Belief, Revisited

(The title is a reference to my facetious post from NaBloPoMo, Day 2)

I had choir practice last night, which gets me nostalgic for all my past choir days. Do you ever get the sense when you're in the middle of something that "This is amazing. This is going to change me and stay with me forever but it's not going to last long so I need to savor it!" I feel that way now about lots of moments of motherhood, but I also felt it frequently in choir at BYU. I knew it was a singular experience at the time, but the years since I've been out of school have thrown that truth even more into relief. So much of that music made an impression on me - the harmonies and the lyrics - at a formative time in my life, and those impressions constitute much of what I consider my limited knowledge of God. In other areas of my life God has felt somewhat distant or abstract at times, but music has always been one of my primary means of intuiting God's existence. I've had in mind the past couple nights a song I sung back at BYU, a choral setting of a Robert Frost poem, "Choose Something Like a Star". Here is the poem for your devouring: 

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Choose Something Like a Star 
O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

And here is a good clip of the choral setting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWnKkMd8zY8 

(And now I will awkwardly attempt to wax eloquent and philosophical, with probably too many rhetorical flourishes and not enough clarity or editing. Please forgive the attempt.) 

In this poem, I see man and his longing to understand the universe. It's funny, because from one perspective I can see this poem having great appeal to an atheist. In the absence of God, choose something like a star. But as a believer, I also see a parallel to man and his longing to understand God. Here is my rambling vision, prompted in part by this poem: There is so much in the physical world and in the spiritual calculus of the universe that we want to know, but we don't. How things work, why bad things happen to innocent people, etc. We can't even know how much we don't know. And yet we sense that things have explanations, have meanings even when it's impossible for us to comprehend them. We are meaning-making creatures - we try so hard to explain everything - but our reach exceeds our grasp. We grow frustrated - we overcompensate - we embellish what little we know - we talk up our certainty of what little we do. We see the stars burning silent and distant and we can't leave them alone to burn - we sense, we insist that they have something to say. We are part of the universe and we feel entitled to comprehend it all, to know it's deepest corners, to resonate with it and hear it speak to us.

But we forget that we are children. We demand to know, we demand because demanding is the bulk of our skill set, and I imagine God as empathetic towards our flailings and lashing out. I also imagine His attempts to speak to us as not dissimilar to my attempts to speak to my pre-verbal children. Each one, I have spoken to from birth in a daily ritual, watching their eyes as I touch my face and say "Mama", then put my hand on their bellies and repeat their own name. Over and over. I want them to know me and to know themselves in relation to me. There is a cloudiness in their eyes, but also such concentration! So much attentiveness as they study my face and see my lips move and hear my words. As months and more months pass the cloudiness recedes, but even as their recognition grows they have no language to articulate what they recognize - only noise.

When I try to conceive of God, I imagine Him in my place and myself as the neonate. When I imagine my soul in communication with God I see my infant whining and wailing, and I see those times in my life when I believe He was communicating back to me His existence - always simply - no angelic voices, no bright lights or specific instructions for me - but like Frost's star, "I burn" - "I am here" - "I exist". Nothing more, but nothing less either. A sense of warmth from a faraway burning. "It gives us strangely little aid, but does tell us something in the end." I could dismiss that sensation of warmth, of mercy, as emotionalism, as a mere cocktail of hormones gifted to me by evolutionary biology, and that picture's not wrong, but incomplete, I think. Just as a star is a giant ball of gas millions of miles away, and yet something more than that, the science behind my emotional responses to music (and literature and art and scripture) is insufficient to me in explaining their significance.

As I've mulled over this poem the past couple nights, I've also been reminded of an essay I read a few months back by one of my favorite Mormon writers, Rosalynde Welch, titled Disenchanted Mormonism: Practicing a Rooted Religion, that offers an alternative narrative to the common one of "faith, faith crisis, then faith resolution or abandonment":

"My experience has not been one of conventional religious doubt, an agonizing knife-edge demanding resolution through insight or decision, but rather one of puzzlement. Puzzlement is a gentler and more sustainable state of mind. It entails patience, an internal stillness, and an acknowledgement of my own failure to wring answers from an inscrutable world. Puzzlement implies humility. If provisional doubt must be mastered by individual judgment and choice, then puzzlement marks the limits of our intellectual and moral mastery. 

Moreover, the notion of puzzlement allows us to uncouple belief from faith, and faith from choice, in the troubling but inescapable logic of doubt. Puzzlement allows us to think of faith not as a moral victory over uncertainty but rather as an encounter with uncertainty itself, which is to say an encounter with the limits of our own capacity to comprehend or control the world. When we encounter church doctrines or practices that we fail to understand or can’t justify, or when we taste suffering in our own lives or the lives of those we love, we find ourselves puzzled by God’s will. These moments of hesitation become the personal occasions of faith. They originate not in our capacity to choose, in our strength of will, but on the contrary in our own limitations of mind, in our insufficiency to comprehend or our present inability to decide. Faith begins at the moment we say “I don’t understand.” Faith here is not a choice to believe but choice’s opposite, born in a moment of spiritual hesitation or aporia; not first a triumph of the moral mind, but its fortunate failure."

I find myself in a state of puzzlement all the time. Similar to the author, my natural bent is not to see God in every little lucky coincidence or mishap. Elsewhere in the article she talks about a spiritual otherworld visible to some believers, where every boon and bane confirms His existence - I don't know that world. What I do have is puzzlement about why things are the way they are, why I am the way that I am, and in the face of that confusion, a quiet "I burn" communicated through others by kindness, by music, by compassion, by art. It stays my mind, and asks of me a certain height, and I'm certain that I am not reaching it, but I am reaching.

(I am not sure if or how to end now, but)

THE END