All We Know
Quote from a movie priest: There comes a time in man’s search for meaning that you realize there are no answers. When you come to that horrible, unavoidable conclusion, you either accept it or you kill yourself. Or you simply stop searching…
I remember how obsessively important it was to get answers to the big theological and existential questions about religious doctrine, miracles, healings, prayer, heaven, hell, death, afterlife. At a certain point, in the midst of all the contradicting voices in my ear, I had to admit that I just couldn’t know for certain. I put a symbolic stake in the ground at the point of the Father’s love as a way to hold on to the one thing I did know.
But I wasn’t ready to stop searching.
Then life happened—marriage, divorce, births, miscarriages, achievements, failures, sitting with others facing cancer, amputation, suicides I never saw coming, healings and reconciliations I never saw coming—and those questions that had been so all consuming grew smaller, toothless, more and more irrelevant until only the love remained. I understood why Jesus boiled it all down to loving God and others, and then even further…love each other as I have loved you…as if even God didn’t require mention.
Mother Teresa described her work with the poor as loving God in his most distressing disguise. In her life-prayer-work, she had accessed momentary nondual states in which she glimpsed everything as one thing. God in everything, everything in God, no division or separation. We don’t love God directly or abstractly in prayer, ritual, worship. Those practices help us cultivate the nondual moments we need to see God in each other, to know we only love God by loving each other. There’s no other way.
We’d like to bottle those moments, store nondual data as certainty. But it’s like breathing. We breathe just enough for the moment, breathe again for the next. We can’t store air, but each breath is just enough for us. We can’t store answers to unanswerable questions. But all we know for sure, the oneness of love, is just enough for us, if we simply stop searching for answers that add nothing to life.
