"We Can't All Be Mother Teresa" - Or Can We?

The recent publicity about Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, the soon-to-be published journals and letters of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, surprised me. One author called the revelations of her profound doubt and sense of God's absence "stunning," but I am not stunned at all, except to learn that others are stunned. I am surprised, not only by the surprise of others, but also by the complete lack of understanding some people appear to have about spiritual struggle. Is it so impossible to imagine that people for whom spirituality consists of deep, intimate relationship will struggle with that relationship?

Jacob wrestled with God. John of the Cross wrote about his "dark night of the soul." Many truly holy people who actually bother to WORK on their spirituality find that the work can be hard, painful, dark, and daunting, that their faith can waver to the point of buckling.

I think this is especially true among humanitarian workers, who have to gaze upon the face of the Suffering Christ on a daily basis. Whether or not you believe God exists, that Face certainly does, and it hurts to see it, live with it, try to make it better.

I've read that some have reacted with disdain to Mother Teresa's inner battles, suggesting she was hypocritical to profess a faith that, in reality, eluded her. First of all, I think anyone who has lived a life as generous as hers can feel free to cast stones - after all, you've been in the trenches; you know what it's like - but everyone else can shut up! Secondly, what a total misunderstanding of the nature of a life in faith. Doubt and near-despair are part of the process of, and perhaps essential to, becoming a fully integrated human being - integrated, whole, holy. The words of Madeleine L'Engle are worth revisiting: "Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself."

I get annoyed when people of one faith - and I include atheism as a faith, as I would any other system of thought centered around something that cannot be revealed by proof - gloat over perceived deficiencies of another. The childish arrogance of being absolutely certain and of believing oneself to be incontrovertibly right, and the cloying superiority with which the "right" people criticize the people they believe to be "wrong," are divisive, unproductive, and morally inferior means by which to "edify" society. The irony of any glee detractors might have over Mother Teresa's faith crises lies in the fact that her humility and human pain actually have a greater power to teach and reach others, who might be going through some spiritual striving of their own.

A Time article points out, "Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with [darkness within faith] and abandoned neither her belief nor her work." I think this is the true meaning of holiness or sainthood, right here. It's what Harper Lee described in To Kill a Mockingbird as the meaning of courage: going on despite obstacles, lack of support, the risk of defeat, and near-total loss of hope. If Mother Teresa made mistakes, had imperfections, and lost faith time and again, what right does any one of us have to criticize, resent, or judge that, or claim she is a less holy person because of her struggles? Can any of us claim we know and understand what lies in the depths of anyone else's heart? I think these journals and letters are the closest we are going to get, and if they reveal a person who experienced unspeakable loneliness and pain but tried her best anyway to live a loving life, then we could learn something from her - about our humanity, our spirit, ourselves. Such an individual is just what our church might declare, in a spirit of hope, to be a saint: not a perfect person, but one who poured herself out completely, in yearning and in hard work, to reach the perfection of love to which every human being is called.

The Power of Books

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!

Is it just me, or are dads sort of challenging to find birthday presents for? :)

I have a tiny little present here, in the form of a link (Dad, click on the word link) to a fascinating timeline entitled "The History of the Book in the Philippines."

Some highlights that caught my eye:

In 1531, Queen Isabella forbade the transport of secular or fiction books into the Spanish colonies. What, no fiction?! No fun!

In 1583 the Inquisition authorized the Bishop of Manila (or his "people") to inspect arriving ships for books listed in the Index of Forbidden Books, or the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. These would be confiscated. (And then what, I wonder?)

In 1610 the first Tagalog grammar was published. In 1618 and 1622 respectively, the Augustinians and the Jesuits set up printing presses. The Franciscans established one in 1692.

Just for perspective, elsewhere in the world, the King James Bible was published in 1611; the Jamestown Massacre occurred in the New World in 1622; and in 1692, the Salem Witch Trials began in Massachusetts.

***

I remember how as a child I treasured the books my parents brought back to the Philippines from abroad, and I read them over and over. Good children's books were not so easy to come by in Manila, as I recall, in the early 70's. One of my most vivid memories of our move to the U.S. in 1981 is of how astonished I was to walk into the library at my new school and see shelves from floor to ceiling completely filled with books. I had never seen so many books in my life. Something awoke in me that has never left - a sense of awe over books, a quickening of the pulse whenever I walk into a room full of them, a love of the sensual pleasure of them - the way the pages smell when I first open a book, the feeling of turning those pages, reading words and somehow having those written letters conjure up scenes and lives in my mind, as if from nothing.

With that kindling of a passion for books came a heady infatuation with words, with language and with languages. I felt I could almost taste them in my mouth. Even now, words I like make my mouth feel good, whereas those I don't seem to leave a bad taste in there, or an annoyance in the ear that induces grimacing.

***

So many memories I cherish of my parents involve literature. Every time I see a full moon shining through wisps of clouds at night I hear my father's voice quoting Noyes: "The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas." When I think of T.S. Eliot - especially since I work with patients, if not etherized, anesthetized on the table - I remember my mother opening a beautiful leather-bound volume of his poetry in a musty, second-hand book store and reading to me from Prufrock. And to this day I cannot dog-ear my pages without feeling I have betrayed my beloved grandmother, who taught me to treat books with love and reverence.

***

If I were to chorerograph a ballet depicting the story of the Garden of Eden, I wouldn't use fruit or sexual license to represent the mythic "Forbidden Fruit." I would have the Serpent character pluck a book off a shelf (or a tree) and hand it to Eve and have her dance around with it for a while before sharing it with Adam.

I can see why people would be afraid of ideas, of learning and thinking for oneself. Insight is powerful; it is power. I know from experience that knowledge and education challenge blind faith.

To that I say an emphatic Amen.

God is not God if God wants unthinking creatures to go around paying thoughtless lip-service. Why forbid the fruit, then? Did the God of Genesis know something about "Adam" and "Eve" that they didn't even realize about themselves - like, perhaps, the fact that they weren't quite ready for the responsibility? Sounds familiar - how many ethical issues has humankind dredged up and been completely ready for?

I think what happens next in the story pretty much demonstrates Adam and Eve's level of readiness, or lack thereof. I believe the "Original Sin" didn't consist of failure to obey a puppeteer god, but rather of self-interest. They grabbed at the Tree's fruit for the wrong reason. They got sucked into listening to external pressures without real knowledge of themselves first, and they wanted the fruit, not as a means to serve their world or honor others, but rather to glorify themselves.

The irony of the Serpent's temptation - You will become like God - is that that's exactly what a loving God would want: human beings so fully realized in their humanity, so spiritually adept, that divinity shines through them. Trust a "snake," though, to miss the point, to not only lack understanding but to completely misunderstand, to fail to realize that knowledge of good and evil - and perhaps, of one's own vulnerability / nakedness - is the only way to make choosing good a valid, freely-made choice.

I do not believe this story, in what many consider the Book of Books, is factual. But I do believe it is true. Because it's a story of me, and him, and her, and you.

The Problem of Prayer

"Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself." -Madeleine L'Engle


I was just enjoying Anali's blog and her post mentioning Dionne Warwick's song, "I Say a Little Prayer for You." Lately prayer's been coming up a lot; a personal ramble seems in order.

A few days ago I came across Dr. Sid Schwab's brilliant post about a family who had chosen prayer as the sole intervention for their child with neuroblastoma, after one arduous course of conventional medicine after another had failed.

I can understand why people would feel totally exhausted in the effort to fight a ruthless cancer. I took care of a 5-year-old with rhabdomyosarcoma my first year out of medical school, and that experience completely destroyed my faith--at least for a time. She was only five but looked like a hundred and five - emaciated, her skull and skeletal form detectable beneath her greyish skin, barely any wisps of hair on her head, miserable beyond description, unrecognizable when compared to the photograph of her at her hospital bedside, showing a healthy, smiling, fair-haired little girl, all sweetness and promise.

Her x-ray was unrecognizable too. We doctors get used to seeing certain things on an x-ray - large black spaces outlining the lungs, heart in the middle of the chest cocked just so, ghostly traces of familiar internal structures all in their proper places and configurations. Looking at her x-ray was like looking at a jumbled mess of alien, unfamiliar objects, which of course it was. Piles and piles of tumor had ravaged her on the inside, taking over every nook and cranny and claiming them as their own. There was barely anything identifiable to be seen.

The girl died after weeks, perhaps months, of indescribable suffering. If I'm ever asked to be on a jury for a "pain and suffering" case, I'm going to have to explain, "Well, guys, just so you know what my idea of 'pain and suffering' is, ever hear about rhabdomyosarcoma?" Five years old, lung spaces so obliterated by cancer that she could barely breathe. Five years old, body wracked with pain from head to foot, then untimely death. Hopeless.

My own daughter was five years old at the time - exuberant, full of laughter and life, pleasingly plump, sunny and bright. Naturally, I had a lot of questions. At the time my conclusion was that no one was listening; we were fundamentally alone, and after our lives ended, we turned into dust, our consciousness, "spiritual" growth, memories, and identity completely snuffed out into oblivion. But if you were to ask me today if I pray, the answer is, actually I do.

Dr. Schwab was able to articulate questions about intercessory prayer that so many people, believers and non-believers alike, ask, especially in the face of extreme hardship or tragedy. I've put a link to the full post on my sidebar, but here are the passages that I found so eloquent and so powerful:


I must also say this: there's something perverse to the point of revulsion in the idea of a god that will heal the girl if enough people pray for her. What sort of god is that? To believe that, you must believe he deliberately made her ill, is putting her through enormous pain and suffering, with the express plan to make it all better only if enough people tell him how great he is; and to keep it up unto her death if they don't. If that sort of god is out there, we're in big, big, BIG trouble. If people survive an illness because of prayer, does that mean that god has rejected those that didn't pray? If you pray for cure and don't get it, and if you believe that praying can lead to cure, then mustn't you accept that God heard your prayers and said no? If so, are you going to hell? But if you say either outcome is God's will, then what's the value of the prayer in the first place? In this case, it seems, it's only to make the girl feel guilty and unworthy. How sad. Since the whole idea is so internally inconsistent, give the poor kid a break.

Does this family's god need reminders; does he have DADD? Or is he waiting for them to hit a magic number of people praying? A certain quantum of prayer-units that must be achieved? Does he give credit for getting close, maybe knock off a little pain when they hit 80%, or is it all or nothing? In praying to him -- and if, as the article says, people around the child see God at work in all his glory -- shouldn't they be thanking him for their daughter's misery rather than asking for a change of plans? Shouldn't they be delighted with the whole thing? If He's perfect, how can you add to that by praying? Or expect a change? I simply don't get it.

And what of children who have no one to pray for them? If prayer works, what's going on with those kids? Does this prayer-tabulating yet perfect god not care about them? Or isn't he paying attention? Has he deliberately set them up...?


The most recent research study I know of, the STEP trial, showed that prayer makes no difference to the outcome of coronary bypass surgery. In fact, people who were prayed for and knew it experienced a significantly higher incidence of complications than those who either were not prayed for or were not sure they were being prayed for. The study had no control group (people who were not prayed for and knew they were not being prayed for). The "prayer" consisted of Christian prayer groups, who were told the date of surgery and the patient's first name and last initial, asking God for "a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications," twice a day for two weeks, starting on the eve of surgery.

Already I have a problem with this - not with the results, but with the underlying presumptions. One time my son wanted to ask God to prevent rain as the storm clouds were already gathering overhead. I told him this was not the right way to pray - asking for something so self-serving, and also asking for something not to happen when it was already beginning to happen. Even Jesus prefaced a desperate petition with "If it is possible..." Asking for over 1200 patients to recover quickly without complications from cardiac surgery is asking the impossible, especially when many of them were having the surgery BECAUSE they already had conditions which were the first step in developing those complications - previous heart attacks, high blood pressure, diabetes, lung disease, and the like. I think there's something inherently disrespectful and counter-productive in turning prayer, which is not merely an act but a way of relating, into what amounts to a GAME. Let's see if God will play - will he help out 50% of the time? 55%?

Like Dr. Schwab, I reject the notion of a Vending-Machine God. My husband said it well when we were talking about this: a prayer life is so much more about a relationship than about asking for things. Prayer is an intimate expression of longing, faith, hope, and love. If we do have spirit beyond our conglomeration of cells and molecular reactions, prayer, being a spiritual form of engagement, has real gifts for us. C.S. Lewis pointed out that prayer is not for transforming God but for transforming ourselves. I think we can pour out our longings and our pain in prayer, and we can even ask for help, but I also think if God is the parent that so many believe God is, this parent has to let us live our own lives freely, without interfering every time we have trouble. I believe help is possible, but using prayer solely or primarily as a means of acquiring fixes is missing the point and misusing the act.

I used to get mad at God for the suffering of children - sick children, abuse victims, the impoverished. Then someone pointed out to me, "What do you want God to do, make everything perfect? You're looking for the Christ who healed lepers and gave sight to the blind. He's not here." How startling it was to me to hear such simple, familiar, yet eye-opening words as if I'd never heard them before. Even the scriptures ask, "Why do you seek the living one among the dead? He is not here." I think Jesus lived out the example of what a loving God would want: when you see suffering, try to heal it. It's not what we're meant for, not "God's will."

We're the eyes and hands now. We have our work cut out for us.

The Gift of "Small" Moments

This weekend was truly lovely. We acquired two additional sons temporarily - our good friends had their wonderful boys, ages 10 and 13, stay with us while they went on a long-awaited trip - and as a bonus we also got to know their cute bronze-winged Pionus parrot (Pionus chalopterus).

The brothers were adorable trying to figure out what key to start singing the Hebrew blessing in before dinner Friday night - both are musicians, one with a deeper voice than the other. "Baruch-no, that's too high...Baruch-ato--no, still can't reach that..." But they found their note and set the tone for a nice evening.

I love the way family prayer, sung or spoken, can re-center our scattered lives and bring us together around the table from the various forces that tug us away from that center every day. When we four are alone as a family we often resurrect the old Catholic tradition of saying the Angelus at dusk, another call to pause and refocus busy lives on love and family. It's balm.

The rest of the weekend was truly relaxing - seemingly ordinary, but to me quite special. We enjoyed a blueberry pancake breakfast at a farm in Concord, went on a hay ride, played our favorite family card game, ouistiti, two nights in a row, maneuvered around a birthday party here and a tennis game there, discovered a tiny local lunch place that serves breakfast all day as well as some exotic items (falafel), and spent time enjoying the weather in Harvard Square hopping from book store to book store (my favorite!). My daughter has big plans to sing for her supper on a street corner. She gave her last dollar to a boy who was playing Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen, fairly well, too.

I envied all the students reading and writing in the Yard. I do get nostalgic for my college days; I remember only what was best about them, not the stress. We took position at an old favorite spot of mine, one of Widener Library's broad "sphinx pedestals" as I call them, and watched tourists and students crossing each other's paths below. It was wonderful to be able to just watch and have no fixed time-table.

***

Today I bought a book called The Last Duel, by Eric Jager, in a used book store called Raven. It's a gripping tale of medieval Normandy, the true story of a fight to the death between a squire and a knight whose wife had accused the squire of raping her. The result of the duel was supposed to demonstrate God's judgment of who was right and who was wrong in the matter. Or, as one of my "temporary sons" intelligently said when I told him about the book, "So, whoever was more physically fit would turn out to be innocent?" It was the last time a dispute was mediated in this manner, hence the title of the book.

It's amazing to me that people ever thought God would work like this, and flabbergasting to me that they sometimes still do.

God on the Brain; the Brain on God

When I was little I wanted to be St. Bernadette. One of my prized possessions was a worn, newsprint comic book depicting her short life - her impoverished childhood in Lourdes, her visions, her illnesses. The visions, of course, were what captivated me. To see a supernatural person, someone from heaven - wouldn't that have been the most amazing thing ever? I remember trying to find vision-friendly spots in our garden - a grotto-shaped pile of rock, a hospitable arrangement of brambles. Similarly I would look for arrangements of tree branches or hedges that might make good portals to magical worlds like Narnia. Needless to say, I never had any visions, and when I was reminded that sainthood often involved suffering greatly for one's faith, I got over it.

As an adult I didn't have too hard a time letting go of some of my childhood "magical thinking" (I've happily clung to some of it - like the thought, "If I get all my resuscitation drugs ready, maybe I won't need to use them.") In high school we had a required course in scripture during which we were encouraged, as our church teaches, to undertake a contextual rather than an insistently literal interpretation of the Bible. Rather than objecting to or resisting this, as many of my classmates did, I found this approach emancipating and, in fact, spiritually enriching, opening up more truths and insights for me than I would have gleaned otherwise.

I wasn't bothered, either, when neuroscientists began to study religious experience and connected religious visions with temporal lobe epilepsy. By then I had spent time as a medical student in psych wards and, though the various disorders of the DSM-IV and the way we seem to be at the mercy of our neurotransmitters made me really question the nature of human will, I didn't necessarily connect sanity with validity. Some of the most psychotic people I saw spoke uncanny truths and had remarkable insights that the "rational" caregivers, supposedly more connected with "objective reality," didn't have.

A few months ago when our church was planning a retreat for young people who were about to get confirmed in our faith, one of the suggested activities was a "Saint Buffet": a time and space set aside for story-telling and visual exhibits about people's favorite moral heroes and heroines. During the discussion of which saintly people we might highlight, I remember saying, "Can we not do Joan of Arc?"

"Why not?" one of my team-mates asked.

"Um, because she was crazy?" I replied, hoping she would hear my tone as affectionate and not disrespectful. Then, fearing that the other folks in the group who didn't know me well, and didn't realize the deep love I had for our faith and many of its elements, might not realize I was NOT trying to be irreverent, I dug myself deeper by saying, "Don't get me wrong, she was an amazing person, but she was psychotic. Or, she had temporal lobe seizures." Thankfully, people seemed willing to chalk this up to me having to interpret everything through the lens of modern medicine, and no one ejected me from the retreat-planning team.

Bishop Stephen Sykes of the University of Durham said during a BBC program, "There is a very interesting dispute at the moment about whether one can have a talent for religion and whether that is something like a musical talent which some people have and some people don't have." This relates to other issues I've often wondered about - the issue of talent in general, and creativity, and their origins / sources / relations to experience and learning. I've often heard that faith is a gift. There may now be scientific proof of that, in the observations regarding our temporal lobes and the other parts of the brain that interact to produce/interpret spiritual experiences. I do think many of the traditional saints, and people who have had profound mystical experiences, had/have highly active, perhaps unusually active, temporal lobes. Some people seem to have temporal lobes that are innately (i.e., genetically?) more "receptive" to religious experience than others'.

As someone who has to interfere with the brain a little bit every day - chemically reduce anxiety, promote indifference to painful stimuli, induce lack of consciousness, and even cause some amnesia - I am acutely aware of how neurotransmitters can be manipulated. I do it for a living! And yes, I did hear about the Johns Hopkins study that found that the psilocybin in psychedelic shrooms can act on brain receptors, induce mystical experiences, and produce positive changes in the study subjects. Clearly the brain is the gateway to human perception and thus has a great deal to do with what we consider spiritual experience. As many pieces in the emerging field of "neurotheology" have pointed out, our spirituality, in large part, is in our heads.

The thing is, I just don't mind. It wouldn't make sense for the brain NOT to show these responses. Also, I've gotten to the point, I think, where I don't feel I have to be RIGHT about everything I believe. There are some truths that lie beyond human belief, and whatever science reveals should only enrich my understanding, not destroy it.

By now neurotheology has its prominent names - Drs. Vilayanur Ramachandran, Michael Persinger, Andrew Newberg, and Matthew Alper, to name a few. Some scientists interpret the growing data about the neurobiological basis for spirituality as suggestive of God being a human construct, with the " 'God' part of the brain" being a genetically-enabled product of evolution which helps self-aware creatures cope with the knowledge of their own mortality - the fruit of Eden's tree. It's the old chicken-and-egg conundrum: did God create the brain, or did the brain create God? Some people of faith argue that God, being a smart one, would obviously create a neurobiological substrate for divine revelation - a natural, physical way for humans to perceive and interpret a relationship with the divine.

What would be really neat is if both were right and true somehow.

My understanding of neurobiology, rudimentary as it is, goes something like this: the brain is "hard-wired" to learn, all experience counts as learning, and learning creates changes in the cellular architecture, gene expression, and electrochemical interactions in the brain. Everything we experience changes our brains from moment to moment, and sometimes cumulatively those changes can be significant. Reading a book, hearing an oboe concerto that moves me, being hurt by an ex-boyfriend, playing cards with my family, practicing tendus repeatedly at the ballet barre, internalizing grammar rules in a new language, smelling roasted peanuts while walking down a Manhattan sidewalk, these all make their mark in our minds, and therefore on our bodies, because our brains are, after all, body. The idea that they are separate is illusory.

And maybe we have some evidence. Dr. Andrew Newberg's work with SPECT scans of people from various religious traditions in deep meditation showed not only increased blood flow to the temporal lobes but also decreased flow to those areas in the parietal lobes that were related to our perception of time and spatial orientation. This finding may explain what those who meditate often describe as an experience of "loss of self," a liberation from the limits of space, time, and individual personality, or a mystical union with a greater reality. I wonder if the perfusion changes were a cause or an effect? In any case, these studies lend support to the fallacious nature of thinking of mind and body as separate. Mind IS body.

This is why I love the story in Chapter 5 of the Gospel of Mark, where Jesus heals a woman of a chronic hemorrhage. I love the juxtaposition of medicine and faith in this chapter, and the way the healer, Christ, felt a transformation in his own body - the healing power draining from it, into the woman - while at the same time the woman felt the transformation in the depths of her body as the flow of blood dried up completely, all because she reached out and made a very physical, hopeful connection by touching the hem of Jesus' clothes. Both healer and healed were physically and emotionally changed by the healing. I love this story so much I wrote a poem about it. (I know -what a dork. Or, as someone who loves me a lot says, what a super-duper-dork!)

Now I gotta go to bed and give my temporal and frontal lobes a little rest.

Pentecost Thoughts

Happy Pentecost!

Perhaps there are those who wouldn't be excited to celebrate the "birthday of the Church." Lately, decrying the evils of institutional religion has been the fashion in literary circles, as shown by books like Letter to a Christian Nation , The God Delusion, God: the Failed Hypothesis, and God is not Great. I certainly agree with the thesis that people's manipulation of religious belief throughout the centuries has often resulted in tremendous injustice, violence, suffering, intellectual backwardness, and cruelty. Galileo's trial? Stupid. The postmortem excommunication of Wyclif? Asinine. The Crusades and the Inquisition? Hideous. All the recent scandals, insults, and pastorally insensitive decisions too numerous to name? Frustrating beyond expression. All these are certainly far easier to notice than the quieter moments of individual heroism, the openness of some churches (including mine) to advances in scientific understanding and scriptural scholarship, the call to recognition of the sacred, and the evolution throughout the centuries of hospitals, social programs, and educational programs throughout the world, which have been achieved in great part thanks to the works of the church.

To blame the religions and not ourselves for the utter failure to respect human rights, be educated and thoughtful, and live in peace, as most religions call people to do, is lame and incorrect. It's so much easier to point the finger than hold up a mirror. The institutions constructed by human society don't fail us; we fail them. One could easily say about anything institutionalized - government & politics, for instance - that it is divisive and corrupt.

I believe it's abundantly clear that fundamentalist or militant groups claim the name of God for their own purposes without any understanding or even concern for whether their ideals and actions are consistent with their religion's teachings about humanity and God's relationship to it. It seems to me that these groups would be violent out of pure hatred for "the other" regardless of the existence of religion. There's always an excuse to hate for those who hate. Those types will always be around, even if a thousand years from now societies come to embrace rational empiricism and look back on religious belief as primitive or a function of some neuroanatomical phenomenon - even though belief that God isn't there, that reality is comprised only of what can be proven, is, like all other faiths, nothing more than belief too. Just as the poor, the enraged, the miserable, and the hateful will "always be with us," I also believe, contrary to views I heard expressed on TV by supporters of the recently opened Creation Museum, that there will also always be people who strive to live loving, moral lives regardless of their understanding of God or belief in his existence. In fact, I believe that those who work to live moral lives not because of fear of punishment, which is indeed a primitive, thoughtless motive for embracing virtue, but rather because morality benefits human lives, show superior moral reasoning.

So I do celebrate. Pentecost - this is a joyful, wondrous feast, when we remember an event so indescribable and inexplicable in the history of the early church that authors could only describe it by comparing it to the rush of a great wind, or to the descent of tongues of flame over a group of believers. Christians believe they were on fire with the Holy Spirit, and that when they spoke the good news that they were burning to tell people about, listeners miraculously heard their words in their native languages. I love the story for its mystery, its sense of something momentous and transfiguring in people's lives, its implication that God comes alive in givers and receivers and the transactions in between, intimately connecting us with each other and with a life greater than our own.

Being a Star Trek fan, sometimes I ask myself, if it happened as described, what might provide a natural explanation for it? Did some alien civilization swoop in with their huge space ship (hence the wind) and implant "universal translators" into people's brains, using some visible energy that hovered over their heads like flames? Was some omnipotent life form, like the Q on Star Trek: the Next Generation, controlling their minds and perceptions, trying to see if they could induce a religious movement based on a mythic (or staged) resurrection story, some miracles, and a whole lot of machinations?

Well, sure I guess. Doesn't quite meet Occam's Razor criteria, but it could be a valid theory in this little mental game, though I laugh to myself thinking there are less absurd things.

But perhaps there's a less outlandish "natural explanation" that could explain Pentecost, the way mental illness or seizure disorders are now thought to explain entities once attributed to demonic possession. How about, they were all in a room, there was a huge gust of wind, they went into a mass hallucination, and somehow managed to communicate with people from various cultures about their experience? Hmm, a little vague, but maybe.

Are any of these possibilities less absurd than the possibility of Emmanuel: God with us? Or the possibility that love is real? If there is Life from whom all life proceeds, an energy Source that set all of the natural world in motion, is it then so unbelievable that such a generative energy be a loving one, one that could be present among us, BE us, and triumph over human limits, even the perceived limits of physics and biology?

I am no theologian. I will not pretend or claim to understand spiritual mysteries, to know God or Christ or any of the world's holiest prophets. For me, story and ritual nourish that part of my brain / mind / heart / spirit that longs for transcendence, and I am at peace with incomplete understanding. The doctor in me usually has to know about things; there is a part of me, though, that doesn't need to know or understand everything, that has found peace in mystery, in the process of reaching for greater wisdom whether or not such wisdom is attainable. Trying to find natural explanations for events and experiences is a good thing. Reason is a human gift. We're supposed to use it. But perhaps in some cases, going through all sorts of intellectual contortions to try to understand certain human experiences is futile and, in the end, missing the point.

Something happened back then. I don't know exactly what. But the world was never the same afterward, in both good and bad ways. So that Something made a real dent in our physical and historical reality, and I think our task now hundreds of years later is to let that same Spirit work through us, like hands kneading bread, or leavening that makes bread rise.
-What are we on fire about?
-What would we give our lives to communicate?
-How can we transform ourselves, our world, into something greater than the sum of its imperfect parts?

***

This morning my family, here and in Manila gathered around NPR's webcast of Weekend Edition Sunday (it's amazing that we could even do this!) to listen to a short essay I wrote and recorded for their series This I Believe. I don't know if this was coincidence, but they chose to air the essay, which is essentially about spirit and mentions spirit a lot, on this day of all days, the day of the Holy Spirit. Listening to it reminded me that the Spirit doesn't always have to come in a big gust of wind. Elijah found it in a whispered breeze outside his cave. I see it in my children and my husband every day - in their questions, their joy, their sorrows, their love, in everything that makes us living beings, in all those moments that create our human life.