Yesterday it was raining.  I packed the kids off to camp and wondered how they would like songs in the dining hall all day.  Steve and I argued about blinds for the living room in the five minutes before I ran out the door to teach. (My negotiation skills were half-baked under the pressure of needing to get ready to lead the Institute.)  I left for work in a grumpy mood.  When I sat down to freewrite during the ISI’s Sacred Writing Time, all I had were a series of existential questions:

• Where does happiness come from?
• Should I expect to be happy?  Should I work at being happy?
• Is happiness a good goal for life?
• What about sadness?
• Should I be someone who mourns?
• Is sad an ok way to be in the world as an adult?
• Do we get to choose?

Then I started digging a little deeper.  I asked myself, “What is it that I want to give my children?  Do I want to give them sadness?”  Then I was off and running. No, I want to give them a realistic balance of emotions, with deep joy and peace and love as our emotional posture at rest–our posture at ease.  So where do deep joy and peace and love come from? For centuries, two millennia actually, a growing number of people have looked to God as revealed in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth as the source of deep joy and peace and love.  Steve, my husband, my life long partner and lover, is increasingly skeptical. That leaves me alone in my question about whether God and prayer to be “filled with the Spirit of God” is the best choice for my daily effort to have love, joy, and peace be my default mode, my posture at ease. I’m surprised that at 40 I’m back at square one, with questions I have thought about, but not deeply considered, since about fifth grade, when I remember sitting in church and thinking, “Maybe I’m Jewish.  I believe in God, but I’m not sure about all of this Jesus stuff.” Later that year, I went on my first youth group retreat; and while singing “You Are My Hiding Place,” I had an experience of the love, joy, and peace of God that I wanted to hold onto.  I wanted to stay in that love, to live in it, to be able to move about and have it follow me. And I have.  Leaving a classroom after teaching these days, I routinely pray.  It sounds something like “God, take that small clay pot of my effort to teach and use it for good.  My life is hidden in you, and I feel so fortunate that you just keep asking me to show up and be faithful with giving of myself to help other people.  I may not succeed, but I can keep showing up and using my mind and body to teach.  That’s what I feel called to do, and I’ll claim that vocation and offer my efforts as a thank you for being alive on your earth.” That’s it.  That’s my prayer, such a comfort in the face of performance anxiety and existential doubt. “Thank you for the chance to be here.  Take this effort as my offering of thanks.”

So which comes first, a rational belief in God or an experience of God?  To what extent can we trust experiences, when human religious experiences vary so dramatically. (This question is what motivated psychologist William James to write about The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1901.)  I don’t trust my experience as objective testimony, but I do trust it as subjective testimony.  I don’t need objective Truth to construct a life that has a firm foundation.  I need instead to construct a life based upon honest and careful cycles of observation, reflection, theory-building, hypothesizing, experimentation/action, observation, reflection, theory-building, hypothesizing, experimentation/action…..and on and on.  All I can do is be honest about what I see “working” or not working in the socially constructed world that I experience and observe. What I believe is that holding and being held by my family members is about the best thing in human existence.  Love, honesty, and forgiveness lead to joy and peace.  Those are big words for concrete things like holding hands, reading books together with our heads on the same pillow, and going for a jog together while talking about what’s on our minds.  These give me a spring in my step and the gut desire to pray. “Thank you for the chance to be here.  Take this effort as my offering of thanks.”