Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [131]
As I delved into the science, I realized I need not discard my faith. Rather, I must distinguish it from spiritual experience. A yawning distinction separates the two. Unlike spiritual experience, religious belief can never be tested by a brain scanner or even by historical record. No one can prove that Jesus is the Son of God.What religious belief does is attempt to explain in a compelling narrative the unseen reality that lies at the heart of spiritual experience.
I remember once pondering, if God wanted to speak to us, what would He say? For Jews and Christians and Muslims, who believe that the Torah, Bible, and Koran were inspired by God, the answer is simple: God tells stories. He tells stories so we can relate to Him, because each of us is, after all, a story that unfolds minute by minute, day by day. He writes about a hundred-year-old nomad named Abraham who fathered two great tribes. He writes about a shepherd boy named David who felled a giant and became a king. He writes about a prostitute who was forgiven, a blind man who gained his sight, an epileptic boy whose seizures were stilled. For Christians, the greatest story of all tells of a Son who was nailed to a cross, a story of sacrifice and redemption and, most of all, love. And so I fell in love with a story, that of a Christian God who is intensely interested in our lives.
As I studied spirituality, however, it became clear to me that there were elements of my religious beliefs that I would have to discard, or at least view with a skeptical eye. First, I simply cannot read the Bible literally. For one thing, its internal contradictions (witness the two versions of Jesus healing the Centurion’s servant in two Gospels) show that the Bible was written by flawed human beings. I believe Scripture is inspired. But when the literal reading of the text conflicts with tested and established science—six-day creation versus evolution, for example—I believe science wins. That does not mean that Scripture is wrong. Any Christian theologian will argue that Genesis is sound theology. But Genesis is not, and never was intended to be, a peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal. Scripture is metaphorical, explaining the world in a way that humans could understand at the time it was written, thousands of years ago. I do not think it was meant to be freeze-framed for all eternity.
That one was easy, since I never did subscribe to the literal inerrancy of the Bible. More problematic was the central tenet of Christianity—that there is only one way to God. When it comes to spiritual experience, there is not one story, and it certainly is not Jesus, not for everyone, not by a long shot. This became blindingly evident as I listened hour after hour to people with radically different story lines—ones that may or may not include God or religion but that involve a transforming encounter with another type of reality that is every bit as powerful to them as the Christian story is to me. These people are as “born again”—with a new outlook, dreams, behaviors, and beliefs—as any evangelical I have met.What story they selected, or what religion they followed, is their own best shot at making sense of something unexplainable—the ache for the eternal, the gnawing suspicion that Earth is not our home.
Embracing a particular faith, I came to believe, is a little like hopping in a car.You can drive wherever you like: some head to Rome, others to Mecca or the Western Wall. Still others exit the highways to find the winding roads called “spiritual but not religious.” But what makes the car run is