Yesterday my wife and I had a very real conversation. We were sitting in our car, watching our kids play in a park, and Dani casually asked me about metaphysics.
The scene must be set a little so that you can see my point here. Dani and I left The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about 4 years ago. I left in my mind first, having concluded that the likelihood that a god exists is thin enough to warrant disbelief. I have stayed my mind on that case, and the evidence for it continues to foment in my mind.
Dani has not been so sure. She has always been cautious and rigorous. She does not seek a conclusion. She waits for it.
So, yesterday, we sat and she casually brought up some experiences of which she is aware that seemed to give evidence for a spiritual realm. We talked about intuitions, incredible coincidences, and synchronicities. Spouses sense the death of their loved ones from across the globe. Dani has sensed danger before it arrived, identified lies before the truth crushed them.
We talked together of the law of large numbers, statistical synchronicity, and the logical bankruptcy of supposing there are “real” things that are not composed of the substance we call “reality”.
This is all worth talking about again in greater depth, but our next topic is what I am thinking of today. She discussed meaning with me. If the authority of God is not underneath things, don’t those things matter less? Doesn’t that make life stark, emotionless, and rigid?
In our conversation, we focused on the fact that, when I decided to propose to Dani, I went to the LDS temple and I received a “revelation” from god to do it.
The question was: how could this event remain romantically grand under the realistic scope of reason?
I want you to feel with me the magic of reality, through that moment. Life, reality, the experience of emotionally brilliant events, is the only wonderment.
When I decided to marry Dani, I was terrified. I made very little money, I was young, and I had no real dating experience of which to speak. Yet I loved her, I did know that. I also knew that I was lucky. She is so much better than I am. She exceeds me physically, emotionally, ethically, socially, every way. What was the danger of a life with such a person?
But, I remained afraid.
So I went to the temple. As a believer in God, and in revelation, I thought that I could be told what to do by the wisest being in the universe, who loves me more than anyone else. I went through the ritual of passage there and as I entered the room that Mormons call “celestial” I felt the reintegration that passage rites have given humanity since “the first wife laid next to her spouse’s corpse and wondered where her husband had gone.”
I felt something tell me to do it, I felt comfort overwhelm my fear and I left, fully committed to proposing to Dani.
At the time that felt magical, spiritual – Religious. But look past that with me, see the reality. That is where there is magic. Is it not more romantic that the resolve came from me? I didn’t go to Dani and ask her to marry me because someone or something told me to. I did it because I was convinced it is what I wanted to do, that it would bring me happiness. I was convinced by myself, and by the real things: Dani’s beautiful hair that stunned me with its natural variety. It could look different from one day to the next. The way her curls could dangle in tight, bouncy spirals like so many helixes. The way she curled it in elegant, larger, loops framing her face. The way she straightened it into touchable lengths, the softest, most comforting substance I have felt. Each way was my favorite when I saw it. Each way seemed most natural to her of all. Each way seduces me still. Her humor, her honesty, her confidence. Her.
Love is more real when it comes solely from the lover, not less. Gardens are more beautiful when in them than when painted. “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
Reality is. Superstition imagines. Anselm could not have said better that extant things are greater than imagined ones. The thing out there that is sending stimuli to the thing I am, exists. Of that you can be certain. When that thing is Her and her touch finds me, no metaphysics can improve that moment. Were there some other thing in our way I’d work my best to eliminate it.
This is the true sense in which we should leave our father and mother and cling unto our loved ones. That “father and mother” compose the imagined things, the gods, whom we should leave when we discover reality. No other thing is worth worship. I am not in search of a god because I found:
Someone you have to let in,
Someone whose feelings you spare,
Someone who, like it or not,
Will want you to share
A little a lot . . .
Someone to crowd you with love,
Someone to force you to care,
Someone to make you come through,
Who’ll always be there,
As frightened as you
Of being alive,
Being alive, being alive, being alive.
Works Cited
Adams, Douglass. 1986. The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. New York: Ballantine Books.
Campbell, Joseph. 1988. The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. New York: Anchor Books.
Sondheim, Stephen. 2011. 'Being Alive' from Company. Vols. I: Finishing the Hat Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes, in Stephen Sondheim The Collected Lyrics, by Stephen Sondheim, edited by Stephen Sondheim, 193-195. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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