Sacred Dance #1: Hide and Seek

Being something of a science fiction geek, I sometimes like to imagine what it would be like if alien archaeologists ran across the ruins of our civilization. What would they make of us?

Take one of the most basic issues that has defined human civilization: does God exist? In our history, they would find accounts of a great many people – easily tens of thousands, possibly millions -  who were quite sure that they had a personal encounter with the divine. But they would also no doubt see that most of us never had such an experience. Many of those are still “religious” in some sense, but never really claim to have had an undeniable divine encounter. We live – so to speak – on “faith.”

I think this discovery would seem quite odd. Did some of us experience God or not? The number of claims is so great that charlatanism alone can’t account for them. So…what is the explanation? Mass delusion? Some evolutionary psychological quirk?

Or is God just playing games with us?

If those of us who are believers are honest – and I’m including monotheists of just about any form here – I think we will admit that our own experiences are not always consistent. We have moments where we are certain that God is near – our hair stands on end, we marvel at some blessing that results from the most unlikely coincidence or at a turn in some illness that seemed hopeless. Then… poof! The feeling, the experience is gone. Things don’t work out as well as we thought. The illness comes back. And deep inside, we begin to question whether anything of divine  origin happened in the first place. We ask whether the whole thing was a delusion. Then, we look at the stars, reflect for a moment, and decide it doesn’t make sense that things just happened. And the pendulum begins to swing back the other way.

Doubt and belief come and go like day and night.

My guess is that an honest atheist will tell you she is on the same intellectual/emotional roller coaster. She may have more confidence that she is perceiving what is “real” when the universe seems empty of the divine. But…still, there are moments when she wonders, even senses that there is something more that is out there. Like the believer “shakes it off” when there is a sense of God’s absence, she has to “shake off” the sense of the divine.

Our lives are microcosms of the same human experience that our alien visitors would discover: God is gone here, today, and back over there, tomorrow.

The lion, as C.S. Lewis would put it, may be very good, but he isn’t tame.

I would love to begin a series of posts on experiencing God by simply taking it as a given that the experience is out there to be had. But then, I wouldn’t be honest. Truth is that, like others, I experience God. And then I don’t. Sometimes, I even sense that I both know and don’t know at the exact same time. And any explanation of how we encounter the divine that doesn’t deal with this rather bizarre experience from the outset would not be satisfying to me.

If God exists, then he must love to play hide and seek. And why not? If human beings are indeed made in God’s image, I wouldn’t expect anything less from our Creator. After all, we are awfully good at this particular game – and not only when we are young.

As adults, we just change the rules a little.

Up next: The Johari window and divine hide and seek.