Rector's Blog: Unprovable
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Recently, I have written about some of the more mystical experiences I have had in my life. I wrote about hearing God speak to me on a mountainside, and about my father communicating to me after he had died. It has been odd for me to recount these experiences publicly. Yes I’m a professionally religious person, and yes I believe in God, in mystical experiences, in life after death. And also, it is still odd. Not because of how personal the stories are, not because they require me to be vulnerable. Though they are personal, and it does feel vulnerable. But I have sought for a while to make a discipline of speaking personally and vulnerably. No, sharing these stories is odd because, in telling you these things that are true about me, I’m forced to acknowledge just how much of my life is based on things that I cannot prove.
That may seem very small to you. It feels very big to me. Like a lot of other Episcopalians, I have a deep desire to seem reasonable. Allowing my life to be transformed by unprovable things seems decidedly unreasonable to me. And yet here I am, being transformed. It’s complicated.
After writing about my dead father calling me on the phone, several people I love reached out to me. Some told me they had had similar experiences. Two of them, both of whom had lost spouses, mentioned that they had not yet heard from their beloved in a similar fashion. Neither of them expressed incredulity at my claim. Both acknowledged something akin to respectful envy. “I love that that happened to you. I wish it would happen to me.”
I have a dear friend from college who belongs to a different religious tradition. Though we believe different things and practice different religions, we’ve always liked each other, in part I think, because we respected that the other took their faith seriously. It’s been over 20 years and we are still talking about our faith with each other, and recently we were talking about the difficulty of being faithful in this hard world. He asked me if there was anything that kept me coming back, and I said, “Well, I mean, I heard God speak.” His response was similar: I love that that happened to you. I wish it would happen to me.
I don’t know why these things have happened to me, and not everyone else. Those who have confessed to similar experiences have been comforting in the moment, but it’s the people who have not had them that rattle me. Because I know these people and I am not better or smarter or stronger or more faithful than them.
What’s more, it’s this sort of inconsistency to which skeptics point when they are saying why they don’t believe: Any person can add 1 to 1 and get 2. Anyone can put water in a freezer and make it into ice. Anyone can recognize life is life and death is death. These things are consistent and reproducible. But you say God spoke to you and nobody else heard it? And you can’t make God speak again by going the same place and doing the same thing? Unprovable. You say you spoke with a deceased relative in a dream? Unreasonable.
It is strange what we feel the need to prove.
When we think about why someone loves us, we feel the need to prove we’ve earned it. We haven’t. You can’t earn love. But we want to prove it just the same.
You cannot prove anything about love. You cannot prove that you love anyone. You cannot prove that they love you. But when you are in the midst of being loving or being loved, proving it doesn’t matter at all. You’re too busy experiencing it.
I think, for my own sake, I need to rest here a little longer in this understanding: That the things that matter so deeply to my heart and to my life – it’s not just that I can’t prove them – it’s that proving them isn’t the point. The experience is the point. Experiencing love is more important than proving it. When I am hungry, I don’t want to prove I’m hungry. I want to eat.
Maybe you have heard something you’d call God’s voice. Maybe you haven’t. Maybe a deceased loved one has reached out to you. Maybe they haven’t. But I’m willing to bet you have had a mystical experience. Because you have known love. Which means you have experienced the joy of the unprovable thing. To love is to be a mystic. To be loved is to be the subject of divine intervention.
And while consciously we may obsess over proving the things that matter, our lives are transformed by the unprovable.
When I say I have been transformed by unprovable things, you might get the idea that I had some revelation and started living differently immediately. I was lost and now I’m found, I was blind and now I see. But that is not true. These moments of realization seeped into me, bothered me, shook me, and then I spent a lot of time in the aftermath being the same person I was before – with one fundamental difference: I chose to trust that my experience was real and then live as if it were true. Ok, I’ve heard God’s voice. What does it look like to live as if God is real? Ok, someone I love communicated to me after they died. What does it look like to live as if there is life after death?
It is in the seeking to live as if that I find myself seeing the world differently. And I call this transformation.
Of all the unprovable things, the one that has caused the most transformation is love. At some point in this mystical life I came to believe that God is love. What’s more, I came to believe that you and I were created out of the abundance of God’s love. That we were made from love and for love. Nothing transforms me more than trying to live as if this is true.
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