned not to love my career in advertising, but to like it. Somehow the prayer and the spiritual writing that frame my day keep my job in perspective—so I’m free to pursue it joyfully without finding my identity in it.

Is this what it means to be in the world, but not of the world?

I suspect it might be. Jesus wasn’t the only one to allude to this idea. Buddhism (as far as I understand it) emphasizes detachment from temporal things and compassion for all beings; the bodhisattvas—who are completely free to enter nirvana, but “stay behind” to guide others to enlightenment—are the role model for this. They are, in short, in the world but not of it.

It is a liberating, exhilarating place to be. The need for control falls away. We can live into our calling without concern for results. We can orient ourselves toward the eternal without denying the dignity of the everyday. We can take each day as it comes, for the blessing it is. No wonder the spiritual masters invite us there.

Touchstones

Maybe it’s because I’m so weary of the conflicting voices that lay claim to absolute truth. Perhaps it has to do with just how elusive that truth really is. Whatever the reason, I find myself, as part of my spiritual path, constantly returning to certain touchstones: shards of truth that anchor my soul. I wouldn’t want to claim drop-dead certainty for these touchstones—as Brother Billy says, “Ultimately, it’s all unexplainable”—but to me they consistently ring true as other notions ebb and flow. Here are three:

1. God is. On one level, the evidence appears to defeat this entirely. Evolutionary theory includes autonomous mechanisms, like natural selection, to get us from amoeba to Homo sapiens. Researchers are beginning to explore the neurology behind faith, and they’ll undoubtedly find something. The impossibility of explaining the Holocaust in the context of an omnipotent, loving God leaves the alternative models—like Buddhism—far more satisfactory.
   

And yet…what started evolution, and why? Why are we (at least most of us) hard-wired to believe—rather than, say, to find other adaptive mechanisms for survival? Even more basic, how could a world of such staggering beauty and complexity come to be through impersonal processes? How could entropy be thwarted so many billions of times to create a cosmos? Why does life find a way?

I don’t think we require the traditional images of God to explain these things, but they all speak to some kind of God. A God who creates something from nothing, rather than lets nothing be. And that leads right into the next touchstone…

2. God is love. Given the aforementioned Holocaust, this is a big stretch. And yet I don’t think we have a choice. If God is, how do we even begin to live in a cosmos where God is hostile, or uncaring, or inattentive? In some ways, that is even more terrifying than belief in no God at all: at least with atheism, you can grieve at horrific world events while accepting them as random occurrences.
   

3. By their fruit you shall know them. How on earth are we supposed to evaluate rival truth claims? Many of them live in their own closed loop, impervious to refutation. We end up with little citadels of belief, each snug inside its own theological walls and occasionally catapulting rocks over the walls of its rivals.
   

Which is why this saying of Jesus carries so much import. If God is love, if God cares deeply about beauty and justice, wouldn’t those who follow God generate more love and beauty and justice as well? Therefore, could we use these “fruits” as a filter to explore the faith of those who practice them?

I’m not talking about people who profess a faith but don’t live it. Otherwise, we would have to evaluate Christianity by the Inquisitors, or Islam by al-Qaeda. My thought, rather, is to note people whose lives bear abundant fruit, and to explore the insights that produce fruit in them. In the process, we may just run up against other shards of truth.

So those are three of my touchstones. What are yours? And how do they give you hope?

Where Is God in This Picture?

Tell me where you see God in the following story.

Often I try to pray when I run in the morning. Often it doesn’t work: my mind wanders off to (if it’s a good day) hobbies and books and things I love or (if it isn’t) anxiety about the day ahead or the week ahead or this difficult meeting or that difficult phone call.

Last Wednesday was not a good day. The week was tricky to begin with, and the trickiness was to reach its climax in the day to come. I have been working on mindfulness lately—paying complete attention to the here and now—but on this day my mind ran away from me. Toward the end of the run, I tried to get back to what was happening around me.

Which is when I saw the pileated woodpecker.

Birds enthrall me, and I’ve only seen a pileated once before in my life. They appear rarely, almost never, in our neighborhood. So all my attention was suddenly riveted on the woodpecker. In short, a single bird brought me back to the mindfulness to which, I believe, God is calling me.

So where was God in all this?

Was God somehow in my return to mindfulness—inspiring it, as it were—so that I could see and enjoy the woodpecker? Certainly possible. Did God call that bird to that tree for that particular purpose? A yes answer, of course, raises the oft-asked question of the whereabouts of God on 9/11, or during the Holocaust, or in the life of the child who dies suddenly. But ascribing this event to mere coincidence doesn’t work for me; the presence of the Divine in that moment was almost palpable.

I wrestle with questions like this all the time, and wrestling with God is good. Sometimes, though, I run up against the impenetrable, or at least the too-difficult-for-me. In cases like that, I’m beginning to believe, it’s time to stop thinking and simply breathe in the experience—specifically, the Divine within the experience.

There’s solid precedent for this approach. According to the sage Ben Sira, “Neither seek what is too difficult for you, nor investigate what is beyond your power” (Sirach 3:21). The psalmist speaks in a similar vein: “I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me” (Psalm 131:1). Thomas Merton, the Franciscan monk and thinker, writes approvingly of Zen’s emphasis, not on explaining, but on paying attention.

Maybe, when we follow both wisdoms—the call to wrestle with God and the call to stop wrestling—we approach God with more of ourselves: our minds, certainly, but also our deepest selves. This, according to Jesus, is precisely what the Father so ardently desires: those who “worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23).