I gave him a single-word answer: "Repulsed."

An essay on belief, superstition, and love.

A special treat on this Thanksgiving week.

Gemma Mason

is a writer from New Zealand, and one the most active members of the Crowd. (We’ve featured her comments in CrowdSource several times.) Today, we publish an essay in which she wrestles with belief and unbelief. Gemma’s piece weaves the philosophical and the personal in a compelling and moving way. Enjoy!

— Santiago Ramos, Executive Editor

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I knew a boy, once, who claimed he could find a four-leaved clover in any clover patch. He said they were always there; all it took was patience. To prove it, he found one for me in the grass we were sitting in at the time. Then he found another and gave me that one, too.

***

Once upon a time, people believed that physical objects could hold magical or spiritual power. It wasn’t just four-leaved clovers and self-bored stones and other faintly pagan things. It was also religious relics, and the consecrated ground of a churchyard, and of course the Eucharist.

There often seems to have been very little difference drawn between spirituality and magic. In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor mentions the historical example of a love charm made from a consecrated host. It might sound terribly sacrilegious to use the very body of Christ for such a purpose, but nobody would do this unless they truly believed that the power of God was manifest in the object they were using.

***

Four-leaved-clover boy was Christian. His faith wasn’t normal in our social circle, but he carried it easily, without shame or defiance. He would mention his favorite book of the Bible (Ecclesiastes), or his favorite Christian author (C. S. Lewis), or his plans to attend church that Sunday, just as part of the usual chit-chat that people give about what they like and what they are doing.

The first time I made a mathematical mistake in front of him, I was awkward about it. He wasn’t, though. He could correct me without making me feel stupid. In fact, he was good at correcting me. I am inclined to quick intuitive leaps, but they don’t always pan out once you look at the details. He’d examine them as patiently as a patch of clover. Then he’d tell me if I was wrong. We could put together a whole proof in tandem, stringing together conjectures and counterexamples until we understood fully what was going on. I felt so free, unafraid of looking stupid. Together, we were so smart. It was like discovering the other half of my own mind.

***

Perhaps the most significant difference, though, about the enchanted worldview, was the way that people understood their own minds. They saw themselves as porous. Spirits of all kinds might influence their thoughts. Bad habits of mind came from demons. Good impulses came from angels.

Think about a phrase like “the better angels of our nature.” Angels would be a message from God, but our nature is already inside us.

***

He asked me once to try opening myself to God. “Consider letting Jesus into your heart,” he said. “How does that make you feel?”

I thought about separating myself from my sense of right and wrong, and taking the Bible as my guide instead. I thought about relinquishing my best judgment as to the truth of things, perhaps even thinking badly of myself if I couldn’t make myself believe a specific narrative. The idea was nauseating. I could barely contemplate it.

I censored my reaction, but not by much, because he was obviously asking me for a sincere response. I gave him a single-word answer: “Repulsed.”

***

The opposite of a porous self-understanding is a buffered self-understanding. As we enter modernity, this way of thinking becomes more common, and our philosophical thinking shifts in response. Are we all just brains in a laboratory, hallucinating experiences through our nervous systems? This idea is much more plausible if we think we experience the world only through our senses.

I suppose the ultimate buffered self would be a solipsistic one. Perhaps you are the only mind in the universe. Perhaps everyone else is an automaton, or perhaps everything you see is just a dream you’re having. You can’t prove otherwise.

The solipsistic viewpoint is amusing, but I can’t seriously entertain it. The moral force of other people’s existence is too important. Being open to the subjective apprehension of other people’s feelings is always risky, but the risk of not seeing people is worse.

***

I could tell he liked me. It was in the way he flinched when I straightened his hair, and in his resigned resentment when other boys paid me attention. He was nice, and he was always there, but I wasn’t sure I returned his feelings.

I told my mother that he wasn’t handsome. My mother disagreed.

***

Even a buffered self still feels influenced by different forces. We talk about conflicts between head and heart. We get messages from our gut, or from our unconscious, or from our lizard brain. We hold entire conversations with imagined versions of people who aren’t even there.

It can be hard to bring your whole self together. But sometimes, when you get close enough, it all falls into place. For a time, everything makes sense and the reasonable feels right.

***

I think the thing that made up my mind was that I already did love him, in so many ways. I loved him with my heart as a friend, and with my mind when we were doing maths together. It was easy, in the end, to love him with all of me. Easy to lean over, one evening, and put my head on his shoulder.

Easy to take his hand.

When he opened his mouth to say, “We need to talk about this,” I could tell by the slow way he said it that it was not at all easy for him to get the words out.

***

I believe in so many intangible things: circles, modus ponens, the Mandelbrot set, the number two. Some of my understanding is surely attached to particular ways of talking about these things, contingent upon culture, and yet beyond that it still seems that there is something in mathematics that can’t be moved, something perfect and powerful and incontrovertible.

Why is it that, the further from mathematics we get, the harder it is to agree?

***

“If you don’t open your heart to Jesus,” he told me, “you could go to hell. Can you tell me why you can’t believe?”

“I can’t believe in Christianity because you shouldn’t believe things without a good reason. That would be morally wrong, and any God who would send me to hell for honestly seeking the truth would be an evil God, who wouldn’t be worth worshiping in the first place!”

“There’s evidence,” he told me. “I can give you some. But you need to understand something. When you say you feel repulsed by the idea of accepting Jesus, you are telling God ‘I don’t want to know you.’ That’s the worst thing you can do! If you refuse God’s love, then you will be separated from God when you die. Seeing you in heaven is more important than anything that happens in this life. You need to be able to ask Jesus for forgiveness.”

“What, so all the non-Christians just go to hell, then?”

“Not necessarily, but you have to have something, some connection to God that you can call on.”

He looked at me as if he was daring me to claim I had such a thing. I felt small. I did not try.

***

In more buffered kinds of self-understanding, belief doesn’t mean exactly the same things as before.

Even if an all-powerful God could communicate with you directly, it starts to seem less likely that such a thing would happen to you. Instead of being a messenger from God, a good impulse might be seen as a quality that God has built into your nature to guide you.

As this development becomes more entrenched, people often assume that the non-religious, and the buffered-religious, don’t experience those things that might traditionally have been expressed in porous religious language. Our beliefs do alter our experiences, it’s true. But how much?

***

Summer ended, and the boy who found me four-leaved clovers went back to one town as I went back to another. Without him, it felt like there were pieces missing from every thought in my mind.

Sometimes the call to a Christian life is framed as an invitation: come, confess your sins, be forgiven, and eat with us the bread of eternal life. Between me and the boy I loved, it was not an invitation but an ultimatum. He would not disobey the Bible to marry an unbeliever. I would have to choose between conversion and heartbreak.

Hell is an ultimatum, too.

***

The fact that our beliefs alter our experiences can be terrifying. If someone were to convince you of the existence of demons, or angels, or God, then you might experience them as real even if they weren’t. You could end up living your whole life in a sort of dream, buffeted by forces that don’t even exist.

Supernatural beliefs can have alarmingly concrete consequences. The Hmong people of Southeast Asia believe that the tsog tsuam might come upon you in your sleep to paralyze and kill you if you don’t pay proper respect to your ancestors. This belief corresponds to a known physical phenomenon: your body has a mechanism to stop you moving as you dream, and sometimes the resulting paralysis can linger as you wake. Many cultures attribute this to a supernatural creature; our own word nightmare used to refer to one of them. But, as this article explains, the Hmong suffer from a mysterious syndrome that causes them to die in their sleep. It would appear that, sometimes, the tsog tsuam kills them just as they believe it will.

One way to respond to the apparent existence of malign forces that impact your mind would be to believe yet more strongly in a countervailing good force. But disbelief seems to work, too.

***

We exchanged a lot of emails over the next few months. Lots of news about our lives, lots of arguing about God. It got a bit tricky, trying to give them subject lines. We ended up just using single punctuation marks. The first punctuation mark subject line to get handed back and forth was a semicolon. The last was an ampersand, because we didn’t change it after that.

In mathematics, our differences were complementary. In religion, they created problems. I was very attached to the idea of goodness, as a whole. It felt like cheapening it to see morality as a set of individual commands from some all-powerful being who could change them at will.

As for his personal experience of God, I didn’t see how anyone could be sure of something so dependent upon interpretation. But he believed in it, and seemed to believe that I would, too, if only I could experience it. He suggested praying. I dutifully tried. “You know I don’t want this, if I’m wrong,” I explained to a God that I scrupulously framed as a hypothetical. “I just can’t affirm something I don’t have good reason to believe.” Being honest, though, I had to admit that my sense of right and wrong wasn’t just engaged by true and false.

Maybe I needed to push harder, to separate myself from those feelings.

***

Allowing yourself to believe in the supernatural opens you up to all sorts of influences. There have always been charlatans who prey on the credulity of people who long for solutions to the deep problems in their lives. Also, you can’t believe everything, because different religions contradict each other, all the time, on deeply important matters.

One way to respond to both of these problems is to say that people from the true religion have been given, or have attained, some special grace or insight not available to others. They are dreaming; we are awake.

***

I woke, and didn’t wake. I’d been dreaming of a big rectangular mouth, half monster, half machine.

People lay on a conveyor belt leading into it. They went voluntarily. I helped them.

I couldn’t go back to sleep, back into that terrible horror. I couldn’t wake, either. I couldn’t move.

Why couldn’t I move?

I would be able to move if I could understand the wrongness of my nightmare. As soon as the idea came to me, it seemed true. I thought about the monster, and how terrible it was, and then tried to move. I couldn’t. Was there no way out?

Perhaps the problem was that I was only feeding other people to the monster. Maybe if I fed myself to it, I would understand how bad it was. I fed myself to the monster. I saw my vision go white as I passed through the monster’s metal teeth.

It didn’t help. I felt worse than ever. Trapped, motionless, powerless.

So, I shouldn’t be fed to it. I shouldn’t be fed to it, or help anyone else to be fed to it. Because — because the machine was religion. And if I didn’t feed myself to it, or anyone else either, then — yes, now I could move.

***

Our beliefs alter our experiences, but they don’t predict them, precisely. Disbelief is not a firm barrier against the apparently supernatural. But if you’re relying on experience to support your beliefs, then is my experience worth less than yours?

Mind you, nearly twenty years on, I can see more than one interpretation for what was happening to me. Rationalist atheism does not really recognize “spiritual distress” as a meaningful category, but that might be the best terminology for what I was going through. In dreams or out of them, there is a part of me from which I ought not to be separated. Or is it more than just a part of me?

Whether spiritual experiences are mist in our minds, or whether there is some centre to them that is perfect and powerful and incontrovertible, I cannot be certain. What I will not do is assume that experiences like mine are more real than experiences that don’t easily harmonize with mine. That would be another kind of solipsism.

***

What would you do if the strongest, most striking sense of the supernatural you’d ever had was an intense dream telling you not to be religious?

I seriously considered ignoring it. After all, it was just a dream. But I found I couldn’t shake it.

Maybe it would be wrong to credit a dream when attempting to determine a question of fact, but the idea of going back on my word — had I given my word? It felt like I had. But if there was nobody else in my head but me, then that was just a promise to myself, from which I could in theory release myself.

What I needed was a good reason. Such as, if it’s possible to have a religious experience telling you not to be religious, then religious experiences can’t be reliable, so there’s no point looking for one.

Phew. Good thing I have a good reason.

***

There is a paradox to disbelieving in religion because a dream told me to. Yet it emerges from the paradoxes that gave rise to the whole experience. Once upon a time, a boy I loved inflicted spiritual distress on me because his religion told him to. I let him, because I had no religion to tell me not to.

To think of ourselves as making sense all the time is to believe a falsehood. It’s easy to end up with a thin veneer of pseudo-rationality over decisions made on an entirely different basis — like writing a detached essay that’s really about a lingering personal experience. We can’t help trying to make sense of ourselves, but maybe we also need to accept our own absurdity. Do you think the absurd could have a logic of its own?

***

How do you break up with someone when you were never together in the first place? When the closest physical contact you’ve had is to hold hands that one time?

“For these past months,” I told him, “I’ve had my hand out. Even if you didn’t feel you could take it, I was always offering it. I think it’s time for me to stop doing that.”

His face darkened. “I’m starting to get quite —” he caught himself, then continued, “angry at God for not showing Himself to you.”

***

I wish I could hand you some synthesis that would make sense of you and me and all of us, in all our heartfelt complexity. I wish I could find it growing in the grass on a summer’s day and pluck it for you so you could hold it in your hand, a tangible marvel, simple and natural and whole.

But even an enchanted world couldn’t give us all the answers. There are people even now who would tell you that God Himself can be found in an object you can taste, but they would also tell you that this is a great mystery. True wholeness, of a kind that can satisfy our reason and our passion, is apt to slip through our fingers. We may hope to be grasped by it, but we can never grasp it.

***

I kept those two four-leaved clovers he had given me for a long time afterwards, in a little cardboard box in the front pocket of my backpack. There was a window in the lid, covered with clear tape, through which you could see them lying like Snow White in a crystal coffin.

The backpack went with me to Cambridge, and the four-leaved clovers went with it. Mostly, I ignored them. But when it was time to leave for home, it seemed best to try to turn them into another goodbye.

I took them to Trinity Bridge and crumbled them over the side. I wanted the pieces to drift down to the water, but the wind caught them almost as soon as I let go. I didn’t see where they went.

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