My Most Embarrassing Belief

Well-educated citizens of modern society are supposed to accept certain facts as just true. Chief among them is that the laws of nature are not bendable or breakable. If something happens that seems to contradict the laws of nature, it must be due to a scientific principle we haven’t discovered yet (but A.I. will get there any day now). Or maybe there’s a simple explanation we just haven’t learned about. The miracles of the Torah, the New Testament, and other sacred traditions are to be responsibly taught as pleasant metaphors, if they are taught at all. And what preceded or caused the Big Bang is not to be probed, since that’s beyond the scope of physics.

Take this mindset to its logical conclusion, and you get a pretty bleak, academic-flavored reality. The whole world is a giant Rube Goldberg contraption, where every moment is explicable in terms of what came before it. Nothing lies outside of material cause-and-effect. Plug in enough data about our nature and nurture, and you could theoretically predict the next word out of any of our mouths. I don’t buy this Rube Goldberg approach to life.

I believe that there are holy ruptures – moments when the predicted order of our world gets radically upended. I’ve experienced them in my own life and seen them with my own eyes. Some of these moments are fabulous and dramatic, some are subtle and ubiquitous. In other words, I believe in miracles. And that puts me in the embarrassing minority in my social circles.

When I was a grad student at the University of Chicago Divinity School, it seemed that the goal of scholarship was to explain away the religious claims of the traditions we were studying. Everything was approached with what they called a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” in other words, a philosophy of skepticism first. All mythology, ritual, and religious practices were assumed to be furthering someone’s wealth or power – the only real question was whose and how. There were some brilliant professors at U of C, and their work was fascinating, but it only admitted one way of knowing. It pointedly excluded religious knowing itself. In this sense, I felt, many of these professors actually understood very little of the traditions they researched.

I didn’t yet have a robust Jewish practice of my own at that time, but I sensed something lacking in this approach of dissection and deconstruction. I wanted more. It was during these years, surrounded by this community of superior intellects, that I heard a fellow student describe exactly what I was experiencing. He said, “Studying religion academically is like pouring acid on your soul.”

The key here – what I loved about this statement – was that it pointed to the precariousness with which religious people in secular modernity sustain our faith. Because it’s not just the academy that subjects everything religious to intellectual suspicion – it’s the entirety of mainstream-left society. To hear many in post-religious circles tell it, faith is a slippery, dangerous pit from which we have to distance ourselves and our children lest we inadvertently fall in. In my experience, it’s exactly the opposite – faith is hard to gain and easy to lose. It’s the secular worldview that’s easy to fall into, especially for those of us who had painful religious upbringings or who, like me, grew up non-religious with the catechism of sola ratio (only reason). That familiar skeptical voice worms its way into my prayers and meditation to this day, questioning, mocking, and blocking my attempts to open a broadband connection to God.

And yet, I have had miraculous experiences that I cannot ignore or deny. On the least controversial end of my belief in miracles, I’d suggest that every creative idea or act is an inexplicable wonder. There is no rational way to explain, say, a jazz solo or the spontaneous solving of a problem or the invention of speech. Some gap has to be jumped between what came before and the new idea. On the more controversial end, I’ve had experiences that have rocked my world: I’ve watched my dead grandmother intervene in intractable problems in my life; I’ve asked God questions and received unmistakable replies; and strangest of all, I somehow generate live water bugs (those giant cockroaches that are ubiquitous in NYC) in my apartment in exact proportion to the fear and contraction I’m experiencing at the time. More fear and contraction – water bugs every day; a period of liberation and growth – no water bugs at all. I’m not kidding.

As I escaped the clutches of academia (first by switching to the MDiv program – the clergy training track where my classmates were committed Christians – and then by graduating), I was also deepening my Jewish spiritual journey. I continued to wrestle with my inner voices of suspicion and skepticism. But I also found something that surprised me: the sense of magic that pervades the liturgy and Torah stories was familiar. The Garden of Eden, Jacob wrestling with the angel and being given a new name, the crossing of the sea of reeds, and the manna that arrived from heaven – it all mirrored my own experience of living in an enchanted world with an interventionist God. The Rube Goldberg machine is glitchy; it breaks down all the time, and life unwinds in unexpected directions.

I may share the details of my stories of miracles in my posts here over the next months. But for now, I’ll leave it at this: I have witnessed the slippage between the material word and the spiritual-energetic worlds over and over again. There is no solid line between them. The worlds interpenetrate and, in fact, are one and the same. Reality is multi-faceted, like a monarch butterfly with 12,000 eyes. This multi-faceted reality is attested in the accounts of sacred literature the world over: the physical plane is not solid as it seems, but morphs with the flow of consciousness – ours and God’s.

We find this expressed in different images in the Jewish mystical traditions of kabbalah and Hasidism, in Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, indigenous and shamanistic traditions, and even in the teachings of Jesus who said, “if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.” So, it may be embarrassing to admit that I believe in miracles in today’s soul-scorched Rube Goldberg world, but at least I’m in good company.