The following is the kind of hallucinatory thinking that stalks people facing disconnection.
Four things transcend all our experiences: the vastness of the universe, the engine of life, truth and love.
The joy of watching a starry night soon dissipates when we realize how little we see. And with that comes the sense that we may just be a sub-species of the intelligent life forms out there. Unable to explain all this, we turn to God, as many socialized communities do. We now feel part of a plan, which alleviates our existential anxiety.
Science does not give up on explaining how we all got here. But they are stumped by dark matter, unseen and unmeasured, and a god particle that is known only by its traces. We look over our shoulders and the double set of footsteps in the sand behind us tells us that we are connected to a higher unseen power. Our relationship to the universe needs to be personalized.
Is life just a biological artifact? Take 5 ingredients, mix with water, leave in a warm place and soon life swarms, some intelligent and some following a chemical trail. If there is only one formula, than an infinite universe is required to decrease the odds. God may have been surprised when the first seed sprouted. That evens the playing field between the spiritual and physical world.
Perhaps we exist with God in a world that neither of us understands.
Expecting miracles and special interventions exceeds God’s expectations. That’s not what He does. To Jesus He was a Father that He knew in a different realm. And when Christ told Pilate, “I am the Truth,” the Roman understood that he would never know Him or anything.
The Truth is expressed in humanity by a transcending love. When Jesus loves the least among us, and that love is returned, Truth is born. Truth is universal and eludes detection by the strongest deep field telescopes. Hubble has brought us to seeing within 800 million light years of the Big Bang. The Webb will soon eliminate that gap. And when we see the flash moment of our birth, will we be any closer to the Truth. Probably not, because the next tick of the telescopes takes us beyond the flash, leaving the universe behind us. The palpable terror will send us scurrying back to the safety of our binoculars.
At this moment, the question of “the soul” looms large. And that’s because at my age it seems like a good idea to have a soul.
Jesus must have had one. How else could one explain His re-materializing and still being on message? His Divine soul is the Truth of everything. Insofar as we have loved, we create a soul that survives in Truth. Those who have never loved and avoided a moral life are molecularized upon death and dissipated to the solar winds.
A few days ago I spoke to my mother’s spirit on the chance she was out there. Her love for me penetrated so deeply that it hurt. I told her that I had many things to say to her and I needed to know if she could hear me. Come back, please. Now one would have expected that I would have dreamed of her the following night, but she was clever enough to know that I would have consigned her to my imagination. I did dream. There was Helen Jurgrau, my mothers best friend. There was Joe Casta, her least consequential and second husband. There was an apartment door, our neighbor Millicent Ann Bardsley, an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College. We all lived in the same apartment building, 2047 Nostrand Ave. There was no content or context. Were they just meant to be signposts? Still working on it.
The next morning I look at Olga over breakfast in our Moscow condo, sipping French brewed coffee, but sensing something was missing. Brought up under Communism in Godless Russia, she’s found her soul…in the words of Jesus, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin and Akhmatova. How unlikely that this former MD turned neuroscientist would have come to America and found hedonistic me. The miracle of our loving each other, in Russia, in my dotage, living on the cusp of world-changing history perhaps tells me what my mother couldn’t.
If death means the end of my relationship with Olga, how I learn and grow from it, then I am sad. I continue to nurture recurring thoughts that sometime I will introduce her to my mother. And where my mother is, there’s bound to be an Entenman’s boxed Crumb Cake nearby.