Real Things

Cover of Brave New World

My daughter was telling me about "Brave New World", which she had just read, as I drove her to choir practice this morning.  The book describes a world in which humans have been conditioned (among other things) never to feel passion or pain, and to mask any feeling of unhappiness with the happy-drug 'soma'.

An unconditioned "savage", John, who visits the civilization, points out to a World Controller that this avoidance, by conditioning and drug use, denies people access to any spiritual experience, or any contact with God.  Well, yes, says the Controller; we've chosen comfort over those things.

John answers,"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," the Controller replies, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy", and John agrees.

So I've been thinking about this.  Is it true that God is most accessible, most present to us, when we're miserable?

I remember years ago a very devout friend of mine telling me about the time his then-fiancée had told him she didn't want to marry him after all, and had returned his ring.  He was devastated, and although he rarely drank, that night he went out and got very drunk.  The next morning he had to drive back to his home city, feeling very sick indeed, and had finally had to stop in a roadside café to be wretchedly, incapacitatingly ill in the public rest room. But what he really remembered, he said, was that the whole time he was in the rest room, too weak even to stand without support, he had never felt God so close, all around him, holding him in his grief; he had never felt so sure he was truly loved.  It was an odd time for a beatific vision, he said, but he welcomed it.

It's true that when we are desperately unhappy we can sometimes see, feel, God in ways we usually don't.   Is pain, misery, a necessary part of being able to feel the presence of God? That's what Brave New World seems to suggest.

I am no expert but I don't think so. I think what we really need, to experience God, is to to be open to what's real; not to mask our perceptions with - other stuff.  Soma.  Internet surfing. Food as a distraction instead of a need or even a pleasure. Whatever it is we use to draw ourselves away from our actual perceptions, from what we actually see and hear and feel.  Maybe we notice God more when we're miserable, because misery has a way of getting our attention even when we try to avoid it; it overwrites our distractions and insists, FEEL THIS.  But I don't think it's misery that's necessary; I think what's needed is just paying attention to what's really there.

I think we make it possible for ourselves to feel and see the presence of God whenever we pay attention to real things; our real feelings, our real experiences.  Because God is real and is part of all of this.

The way God was part of driving my daughter to school, half-asleep in the pre-dawn darkness, talking about Brave New World. Compared to still being peacefully asleep in bed it wasn't comfortable; but it was a pleasure, and it was real.