My First Religious Experience
I had my first religious experience tonight, but its possibility was contained in a sermon I had heard a few weeks ago. It was during the homily or sermon—whatever they call it. I’ve been to a lot of differently denominated and non-denominated churches, lately. I’d been trying to find one that stuck. At this service, the priest made a point about prayer. He said that a lot of people treat prayer as a way to ask God for things. Like, ‘Hey God. It’s me, Brian. Please give me a new car, pay my bills, and make sure my kids don’t cut class.’ This approach to prayer is the exact opposite of what we should be doing, though. The priest didn’t go into why this approach is wrong, but I imagine it has to do with God’s omnipotence and the fact that He knows the things you know, and therefore He knows you want those things; if He should want you to have them, then He would provide them. Getting back to what the priest said. He said that instead of asking God for things you want, you should ask God what He wants. We are the ones, after all, who are born imperfect by nature, who can never been whole, who cannot know with transcendent certainty, who bear Original Sin. It’s fitting, then, that we should spend our prayer and contemplative moments wondering at what God wants of us.
I have recently been trying to integrate prayer into my life, but it’s very difficult. I can’t pray at night for a variety of reasons. The primary one is that when I go to sleep, I read or watch something on my computer right up to the moment I fall asleep. I could change my habit, and maybe I should, but there seems to be little room for prayer at night. I thought of praying in the shower and I even tried it once, but my showers are too brief, the water too powerful. It seems unlikely that I should be able to pause my day to pray. I was stymied. My difficulties lasted only briefly, though. Today I thought of the ideal time to pray. I run nearly every day for any time between twenty and ninety minutes. That is plenty of time. Running is solitary and self-directed. It’s supposedly a contemplative activity, although it’s generally not for me. Despite having heard many and many times every song on my vast running playlist, I generally still focus on the music I listen to while I run. And if I run without music, my mind is as empty as a syllogism.
I have of late been faced with a rather large difficulty. I began my run late this afternoon planning on running sixty minutes and thinking for sixty minutes how to dissolve my particular difficulty. I eased through my warmup reaching the point where the pores of my body just started to open up, letting out the first suspiration of exertion. It was just at this point when I realized that I could likely solve my dual problems of being unable to fit prayer into my life and unable to dissolve this difficulty from my life by praying while I ran. My prayer wouldn’t amount to parading a litany of desires in front of God, as if He didn’t already know my life’s material deficits and embarrassing moral lacunae; I could simply ask Him with every stride and breath what He wanted me to do. My mind turned toward’s God’s ends.
Why should someone be good rather than bad. Goodness will be rewarded in the eternal completion and badness will be punished, but the mere seeking of reward or avoidance of punishment is trite in a simplistically rational manner. Faith isn’t a function of reason. It’s a function of madness: It dictates the normative rational stance. I shouldn’t be good because something good will happen to me. I should be because it is good. It occurred to me that God created everyone damaged in comparison to Himself, but that doesn’t mean everyone isn’t a manifestation of the Him, which is to say a manifestation of the Good. Why should I be good rather than bad. The reason, if you should want to call it that, is contained in the question: To be is to be good, because all of God’s creation is good qua ontologically. Conversely, if one were to be bad he would be negating his own existence, since to be is to be good.
As I ran, I focused on an idea of existence at large characterized as an assertion, extension, or implication of God. Ignoring the question of free will (it’s rather obvious: we have it), it seems logical that human’s place in life’s milieu is to be, which means that being is a manifestation of God. That is, everyone’s being’s meaning is to make his meaning (that is, express himself) express himself as a being of God. I realized that my aesthetic existence, that is, my existence in time and space, is a realization of the transcendent existence of God; therefore, my aesthetic existence is a diminution of God’s existence. Personal existence is necessarily a diminution of God’s existence, but not a lessening, distillation, or minor reflection of God’s existence. Personal existence is a positive function (the ontological is of existence), a positive function that is in the form of God yet diminuted; it is made less in the sense of being made as less (than). It is the condensation on the side of a glass on a hot day. It is the child’s scale model of the Arc de Triomphe. It is the now disintegrated portion of the sole of my running shoes, an invisible trail left behind by moving.
