Night after night I connect to a feeling of warmth and peace; I feel loved. This experience brings healing, and maybe that’s the deepest kind, since it displaces and dissolves the hurt and anger that are so much a part of every human life, including mine. As, little by little, the negative feelings drain away, so does the need to get back, to be right, to have revenge, to be superior. 

That’s inner freedom. And it’s the deepest answer to the dark forces that make us humans do violent and cruel things.

But—I have two questions, or maybe three. 

First, Is this a presence, and not merely a feeling? And if it’s a presence, dare I call it—God?

To me, the first question is fundamental. I have to ask. So I was a bit surprised when a seasoned Dominican priest, a wise and deeply spiritual man who happens also to be a friend, accused me of lack of faith when I posed it. He referred to his own transformative internal experience as a youth, and the resulting vocational decision that changed his life. It had to be God.

But I don’t think my question is driven by any lack of faith. I think it’s a necessary one, a responsible one, perhaps more philosophical than religious. 

Our minds do strange things. A sufferer of schizophrenia thinks that the television is talking to her. I don’t materialize a voice in the night; but just the same, how do I know that the presence I felt in that Hampstead garden all those years ago, or the gentle experience of my current nights, is anything more than a burst of dopamine somehow triggered by my own psyche? Or some kind of beneficent pill?

And further, there’s that second question. Assuming that this blissful inner peace is indeed a presence with a life independent of mine, how can I know that it is what we call “God”—the Lord of heaven and earth, the power source that animates this universe, who existed and exists before and beyond and outside time, “before” the big bang: who always “is” and fills an unbounded reality?

By act of faith I can make an assertive leap and call this presence “God”. I personally can—and do—choose to do that. But can I know my belief to be true? And can I further know that the belief structures built on that assertive leap are also true?

I can’t. That’s the whole point of contemporary philosophy.

And there’s another issue nestled—worm in the bud—inside this question. I focus on the nice stuff, the warm sense of invasive peace, and that’s what I want to call “God”. But surely I must also take the opposite feeling into account as well—the frigid grip of anxiety, the coiled snake that I have learned simply to let be, to lie silent but nonetheless menacing in my cupped hands while I breathe in and out, in and out, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me….

I can’t, in all honesty, pretend that only the nice stuff is “god” and the negative other—which remains part of the fabric of the experience, like warp and woof in a cloth— belongs exclusively to my own personal psyche and its dysfunctions. 

So, do I posit a diabolical power? Or do I propose that both are “God”? Good questions.

But today I won’t worry about that. I go back to the question I asked all those years ago, in that Hampstead garden: Why are you so good? That’s the feeling expressed so movingly in the old hymn, Amazing Grace: I’m in the presence of a gentle power that is touching me but is completely beyond me. That power fills me, and it’s sweet, and it does not crush me or hurt me. Rather, I feel affirmed in my being. I live, and life is good. And so my instinctive and reflexive “why” shifts away from the narcissistic and self-indulgent and self-critical to a different kind of contemplation: of the beauty of this creation, of the marvel of order, of the inexhaustible range and variety and wonder of the natural world. It is good. And I have a place in it. All of which affirms the peaceful happiness—call it “joy”—of this moment.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus compares his kingdom to a treasure buried in a field, unexpectedly found; and, in a different image, but the same reality, to a pearl “of great price” discovered by a merchant who has spent his life seeking fine pearls. In both cases the finder does the right thing: he sells everything and buys, in one case the field, in the other, the pearl.

That’s what the experience is. And it’s worth more than being rich or having a nice car—or even joyful sex. And once you’ve tasted it, there’s no going back. And since it is so rich, and so beyond the material, I both feel and think that it must be the power that we call “God”.

Is that a leap of faith? Of course. But it is experience-based, and experience doesn’t lie—particularly when it repeats itself, again and again, throughout all the changes and especially all the vicissitudes of life.

There is, however, a further question, and it’s an important one, particularly in times like ours, when formal religions are in decline. And maybe it matters more than the first two. 

Because, if this experience brings peace and healing, what’s wrong with just accepting it as it is? 

God? Not-God? Why do we need to work that out? Surely, what matters is the healing: the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field.

(More to come.)