Hardwired for God

Much of the wisdom entrusted to me during seminary has leaked slowly out of my bucket of memories, but these words still linger: "we are hardwired for God." This saying rings true for me. I am convinced that we are born, to varying degrees, with the necessary receptors for the divine. I remember as a young boy having trouble inhaling when I looked up at the stars and wondered with the psalmist, "who are we that Thou art mindful of us?" I remember my youngest brother, also at a very young age, contemplating the mystery of life and death, and declaring to the family, "I think when someone dies, God gets stronger." Surely the conditioning of language gives us new words with which to describe our experiences, but the experiences are there from an early age. God is not something we "study:" God is a power we experience. God is someone we just...know. The trick with us and God is that we grow up and "put away childish things," and with them, our fundamental ways of knowing and experiencing.

Every year I have my Confirmation Class respond to this question: "Describe a God you could really believe in." What never ceases to amaze me is that once they're given permission to forget about responding with the "correct answers" they think I'm expecting of them, I find words spilling forth from them that describe the very God I have come to know. A God described by words like, "love," "fair," "hopeful," "strong in unusual ways we can't explain," "forgiving," "challenging."

Faith is about what we know in our bones...or knew once upon a time, and have since lost hold of. Our faith precedes the outward forms of religion, the articulations of formal beliefs and statements of faith. Before we are confirmed, before we have read all the latest authors, we experience the divine without having to interpret. God is not in our heads, but in our hearts, in our hands, and in all the world around us.

U2's lead singer, Bono, once said that religion is "what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building." (Paraphrased from Ashley Kahn's "A Love Supreme.") Religion is our collective attempt to hold onto what we know so that it won't slip away. If only we could trust what children know....that God simply is, and if we open our hands, hearts and mind, God is still here. And always will be.