I heard the other day the poet/songwriter Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” It reminded me of Canadian (and now American) singer Neil
Young’s song, “When God Made Me.” In it,
Young questions God, asking him why he made people a certain way, why he
made people when he knew they wouldn’t believe, why he wanted people to have faith anyway, and
more. Both pieces ask a very good
question: how can I have faith in God if
I do not understand everything I feel or believe him to do or be? Why must I wander in the darkness when I’m
standing in the light?
These are difficult questions. Faith is an exercise in tension, a tension between what we know and what we do not, between what we see and what we do not, between what we think and what we cannot conceive. It’s a nearly insuperable challenge. I ask God many “why” questions, too: why must morality be framed in a particular way; why must people be born only to die a few days later; why do some people believe and others do not? It makes one long for the simplicity of former Beatle John Lennon’s song, “God,” in which he says, "I just believe in me; Yoko and me. That’s reality.”
Though I get that Lennon, along with countless others, wishes to reduce what is real to what
is immediately before him, and that on the face of it, this looks as the most viable way to look at the objects of our perception, I also wonder, given the
possibility of the metaphysical and transcendent as well as the difficulty of
reducing ourselves to a brain and attendant vat of chemicals, whether he is
overlooking that reality is more than what he wants to perceive. Otherwise, we are merely projections of
ourselves—and who and where are we?!These are difficult questions. Faith is an exercise in tension, a tension between what we know and what we do not, between what we see and what we do not, between what we think and what we cannot conceive. It’s a nearly insuperable challenge. I ask God many “why” questions, too: why must morality be framed in a particular way; why must people be born only to die a few days later; why do some people believe and others do not? It makes one long for the simplicity of former Beatle John Lennon’s song, “God,” in which he says, "I just believe in me; Yoko and me. That’s reality.”
Granted, transcendence and religion do not lend themselves well to our perceptions. And that’s the problem. Ironically, it’s also the solution. If we could explain everything with chemicals, if we never developed questions like Cohen and Young pose, if we subsumed all experience into a plastic (or computerized) box, then, yes, we would need nothing else. But we can’t. So we wonder.
It's the ultimate human challenge. And God is waiting for us, today, tomorrow, and beyond, to respond.
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