“Cosmic Loneliness”: Another Episode of “Personal Theology Time!”; with Your Host, MD Tillman
Nov 2nd, 2007 by Micah Tillman | 3 Comments |
Begin Transcript . . .
Yesterday somebody got to my site through a search for “cosmic loneliness.” I found this so amusing I thought I should write a post I’d promised to write a while back. So I went back to find the post where I made the promise, and found the very phrase I thought was so amusing.
Dinesh D’Souza used it in What’s So Great About Christianity: “Christianity also offers a solution to the cosmic loneliness that we all feel . . . .”
The basis, I wrote, had already been touched on in my comments on an earlier post. Famous people, you see, help us deal with cosmic loneliness too. And this can help us understand prayer.
Have you ever watched a movie, loved it, watched it again, and gotten tired of it? Then a friend comes over and asks if you could watch that movie together, and you get all excited to see it again? Seeing something with someone else affects the way you see it.
Those religions that believe in a God who created the Universe itself (not just things within the Universe) come to realize that that belief has certain consequences: God must not depend on either space or time and cannot be limited by either.
This means God can be everywhere and everywhen if God so desires. (I’ve yet to find anything in the Bible that says God is everywhere, only that God is wherever humans can go, if they go there, and is wherever people are gathered in Christ’s name, etc.) God is an unlimited observer, and some Bible verses claim God in fact observes everything (e.g., here, here, here, here, and here).
Combine philosophy with Scripture, and you end up with the claim that whatever we see, God is seeing too (”see” being used analogically . . . ). And God not only sees whatever it is that we are seeing, but sees that we are seeing it, and therefore sees it twice (as it were). (Then throw in a few other people seeing the same thing and the thing gets even more Divine Attention. Prayer groups/chains/requests anyone?)
This allows those of us who believe in such a God to not just see movies with our friends, or see sunsets with our significant others, but to see our World and everything that happens in it with God.
And seeing things with God changes your experience of those things, just like seeing a movie with your friend changes your experience of the movie. It gives you a little distance to (from?) the thing, allowing you to react to whatever it does more calmly.
This way of experiencing the World is, I believe, what Brother Lawrence called “practicing the presence of God.” And it is something that has to be practiced. None of the disciplines can be developed instantaneously. (See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.1, and St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, Prima Secundae Q. 63.)
What’s nice about it, however, is that not only does it change your experience of the World (thus solving our “cosmic loneliness”) but it might just change the World as well. After all, what must it do to a thing to have God not only observing it, but focused on it through observing what we are (and perhaps many of us are) focused on? (There is that interesting idea that God is not only Creator, but Sustainer, which might be somehow involved here.)
Or maybe it doesn’t do anything to the World. I haven’t figured that one out yet. I’ll have to let you know when/if I do . . . .
This ends another episode of “Personal Theology Time!” with MD Tillman (or as the phone book says, “Tillman, MD”).
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[...] I think that to listen to a story properly (whether in reading, or movie watching, or hearing a friend talk) means to participate in it, to live vicariously through it. Stories help you get outside yourself. They make you feel less claustrophobic, almost in the same way that talking about famous people does. [...]
[...] So, The Wife had TMZ (the TV version) on for a few minutes. (Have I ever written here about why humans like celebrities? Ah, yes, I did. Here.) [...]
In one swell foop you cover why I value so highly my semi-monthly film discussion group, why I appreciate that spiritual disciplines take a lifetime, why I read D’Souza regularly for intellectual stimulation, and why I am glad to have your blog on RSS feed to get … er … fed by your blog.
Our film discussion group on Wednesday will watch Final Cut, with the irrepressible Robin Williams and the beautiful Mira Sorvino (as Delila, a name surely to remind us of Sampson’s Delilah). If ever there were a film to remind us of what God sees, this is it. As usual, I came for the science fiction and stayed for the philosophy.
–Gene
(credit to Rev. Spooner for “swell foop”)