♣ The opening verse to a moving poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins reads: The world is charged with the grandeur of God. I agree. Maintaining a state of innocent wonder, we readily get a sense of God’s existence, of His universal presence in the world. We can see God everywhere in everything when we mark the plentiful evidence of intelligent design, when we mark the awesome power, scope, genius, logic and indisputable meshing of all we see in the universe, sun and rain, night and day, the seasons, all the countless permutations of life, growth and change, animal, vegetable and mineral, a constant, vast, congenial, balanced, commodious nature, a bountiful, all-nurturing earth, wind and fire, a ubiquitous mass, time, space, dimension, reality, truth, color, beauty, symmetry, the untold immensity and complexity, the exquisite intricacy of the clockwork synchronic which rules the celestial bodies, the insoluble enigma that is man, the mystical, unseen force behind the wondrous human vessel, that elaborate, tortuous, arcane system, that auspicious intermingling of blood, bone and tissue all predisposed to movement under mind, spirit, emotion, thought, reason, imagination and consciousness.
In a state of innocent wonder we sense that even chaos, even the rampant, seemingly contradictory and disarrayed entities wreaking havoc with nature, bucking traditional laws of physics, things believed untenable not long ago and even those of unknown composition not directly observable in nature to this day, such stunners as black holes, quarks and neutrinos, such marvels as dark matter, strange matter and anti-matter, all of whose constructs exist beyond the realm of classical physics and have pressed the need for whole new standards of measure like string physics and quantum mechanics, even these wild, exotic, irreconcilable items enjoy a special place in the vast scheme of things ostensibly pieced together by a great Creator God.
Maybe faith is a form of commitment to the sense of God we get by viewing the cosmos through a constant state of innocent wonder. Maybe more mundane states of being like smug sophistication are enemies of wonder and only serve to squelch our natural perspicacity, dull our fundimental insight into creation, dampen our subsequent sense of God, our commitment to that sense of God and hence our faith.
We don’t at first know God but sense God. The disparity between knowing God and sensing God is a gap we humans feel compelled to bridge because we know that what we sense time and again is something quite real regardless of how impalpable it seems, how indefinable it remains. When we experience it frequently, we lend a certain weight and thus credence to the mere sense of something. We seek to turn a mere sense of something into faith in that something. We commit to that mere sense of something in the form of faith. We have faith in the grave importance and thus the existence of that nevertheless ephemeral something. We get the nettling urge to flesh it out. The world’s been changed countless times beyond recognition by those intrepid men pursuing the mere but constant sense of something impalpable, of something indefinable but evidently real.
We build the bridge between sensing God and knowing God through faith, that is, commitment to the sense of God we experience by assessing the world in a regular state of wonder, grace perhaps, a keen if purely humble state of awareness, openness, readiness, expectation. In time, faith, commitment to the sense of God, becomes not only the means but the very motivation for coming to know God. This commitment to the sense of God is the very nature of faith, what’s meant by the poignant simile “a leap of faith.” We commit to our sense of God in the form of faith the way we commit to our primal senses of hunger, love, fear and self-preservation. We commit on a simple hunch that these urge us on with good reason despite the fact that we don’t immediately see that reason, commit on a hunch that they auger something real, something vital, something attainable. The urge like all human urges suggests the true existence of an entity which can satisfy the urge. We commit to our sense of God in the form of faith, take a leap of faith in God until we get to know Him better and with this knowledge comes a stronger sense of God, deeper faith, greater knowledge, an even stronger sense of God, yet deeper faith, still greater knowledge and anon.
This is the same sense and inevitable commitment to that sense, the same faith that gripped Pasteur, Snow, Bassi and Semmelweis when they gleaned in a state of wonder the nature of microorganisms, specifically, disease-causing pathogens they could not immediately prove existed but felt a driving need to pursue, discover, know, understand and expose despite the highly conspicuous absence at the outset of any hard evidence. It’s the same sense and inevitable commitment to that sense, the same faith that gripped Jonas Salk when he gleaned in a state of wonder a viable polio vaccine he could not at first prove possible much less produce, but felt driven to pursue. It’s the same sense and inevitable commitment to that sense, the same faith that gripped Madam Curie when she gleaned in a state of wonder the source of radioactivity through the paltry suggestion of isotopes, polonium and radium, things she couldn’t immediately prove existed much less isolate, identify and classify but felt the powerful urge to track down. It’s the same sense and inevitable commitment to that sense, the same faith that gripped Einstein when he gleaned in a state of wonder the fact of a single basic equation, a lone code bound to explain the entire universe, one he couldn’t immediately prove existed but felt a burning need to crack and which cracking produced stunning new insights into the natures of time, light, energy, mass and gravity, led to relativity, hinted at the arcane structure of atoms, initiated nuclear technology and quietly revolutionized science for the first time since Isaac Newton. Powerful stuff this sense of things impalpable and inevitable commitment to this sense which is faith.
It’s the same sense and inevitable commitment to this sense, the same faith that grips every man, faith in the things of everyday life, faith in the commonplace but less predictable, less reliable things, faith in cars, trains, buses, planes, drivers and pilots, in infrastructures, roads, bridges, traffic lights, elevators, in the upper floors of skyscrapers, man’s faith in all these things without a guarantee they’ll work for him if they work at all, without a guarantee unless it’s the fact they’re long-established and work for most people most of the time.
We don’t ask if the road might have developed a sink hole somewhere, if the plane, bridge or elevator received a timely inspection, if the cab driver is stoned, the pilot verges on madness, oncoming motorists might have drinking problems or poor judgment, if traffic lights are properly calibrated. We have faith in even these clearly flawed and transitory items. Why not faith in the consummate Architect of an awesome universe?
The universe has its hazards too and yes, in abundance. Still, there’s something behind it infinitely stronger than man, his feeble contraptions and his infrastructures. We already know we’re vulnerable, we live in a dangerous world and still we trust in things that have proven insecure, not the least of which has been dubious man himself with all his man-made systems and apparatus. So how is it worse committing to Him, putting our faith in the Grand Master, suspected Creator of all life, mass, time and space? If He’s the one who made us, at least He’s able to remake us–not so with feeble man or his frail inventions. Still and again, sustaining pride, we quickly, readily, unquestioningly put our lives at the mercy of unreliables every day with a firm commitment amounting to faith and little concern for our personal safety. How can it be that this constant, implicit faith in the weak and perishable bodes less foolhardy than faith in God?
Check it out. Many people are too proud to risk playing the fool by placing faith in a God, keeping pace with a God who in the end may prove not to exist. At the same time these same people, retaining their sense of pride, invest their lives and livelihoods in a whole series of frail, risky, unpredictable, unreliable, oft-proven destructive factors regularly. One strange, underlying detail, however, flips this glaring contradiction, renders what’s irrational in it reasonable. That detail is the unacknowledged presence in these people of a sustainable, subconscious yet deep-seated faith in God. Steeped in pride, these people tend to stumble into denial. They deny the shame of believing in temporal things in the same breath as they deny the wisdom of believing in the eternal.
Those in a constant state of wonder mark such distinctions. The sophisticate never does. He’s grown numb, blind, complacent. He takes life and the whole universe for granted, fails for lack of wonder to see even his own sheer complacency. Faith is a leap from the sense of something revealed by wonder to a commitment to the sense of that something. If you’ve no state of wonder, then you’ve no sense of the world and what’s behind it, no commitment to that sense of the world and what’s behind it and so no faith in a Creator God and, it follows, no faith in your own perceptions, your own acuity, your own skill at appraising the world and what’s behind it, only grateful oblivion, complacency, a constant underlying insecurity, nagging doubt combined with a false sense of self-importance and self-satisfaction for what else have you got when your sure there’s nothing bigger than you?
–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com
