Sasha was confused and fed up with it. Everywhere she turned, someone was offering her spiritual advice. Well-meaning, quaintly dressed young folks regularly turned up at her door with pamphlet offers. For her birthday, her friends gave her crystals with cards certifying their vortex energy. Her uncle kept offering to introduce her to his sufi, while her aunt held an open seat for her at her seances. The prosperity preachers on television had their own shtick, and the new mosque was now blaring calls to prayer five times a day across the neighborhood. The bookstore section on spirituality had doubled in size and quadrupled in chaos. And her professor was sitting cross-legged atop his desk, chanting with his eyes closed, whenever she dropped off her assignments. Sasha felt like she needed a lifeline, not a crystal, sufi, medium, pamphlet, siren, or shtick.
More
If you’ve never wondered whether life has more to it than meets the eye, then you’ve not really been living. Or at least you’ve not been looking around you or listening inside. The world is all at once too strange, wonderful, meaningful, and chaotic to be just some random collection of material. That material has too many patterns, rhythms, and designs to have nothing more to give it that exquisite structure. And that’s not even to consider our human biology and consciousness, able to draw not just meaning but also purpose and value out of the material universe. We are both an obvious part of what we observe but somehow in our consciousness also beyond material. We know more and are more than the material that we touch, smell, shape, and consume, even though we are a part of it. And our peculiarly non-material consciousness is what enables our attention, gives us our will, and makes us question the nature of that more that we know we are.
Confusion
Our consciousness, including our will and attention, is also what drives us crazy, when we cannot articulate the more that we know that we are, the more on which our consciousness, will, and attention depend. If we were brutes, without this preposterous ability to contemplate the material around us of which we are a biological part, then we would not care. We would not confuse and frustrate ourselves over meaning, purpose, consciousness, attention, and intention. We would have neither mind nor capacity to wonder how the material we see and of which we are a part gives not just life and breath, neither of which we can in any appreciable degree replicate out of the material around us, but also consciousness, conscience, and intention. We would see nothing different between a cathedral and a cockroach, although of course cathedrals would not exist, our having no minds nor reason or capacity to create them. But here we are, wondering, questioning, searching for the invisible that so clearly guides, orders, and enlivens the visible.
Project
This human project of searching for the source of wonder, life, mind, will, purpose, design, beauty, meaning, and intention, these things with which the world is so bristlingly full, has spanned millennia. We know so from recorded history, although we increasingly suspect that we have lost memory of this project that might go several times farther back in unrecorded time. Gradually, though, we have accumulated and examined enough of our experience of this wonder of the visible world’s invisible creator to receive the creator’s stunning revelation. For aeons a veil mercifully covered the creator so thickly that we could only peek and shudder at glimpses of his essences. Yet that veil briefly parted, and not by a brilliant insight or experiment of our own but by the creator’s own self-disclosure in revelation. Extraordinarily, almost exactly two millennia have passed since that revelation, during the course of which the revelation has spread around the globe to become ever more widely embraced but also ever more widely denied. We simultaneously learned with the creator’s revelation that both his embrace and denial are our human destiny.
Clarity
The human project was then, two millennia ago, fully apparent, so far as what we needed to know to do our part. For indeed, we learned in that revelation that we had a clear and central part. But as the revelation itself foretold, it must reach so fully around the globe as to be blamelessly complete before its fruition. The revelation must so fully manifest itself that all could choose to embrace it. In choosing the revelation, we live within the revelation without the disorder that characterizes the world’s materiality, apart from the creator’s presence. The revelation’s clarity is there for the grasping, as it has been now for two millennia. One has only to embrace it amidst the chaos that necessitates the choice. Sure, things could be so crystal clear and compelling that we had no choice but to accept the revelation. But then, we wouldn’t really have a choice, when choice is essential to the gorgeous design of the thing. Indeed, the greater the confusion and chaos out of which we choose the revelation, the greater the choice. The greater danger to us would be that the choice would be too clear, rather than not clear enough. For the bits of mystery that remain around the revelation are just enough to compel us forward to it.
Perspectives
Trust this guide for that very reason, that it offers you the revelation’s clarity, without removing its alluring mystery, that which compels us forward. I could show you the full smorgasbord of choices, or at least so much of it as I know, for the choices are endless. But when you turn to someone or something for help, you’re not asking for more confusion. A guide doesn’t lead you past one fork in the path after another, highlighting their features and challenges, while waiting for you to choose. You instead refer to and rely on a guide to show you the path forward, which you still have the option to choose or not to choose. If you want more choices, options, and confusion, then the next time you answer the doorbell to those quaintly dressed young folks with the pamphlets, invite them in for a chat. Then sit down with your crystal, cross your legs, and chant. Then get on your knees facing east at five precise times a day to talk to a god you’ll never meet nor know. And accept your uncle’s offer of a sufi and your aunt’s offer of a seance. But if you want clarity and the best answers you could ever hear, embrace the one revelation that guides two billion souls to the God who is love.
Truth
This guide is also not to give you some tips and tricks, principles and practices, and chapters and verses. Nor is it to offer you solace, although what it confirms should indeed console. You have a lifetime to explore the revelation’s wonders, picking up along the way the tools and rules, and principles and practices, that help you on your journey. You may learn some of those things from this guide, but that’s not at all its purpose. This guide’s purpose is instead to answer clearly, practically, and strategically, pointing you toward the deep truths that generate the rules, principles, and practices. The account of the loving God, of which you are a principal part, embeds those deep truths in your heart. If you learn and embrace that account, which reveals to you the hidden structure of the world through which you walk, you will know the way to live without having to expressly know the rules, principles, and practices, which will instead be in your heart. When you turn to a guide, you don’t want rules and strategies. You want the map. You want the path to the goal.
Experience
Let the revelation itself tell you whether this guide helps you see it clearly. That is the curious thing about truth, that only by experiencing it can you judge it to be true. We must thus grope our way toward the truth, as it reveals enough of itself to us for our experience to judge it to be true, so that it reveals more of itself to us. I myself had no clue of the accurate account of the cosmos and its course and meaning, until the revelation revealed enough of itself to me to experience it, to lead me farther forward. And the account continues to lead me on, deeper into the revelation itself, as experience proves it true. My experience is not as a pastor or preacher, nor a seminarian and theologian. My practice has instead been as a lawyer, law professor, and dean, although also a church officer, director, advisor, band member, and teacher, and the author of a couple dozen faith books. My far greater credit is instead to have come to know the creator author as he has revealed himself in his majestic account and in moments of clarity, inspiration, and embrace. But let his revelation to you be the judge of what is true. My hope is only to point you toward the revelation.
Flourishing
My goal and hope is that this guide will in some degree clarify your vision of the revelation that gives the world its divinely ordered structure. The creator appears to have given us that revelation in the only way that we can receive it, which is to shroud it in just enough mystery that we must rely on one another to see it clearly enough to embrace and follow it. The creator clearly wants us to have teachers and, once qualified, be teachers of one another. The revelation is so powerful and pure, like its author, source, and end, that the creator has given it to us in a form best learned through the many accounts of it that we can collectively give one another. My larger goal is to see you flourish through your increasing embrace of the revelation, as it infuses your heart, steadies your will, gathers up your soul, and directs your path into its own account. By your flourishing, I mean your strengthening, relief, confidence, hope, healing, and perseverance. Life without the revelation is hard, just as it should be, indeed the harder the better. May this guide help you see the revelation afresh and, in doing so, lighten your step along its upward path.
Reflection
Do you recognize that the world has much more to it than its material form that we can grasp and see? Can you point to some evidence, within your own experience, of the hidden patterns, powers, and designs that seem to influence the world? On who or what would you not rely to understand those patterns and powers? Are you familiar with the revelation, almost exactly two millennia ago, of the loving God who entered the world he created to reveal his intention for it and us? Do you feel that your life would be better with a clear and sound understanding of the world’s structure and account, and your purpose within it? Do you agree that your experience should test and prove your understanding of the world’s structure and your purpose in it? Don’t you think you’d do better aligning your actions with the world’s structure and your purpose in it? What else could possibly ground your life with the same confidence and clarity, better than the revelation of creation’s structure and author?
Key Points
The world has much more to it than we see in its material form.
Confusion is easy over the invisible things guiding what we see.
The human project has been to receive the revelation of the unseen.
The revelation came two millennia ago, to spread around the globe.
The path to faith is to see the revelation with greater clarity.
A reliable guide does not confuse the path to faith with detours.
The revelation gives account of the truth, which is in the revelation.
Your experience of the revelation confirms its reliability as truth.
Your flourishing lies in joining your path with the revelation’s account.