I’m thinking about Plato today.  I know just enough to pretend I have a working knowledge of his thought, so that’s what I aim to do.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’m thinking of Plato because of what I wrote here about love.  And Love.  It looks like I’m Platonic, no?  That I think there’s this universal form called Love, and that all the human things we call by that name are just shadows of it.  Imitations, and at that, only varying levels of partial.

I think that does describe what I think.  I’m pretty sure I have yet to experience or offer Love fully.  This doesn’t mean I think love with a lower case ‘l’ is bad or stupid.  I’m not zoroastrian, or whatever you call someone who thinks what we have in the flesh is evil.  I’m just saying I don’t think any of us loves completely, without at least a good dose of other-than-Love mixed in.  How’s that for a specific recipe?

What I’m not so comfortable with is equating that form of Love, that ideal that we can talk more about sometime, because I’d love to try to understand it better, with God.  Since we’re talking recipes, I think this is one for something bad.  Maybe even poisonous.

But before I get into that, I want to talk about the reason why I think this matters at all, or a lot, rather, which has everything to do with growing up.  It has to do with a process in which I think we’re all participating, more and less willingly, and with varying levels of success, which is coming to terms with life being not what we expect it to be.  Those who appear most deeply at peace, I mean far deeper than surfaces, seem to be those who have faced some pretty major challenges.  They seem to be those who have not skipped past their challenges, either, or been stoic or a forced kind of optimistic in the face of them, but rather have let themselves feel the confusion their challenges have naturally invoked, the consternation, the rage, the depression, the despair.  They’re people who have confronted the beast that is Life Isn’t What I Thought or Expected It To Be, and sat with it long enough to realize it doesn’t have to do them in.  That, in fact, they can make a sort of truce with this animal, which…might even move toward friendship.

It seems like in these kinds of people an ironic sort of lightness starts to grow–in spite of, but really also because of all they’ve been through–where bitterness and clenched-upness and mental and emotional fatigue begin to fade into something more like hope, and not a hope that has to be worked at, or conjured up, or willed and prayed into being.  It’s one that comes of its own accord.  Usually very quietly.  Even imperceptively, especially at the start.  And it doesn’t depend on everything going right from then on, either.  It doesn’t depend on people always coming through, or even God existing and being good, but rather on a deep down conviction that it’s okay.  That somehow, some important thing lives on.  Maybe a person–you, even, because God knows some of life’s challenges can make that look unlikely, or someone else you care about–but maybe something broader than that, like love in the world.  Like babies getting born and fed and raised.  Like sunlight being soft sometimes, and plants somehow knowing how to grow.  Like the cycle of water moving up into clouds and back down to earth and streaming to the places where it evaporates again.  Maybe it’s just inexplicable, an inexplicable sense that things will be okay, that what needs to happen somehow is.  Or will.

Whatever it is, whatever comprises this hope, I think these people have it.  And I think this thing that gives them hope is rarely something glorious or triumphant.  Their challenges have made that pretty impossible.  I think it’s edges are rusty, and there’s chips in its paint.  I think its hair is a little greasy and maybe it hasn’t brushed its teeth for a while.  And maybe it never had cool clothes to begin with, and especially not the right color socks. 

But it exists–it, this hope, this sense that something important lives on, and somehow, because of that, things are okay.  It exists in an earthy, un-plastic way, and can’t fall out of pockets or disappear if you look at it too directly.  It can’t get stolen by someone who says it’s stupid, or whose "it" is much bigger, or looks like something taken from a magazine cover.

It can’t get lost because it already has been, and was found again.  It already died, so it can’t get killed.  It’s already all dinged up, so there’s just no worry that it might get scratched.

But back to Plato.  And Love.  And God.

I think this same process of growing up in relation to life needs to also happen in relation to God.  I think there’s danger when it doesn’t, because an idealized version of God can’t stand on its own.  It has to be protected.  Fiercely.  The same things we do to people or circumstances that threaten the Life We Thought We Should Be Able To Live, we have to do to people who challenge our notion of God.  Ignore them.  Belittle them.  Berate them.  Talk bad about them, or people like them, behind their backs.  Patronize them.  Turn them into projects to try to make them see things our way.  Or work on some serious efforts at denial.

I wonder what would happen if we set God free in our minds to be whoever or whatever God is (and isn’t).  I wonder what would happen if religious people let their true feelings about God surface, their true questions and frustrations, and stepped out from under any obligation to believe God is any certain way, out from any work to have faith in God’s love, for example, or God’s power or personal presence.  I wonder what would happen if all the stuff we equate with our being good and faithful and making sure we have some reason left to hope or know among so many options how to live well got turned completely upside down, and the opposite of all of our definitions for such things got unveiled as being the real deal.

The God that would show up in such an upset, the God that would be left, I think would be a lot more like the hope that Peaceful people have.  A lot more like that Volvo that keeps driving 300,000 miles strong, and just doesn’t matter if someone opens a door into.  A lot more like something that needs little protection, and therefore is cause (or justification) for very few wars.

If you want to call that an ideal, a form, to use Plato-speak, so be it.  I think I’d prefer calling it lived, experienceable reality.

I think the process of growing up well involves coming to terms with things being far less perfect than we thought they should be, far less ideal, and learning to be okay with that, and to find beauty and wonder and that sparkly feeling in your chest and your fingertips that used to come from reading fairy tales not by imagining an ideal that exists outside of us, apart from us and this banged up thing that is our world, but by looking at what we’ve actually got, in and around us.  By looking at it deeply, being as honest as we can about what we see, and feel, and know.

I think the same is true of growing up in relation to God.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 11:50 am and is filed under Philosophy, Psychology, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.