People often like to talk about the “problem of the God of the lost keys” or “the God of the Sparrows.”
That problem, simply put, is why can or did God help someone find lost keys or why was God mindful of a sparrow when God let someone else be raped or murdered or devastated. Why did God intervene to help someone find keys, but not intervene so they could escape starvation?
That is because the Tao or harmony of the way is often described in terms of harmony with the background fabric of the universe. (And yes, I’m simplifying concepts that were a bit more complex in my upper division philosophy class I took that covered the subject, but this part of it I believe is accurate). Harmony results in results that do not mean intervention.
The Tao is the intuitive knowing of “life” that cannot be grasped full-heartedly as just a concept but is known nonetheless through actual living experience of one’s everyday being.
Laozi in the Tao Te Ching explains that the Tao is not a ‘name’ for a ‘thing’ but the underlying natural order of the Universe whose ultimate essence is difficult to define.
Adopting the concept of finding harmony as the path to finding lost keys (or anything similar) means that when someone relaxes and finds lost keys, or their mother in a crowded assembly or their wallet where it fell into the bushes, the experience is not so much the universe or God or some force reaching out and making a change, as it is the person opening up and finding what the universe had there all along.
In practice it is much like Joe Miller’s God of the Sparrows where God observes each Sparrow with love, even though God does not intervene. God’s mindfulness exists not in changing the world but in observing it and then bringing every part of creation, even the sparrows, home to him to be loved and healed in the end. To the extent we find or listen to the mind of God, that is not so much an intervention by God as it is our gaining a sensitivity to what reality truly is.
This way of looking at things, or approach is a different perspective from thinking of such results as an active force. It is also a way of looking at life that is also one that also fits with the theology of there being both a [Light of Christ] and [the actions of the Holy Ghost] and that fits with the lived experience that sometimes people pray and find their missing keys. One source of guidance or inspiration [the Light of Christ] is sensitivity to the background flow or grain or nature of the universe that lights everyone who lives. The other source [the Gift of the Holy Ghost] is intervention by the power behind the universe.
Those are my thoughts on why it may be that someone finds lost keys through prayer or meditation, yet that they do have a little miracle of sorts does not mean that God is either a vending machine or unfathomably unfair.
What do you think?
Images from Wikimedia Commons, definition adapted from Wikipedia’s Taoism entry.
This is an issue I struggle with. Being raised LDS, I feel I was taught very much that God is an interventionist and that as we perfected ourselves we would be able to have more of his interventions. Fast and testimony and even general conference are full of people telling how God helped them. I have come to conclude that God isn’t one that intervenes. This post gives me something to think about and also a desire to take more than the one philosophy class I took in college.
I do believe as we harmonize ourselves with God he is more in our lives.
The entire issue of why God intervenes sometimes and not others is a different post. Experiencing tangible miracles makes it harder when they don’t occur.
But God is not just the God who observes sparrows.
I think this worth considering. But, initially I wonder (a) how to reconcile this approach with the NT teachings on prayer and answers to prayer, (b) what value there is [in this life] in God’s observant but inactive love, (c) whether it is possible to feel such love or if it is purely theoretical construct.
On a level quite minor compared to the usual ways of posing the problem, I have seen and heard testimonies of how God revealed to an LDS mother what she should make for her family’s dinner function, not as encouragement of faith in a loving God, but as confirmation that God did not love another LDS mother who had actual serious problems and no discernible answers to humble, heartfelt prayers. I currently doubt that the Tao of the Lost Keys concept would help either of them. Maybe I’ll get it with further elucidation from Stephen and commenters.
BTW, what is Joe Miller’s God of the Sparrows? Haven’t yet found such a thing on the internet.
I believe in answers to prayer, both active and passive.
I think claiming the answer to one set of prayers is not useful in condemning anyone else unless you are competing for Pharisee of the week.
Joe Miller was a newspaper columnist in Wichita Falls who went through a transformative near death experience and who wrote about the significance of God’s observing love.
It is a good insight, though I believe God does more than observe.
“I think claiming the answer to one set of prayers is not useful in condemning anyone else unless you are competing for Pharisee of the week.”
My example had nothing to do with condemning anyone else. It was the person who felt no answers who questioned herself and God. This is not an isolated problem and has nothing to do with pharisaism. Sorry I wasn’t clearer about that.
I’ve had similar thoughts Stephen, that was usefully framed. I think this is about fitting in with the universe rather than getting the results we want.
I think so much of my relationship with God id about letting go of my agenda for Him, me or anybody else, and just following the universe. How that fits in with the idea of an interventionist God I no longer have any idea, my prayers are largely about begging for help to let such agendas go. Fitting in with universal flow is my aspiration and being able to get out of my own way. You may enjoy Nick Cave singing ‘Into your Arms’ Stephen.
Great story Wondering. I guess we all have to rub along together. Tough though when someone else asserts their hotline to God’s ear.
While I love this and love this way of thinking, the research has been done on this. When someone relaxes, prays, and then suddenly knows just where their lost keys are sitting, what is happening has less to do with God and more to do with the way our brains function.
The prayers/relaxation shut up the noisy, verbal left side of our brain (that voice you ‘hear’ when you think) and allows the quiet, non-verbal right side to pass along information that it has but can’t share when the left side is doing all the talking. Essentially, the person goes into a flow state (if you are an artist, you’ll know what I’m talking about, if not you’ll have to look it up) where the right side finally has the space to provide the answer. Modern people are very left brained and most people outside the arts / meditation gurus don’t know how to shut that left brain up. One of the things I like about Mormonism is we teach how to do this in a round-about way (and call it God), which is better than never learning.
Believers in an interventionist God get really lathered up when they think they see God fussing around with the material world to promote some superficially gratifying end, like someone getting healed of a disease after prayer. What they fail to see is that they inhabit a body which is continually healing them, fighting for them, and upholding them in ways so miraculous and mysterious that science has not even begun to understand it. Each second, trillions of microscopic miracles keep us afloat. Yet we get so excited about some vapid miracle such as parting the Red Sea, a minor bleeping of the laws of physics, something even Hollywood could accomplish with a mere million dollars.
“When you cry out for grace, you are like a man standing neck deep in water crying out for a drink.”
I agree with ReTx. All these supposed interventions are simply our brain, our psyche, our psychology–not God, nor the “Spirit.” However, a belief in those “spiritual” concepts and their attendant practices (prayer), is IMO, very helpful to our overall character/righteousness, mental health, etc.
Other than my keys are always in the last place I look, I agree with ReTx on this.
I’ve come to view testimony meeting as a confirmation bias session. We tend to only hear stories about when God intervenes in one’s life. When he doesn’t we don’t hear too much about it. I think it tends to conflate things that happen by chance with things that happen because of God’s influence.
I also find it problematic when one person testifies they know God loves them because their prayers were answered and a child was saved from from harm while there are other parents in the congregation who’ve actually lost children despite their prayers (True story. Often). I understand the gratitude but question God’s justice/mercy if that is really the case.
I think there is something to prayer, but I’m hesitant to put it all on God.
DaveC. I buried three children over about five years. I know the feeling of not being preserved.
On the other hand I’ve had tangible things happen. I’m still working on a thesis that wraps it up beyond the simple summary of God not being tame or a gum ball machine.
However, there is a sub-set of Matters that this description applies to.
My apologies to everyone if it is written to be over inclusive.
This is delightful and all the comments. Taoist thought is most easily understood by westerners, or at least ones who think like me, by reading the Tao of Pooh. It is great.
I will just share this thought, one translation I have seen for Tao is the Way. Very interesting in the concept of Jesus Christ.
Stephen, I appreciate your search and will continue reading what you come up with. Prayer is my primary connection with God, but I certainly don’t understand a lot about it.
To me, this is a very critical issue. It goes to the heart of religion. Who is God?
I had a bishop who believed that God put gas in the tank of his car (or that God made his car run on empty). This to avoid buying gas on Sunday. And when his car broke down in a dangerous locale, that prayer smoothed the way for he and his family. He has spiritual experiences constantly. There all kinds of problems with this concept. Most have been discussed above.
I don’t believe my ex-bishop’s interpretation for a second. For me, God is not an interventionist. But Mormonism supports interventionist beliefs, and certainly preaches them from the pulpit.
I have serious doubts that such alternative ideas about God (interventionist and non-interventionist) can survive together in one Church. I believe that members with a more scientific view of the world are going to slowly drift away, if they haven’t already.
I agree with Wondering. If god is interventionist, he works in ways too mysterious (ie arbitrary) to be useful to us beyond wishful thinking and superstition, which at times are actually not useful at all. I don’t know what role an observing god plays in my life, and I have yet to feel anything but imagined love from this divinity. I like the Tao way of life having to be experienced more than conceptualized.