Endings

When I started working in health care, I wondered how I would react to having to deal with the death of a patient, and how I would feel about touching a dead body. As it turned out, I found it to be a deeply moving experience. This is an essay I wrote a year or so ago, after my first such experience.

Tom died today.

His name wasn't really "Tom". That's just what his friends called him, probably because his real name was one of those that kids get teased for having. He was a little man who seemed even littler because both his legs had been amputated. He routinely refused baths and showers, so his hair was a matted, grizzly mess, and he always needed a shave. He wore a pair of grey cigarette-burned sweat pants that dangled loosely below his amputations, and a big flannel hunting jacket of indeterminate color. At any hour of the day or night you would find him cruising the halls of the nursing home on his motorized scooter, its front basket filled with tissues, cigarettes, empty soda cans, magazines, and, oddly, an emesis basin.

Abraham Maslow said that human beings have five types of needs that must be satisfied in order for them to be whole. "Unwhole" people, he said, are people who haven't had those needs met. According to Maslow's Hierarchy, physiological needs come first, then safety and security, followed by love.

As a CNA (certified nursing assistant), my job description requires me to provide levels one and two for the patients in my care. But I think to truly be a caregiver in every sense of the word requires that I enter into that third level as well. And I'm finding that although levels one and two are basically just a lot of hard work, love is kind of magical. It's not something to be earned; rather it's a gift to be given. And somehow, the giving of it blesses the giver as much as it does the receiver. Maybe even more.

It's not always an easy thing to love someone. Some people, like Tom, can be pretty hard to love. From snatches of conversation I've heard, his own family didn't love him. Maybe he didn't love them, either; I don't know. As I cared for him each day, I made a conscious effort to treat him with respect and kindness; to touch him without shrinking away from the dirt. And I quickly found that beneath that gruff nicotine-stained exterior there was a human being, with a heart and a sense of humor. Pretty soon, loving Tom wasn't such an effort any more. He still wouldn't submit to a bath. He didn't get any cleaner, or smell any better. In fact, he didn't change a bit. But I did.

Today my coworker Thad and I finally got to give Tom that long-overdue bath. Thad shaved him while I soaked his hands and scrubbed off the nicotine stains, then cleaned and trimmed his fingernails. As we worked I wondered about his path through life, and how it had brought him here -- from a cute cuddly baby in his mother's arms to this wizened, tattooed, scarred, broken little body. What made him the man he was? What kept him from being the man he might have been?

When we finished giving Tom his final bath, we changed the linens on his bed, then dressed him in a clean hospital gown. We put a soft pillow under his head, spread a colorful afghan over his blanket, and tidied his room. This is what we're taught to do when someone dies, for the sake of the family. I don't know if Tom's family even came, though. It wasn't duty, or his family, that Thad and I were thinking of as we worked. We did it for Tom.

I felt something powerful in that room today, just me and Thad and what was left of what used to be Tom. We found ourselves talking to him just like we would have if he were still alive - "Okay, Tommy, we're going to roll over this way now..." We always talk to our patients as we work, to let them know what we're doing, and I guess it doesn't change just because there's no one there to hear us any more. Love is something you give, even when you don't expect anything in return. That's what makes it love.

In His Image

After discovering the complete absurdity of my God-image (see Creating God in Our Own Image) I started working on coming up with a new one. Because of my quest to find the relationships between life and science and religion and spirituality, I have tried to build a God-image that works for all of them, incorporating not just what I learned in Sunday School and church and so forth, but everything I have learned from life, as well. It's far from complete, but so far I'm quite pleased with how it's turning out, so I thought I'd share a sneak preview.

I thought about power. God is all-powerful, so there's a connection there that must be considered when painting my new God-image. What is power? When I think of the word "powerful," there are a number of things that come to mind. Lightning, for instance, and all that it implies -- electricity, heat, fire, light. All of those things represent a raw, pure, awesome, deadly kind of power. Emotion is powerful, too. If you've ever loved anyone, you know exactly what I mean. Love, hate, loneliness, anger, joy. They're all as awesome and/or devastating as the lightning kind of power, they just take a little longer. And then there's the more subtle and mysterious power of life. The germinating seed that can split a boulder; the elusive spark that turns a mass of organic material into a living, breathing, thinking being; the force we all know is there even though no one has ever been able to locate it.

Power is focused energy - or put another way, energy is the potential for power. So I looked for the energy behind the kinds of power I had thought of, and came up with three kinds: Light, Love, and Life. I wasn't looking for alliteration, but it works nicely, don't you think?

Science has scratched the surface of what I call "light" energy, but hasn't really paid much attention to the other two. Einstein's equation, E=mc², relates mass, energy, and the speed of light, which leads me to believe that gravity is related to light energy as well.

In chemistry I learned how light can change to energy and back again without any loss -- the amount of energy in the universe always remains the same. Light has an intriguing way of defying logic by existing both as particles and waveforms. Electrons zoom around in molecules in most peculiar ways, emitting or absorbing photons of light as they move from energy level to energy level. Quantum physics starts where general chemistry leaves off, exploring the interesting way bits of light and energy interact. Atoms that have been near each other can affect each other even when they're not in proximity to each other. Photons behave differently if someone is watching them than they do when they're not observed. Science gets really weird and illogical when you start getting into quantum physics. It's an area where, I think, mostly what we learn is that we don't know very much at all about anything.

Even though science doesn't really acknowledge love and life as forms of energy (nobody's written any equations for them, that I know of), the Bible gives some credence to my thought that they are. God is Love, it says, and he breathed Life into Adam and Eve when he created them, so there's a connection there. According to the Bible, Jesus is the Light of the World, and science backs me up on the idea of light being a form of energy.

Back to chemistry again, when you study atoms and molecules, you begin to realize that the glue that holds everything together is energy. Energy is what keeps electrons moving around nuclei, and what makes atoms form molecules. Even though we think of ourselves and the things around us as solid and still, the truth is we're all mostly made up of a bunch of empty space with a few particles scattered around in it, not at all as solid, at the molecular level, as we like to think it is, and not at all still, either. The fact is that all that empty space is not really empty at all; it's really full of energy. Pulsing, vibrating energy that makes electrons zoom around and atoms form molecules and molecules form bigger molecules. Energy keeps all those particles from scattering off across the galaxy in a trillion billion different directions instead of forming a human body, or a coffee table, or an oak tree, or a rock. Energy. Life, Light, and Love.

So the oak tree and the coffee table and the rock and me -- we're all made of energy. And this is where my new God-image comes in. I think that energy is God. God is Life and Light and Love; He is the glue that holds the universe and the coffee table and me together.

Suddenly, my God-image doesn't have to sit in a big control room full of 3-D video screens and super high-resolution projectors any more in order to keep track of things. When I stop forming him in my own image, I can let him out of the Gandalf/Moses body that constrains him to being semi-omnipotent. God is omnipotent and omnipresent, because He is in everything that exists. He knows when a sparrow falls from a tree because He is the sparrow. When I learned in Sunday School that Jesus lives in my heart, my little human brain interpreted it metaphorically. As it turns out, maybe I should have interpreted it literally. Jesus is God, and God is in me because I am made of particles and energy and that energy is God. When the preacher said our bodies are temples, he said it metaphorically. But I think the Bible meant it literally.

God created Adam in His image. God is Light and Life and Love, and He created Adam of Light and Love and a handful of dirt, and breathed Life into him.

Now that's the right way around, I think. The particles that make up our bodies are the dirt. The rest of us is God. Once more, I had it all backwards. The "In His Image" part wasn't Adam's body -- it was everything but his body. All of the invisible parts that made him Adam instead of just a peculiarly-shaped sack of mud.

God is in me, and I am in God, and God is everywhere, because everywhere is God. The oak tree and the coffee table and the rock and me -- we are all God, because we are all made out of God. He lives in us because that's the only reason we Are. If He didn't, we wouldn't Be. He loves us because we are part of Him. He'll never stop loving us, because he can't. To do that, He would have to stop loving Himself. And He can't do that, because He is love.

All my life I've been picturing God with a body, because I have one. As it turns out, God's body is us. Funny thing is, that's what the Bible said all along. I was just listening backwards.

Creating God in Our Own Image

I brought up the topic of spiritual dyslexia before (Paradox), and thought I'd expand on that a bit. One of the multitudinous things we humans have got all turned around is the whole God's Image thing. The book of Genesis says that God created man in His own image. It occurs to me, however, that we have actually created God in our image.

Think about it. How do you picture God? Imagine yourself arguing with someone over whether God exists. You can put yourself on whichever side of the argument you feel most comfortable with. The important question is this: when you talk about God, what image appears in your mind?

My God-picture looks like a larger version of my Moses-picture. Human, of course. Male. White robes, staff, sandals, long white hair and beard. Come to think of it, he looks quite a lot like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings... but a whole lot bigger, because, after all, He has to be big enough to hold the "whole world in His hands." And since He's omnipotent and omnipresent, He also has to be big enough to navigate the universe relatively quickly.

Wait, that's not what omnipresent means!

But of course it is, to me. I have no experience of omnipresent. The best I can imagine is being able to flick back and forth quickly enough to approach the illusion of omnipresence. Being everywhere all at once just doesn't compute for me. Like "nothing," I can discuss the concept, but I have no ability whatsoever to comprehend it, in spite of having done my best to convince my children when they were younger that I was fully capable of doing it. (I think they might actually have even believed it, for a second or two.)

Since I can't comprehend the concept of omnipresent, I can't paint a picture in my mind of a God who is it. Therefore my God-image isn't really omnipresent. He just approaches omnipresence by being really big and really fast with sharp eyes and good attention to detail.

Then there's the time issue. Omnipresence, after all, can't be limited to the present moment. In my brain I know that God exists in all moments, past, present, and future, simultaneously. But knowing it and conceiving of it are very different things. The closest I can come is to imagine this robed, sandaled giant Moses/Gandalf guy in a huge control room somewhere, watching as our lives unfold in surround sound on a huge array of three-dee screens. Once more, since I can't conceive of the ability to visualize all points in history simultaneously, what I really see in my mind is amazingly fast rewind and fast-forward features on the multitude of movie projectors.

But wait, while God's watching movies, who's out there taking note of the sparrows that fall? Who's listening to my prayers and keeping me out of danger?

Do you see the problem? My reality requires a set of data that includes finiteness. Everything must have shape, form, and location. I can't conceive of anything else. I have a shape, and a form and a location, therefore God must also, because that's just How Things Are.

The guys who wrote down the stuff that eventually became the Bible did their very best to explain the concept of God. But they had to do it within the parameters of the language that was available to them, and there's just not a lot about God that can be expressed in words. So I read what they wrote, in their clumsy attempt to get the message across with language that was inadequate for the task, and translate it into images in my mind which are further warped by my experience and understanding of How Things Are.

What I end up with is a God created in my own image: bigger than life but still human, still finite, and still (dare I say it?) potentially fallible. The result is a God-image that wouldn't even pass muster in Hollywood.

It doesn't matter whether you believe in God or not; when you imagine what God would be like if He did exist, you probably don't end up with anything any less ridiculous than what I've just described. Our limited ability to conceive of what God is results in a concept that, to be perfectly honest, isn't the least bit believable. As a result, faith becomes that much more difficult. How can this flawed God-image we've created possibly hear every prayer of every person on earth simultaneously? How can He possibly take notice of the microspeck that is me, among such an overwhelming number of other microspecks? (And that's assuming that Earth is the only planet He has to deal with!)

We also endow God with human emotions. No matter how many times we've heard the phrase "God is love," we cannot fathom the possibility of a being who exists as the pure essence of perfect love. Instead we imbue him with our own imperfect human kind of love. And because we feel unloveable we cannot truly imagine a God who could actually really love us.

Our own inability to comprehend the concept of God is what makes Him so difficult to believe in. Because we've created Him in our own fallible and faulty image, we can't fully trust Him. Because we don't understand His true essence, we can't comprehend his power. Because we are unable to love ourselves, we can't believe that He could love us.

No wonder we're so screwed up.

Paradox

My ponderings on things spiritual and energetic have continued without interruption since my previous postings on love and energy and physics. (Let There be Light, Have You Hugged Your Rabbit Today?, Reality, and Other Strange Notions, Further Explorations, Attack of the Killer Strawberries) I haven't written about them in a while, because I keep waiting for them to formulate themselves into some organized and coherent form which can be condensed into a few concise paragraphs that will sum it all up in such a way that everyone who hears it will instantly understand, and wonder why they never looked at it that way before.

I guess I was trying to write a report. Neatly typed and properly APA-formatted, with logically flowing introduction, body and conclusion, complete with supporting references and accurate citations.

Silly me.

The wisdom of the universe is paradoxically both amazingly simple and infinitely complex. On the simple end of the spectrum, it kind of seems like Einstein actually summed things up pretty well with E=mc², so if you insist on rules and formulas to govern life and reality, there's that. No Fourier or Laplace transforms, no integrals or derivatives or differential equations... just a little bit of simple grade school algebra to explain... well, pretty much Everything. Matter and light and energy, everything there is, and how each relates to the other -- how much more straightforward can you get? An eighth-grader can work it out on a five-dollar calculator, but neither scientists nor theologians have yet been able to fully comprehend all its ramifications. No wonder Jesus told his disciples that "God uses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise." There's that paradox thing again. God is just one big omnipotent paradox.

Every time I think I'm beginning to get a handle on the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything, I stumble over something new that makes me realize I haven't even begun to scratch the surface. Every puzzle piece that clicks satisfyingly into place uncovers a thousand others I hadn't noticed before. So I've given up on being organized. There will be no Reader's Digest Condensed Version of my journey. I'll just write what comes to me as it comes, I guess, and if you're interested you can follow along with my wandering explorations as I go. Don't expect coherency or flawless, seamless logic. Things that make absolute, perfect sense can simultaneously be completely unfathomable. Paradox. The simpler they are, the more complex and difficult to understand. Don't believe me? Okay, imagine nothing. It's a simple concept. Nothing is just the absence of anything. But try as you may, I bet you can't imagine what it would actually be like. It's beyond the grasp of our human brains. We have no experience of nothing, and therefore we are unable to imagine it. And yet we know what it is. We have a word for it. We can say it, but we can't see it. How screwy is that?

The first rule in this journey is that you have to think outside the box. You have to consider possibilities beyond the realm of your own experience and understanding. There's that paradox thing again. How can you think of something you have no experience or understanding of? I dunno. We thought of nothing, so it must be possible. Best I can figure, you just keep reaching and stretching, pushing the limits of your brain a little bit, then a little bit more. We've been doing it for thousands of years, and it seems to somehow keep us moving along, discovering new things and reaching new levels of understanding. Although sometimes it also seems like the more we learn, the less we understand. We can walk on the moon, but Pharoah's magicians could turn sticks into snakes. And even though we heard the story in Sunday School and everybody knows that everything you learn in Sunday School is true, deep down inside we believe it just about as much as they'd have believed we could go to the moon. (Moses is a different story. God was on his side, so of *course* his stick turned into a snake. That's perfectly understandable, right?) But I digress...

The reason for the "think outside the box" rule is that I have begun to believe that human beings are just naturally spiritually dyslexic. Or maybe just stubbornly contrary. We get everything backwards. God said that if we believe, anything is possible. Or, to use a Wayne Dyer paraphrase, "You'll see it when you believe it." And what do we say? "I'll belive it when I see it." Go on, admit it. You've said it thousands of times, haven't you?

Here's another one. According to Jesus, it's grace that saves us; and yet for thousands of years Christians have been making up rules that people must follow in order to be worthy of God's grace. Talk about a paradox. How can you be worthy of grace? If you could manage to be good enough to deserve to be forgiven, there wouldn't be anything to forgive. Grace ceases to exist in the absence of imperfection.

So since we're so good at getting stuff backwards, one of my new "pondering tools" is to look at things backwards. And upside-down, and inside-out. That way, just in case we had it the wrong way around to begin with, I might actually stumble over an important bit of Truth that's been staring us in the face all along.

In addition to their propensity for getting things backwards, humans are also very good at totally misinterpreting things. Jesus' disciples, for instance, fully expected him to establish a kingdom and sit on the throne as king, right there in Jerusalem. They even argued about their own positions in the kingdom. After all, the prophets said he was going have a kingdom. Of course the prophets also said he was going to die, but that didn't fit into their understanding of what "kingdom" meant, so they skipped over that part. Things that don't fit our understanding of reality just don't exist for us. In one of my psych classes we read about scientists who did an experiment in which they raised kittens in a room that contained only horizontal lines. After the cats grew up, they put them into a regular room, and the cats kept bumping into table legs. Their reality had never contained vertical lines, and so their brains were unable to process the concept. The data didn't compute, so it was erased from the picture. As a result, anything vertical was invisible to the cats.

Humans are just like that. We look at things through the bias of what we have learned and experienced as "reality." Anything that doesn't fit gets erased, and we can look right at it without seeing it. Those prophets were trying to relay a message they had no language for, and had to make do with what they had, and a lot of stuff got lost in translation or just ignored because it didn't "make sense." What was meant to be metaphorical was understood as literal, and the result was a lot of confusion and disappointment and disbelief. Paradigms aren't all that easy to shift.

Silly Israelites. All they had to do was think about it a little bit instead of just taking everything so literally. It's pretty obvious, in hindsight.

Of course WE have it all figured out, because we're so much smarter and wiser than they were. We've got electricity, after all, and indoor plumbing and Google, so naturally we have a depth of understanding they simply weren't able to manage.

We're also really arrogant. But hey, that's just human nature, right? :)