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?