Fingerprints of God (2 page)

My body responded before my mind, alerting me to some unseen change, a danger perhaps. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, and my heart start beating a little faster—as it is now, recalling the moment. Imperceptibly at first, the air around us thickened, and I wondered whether a clear, dense mist had rolled in from the ocean. The air grew warmer and heavier, as if someone had moved into the circle and was breathing on us. I glanced at Kathy. She had fallen silent in mid-sentence. Neither of us spoke. Gradually, and ever so gently, I was engulfed by a presence I could feel but not touch. I was paralyzed. I could manage only shallow breaths. After a minute, although it seemed longer, the presence melted away.We sat quietly, while I waited for the earth to steady itself. I was too spooked to speak, and yet I was exhilarated, as the first time I skied down an expert slope, terrified and oddly happy that I could not turn back. Those few moments, the time it takes to boil water for tea, reoriented my life. The episode left a mark on my psyche that I bear to this day.

 

 

 

EVER SINCE THAT NIGHT, I have wanted to write a book that answers the questions that I never voice in the two worlds I inhabit. The golden rule of journalism decrees that you take nothing on faith, that you back up every line of every story you write with hard evidence.You question everything. The unspoken ethos of organized religion is that you leave the uncomfortable questions alone, you accept them as unsolved mysteries or previously answered by religious minds greater than yours.You rely on the wisdom of sacred texts and your minister, and you swallow your doubts.

And yet I could not keep the questions at bay. Is there another reality that occasionally breaks into our world and bends the laws of nature? Is there a being or intelligence who weaves together the living universe, and if so, does He, She, or It fit the description I have been given? I was not worried about losing the old man with a beard—but what about the young man on a cross? Is there a spiritual world every bit as real as the phone ringing in the kitchen or my dog sitting on my foot, a dimension that eludes physical sight and hearing and touch? In the end, my questions boiled down to five words:
Is there more than this?

As the years unfolded, I stockpiled more questions and more stories—strange stories that demanded an explanation. I wondered about my friend John, who was a slave to painkillers and scotch. Day in and day out, the cravings drove him away from his wife and to bars and Internet pharmacies. One day he felt the touch of something supernatural, and the cravings vanished. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, and while he never really bought into the tenets of his Catholic Church, he subscribed to the mysterious power that pulled him from the pit.

I wondered about my grandmother, a Christian Science “practitioner” or healer, who prayed for people and saw them recover. I thought about one patient in particular, a teenager in San Francisco who, tripping on LSD, jumped from an eighth-story window onto the street. The doctors declared him brain-dead and left him to Granny’s prayers. Two weeks later, he walked out of the hospital.

I wondered about my own brief brushes with something numinous, and the gnawing suspicion that there might be a reality that hides itself except in rare moments, or to rare people. I have stumbled a few times into a mystical presence—once, as a blinding light in my bedroom, another time as a voice, several times as an undeniably physical presence. Few people know about those times; they are intensely private and, to be honest, a little bizarre.Which is why, I suppose, it took me more than a decade to write this book.

MARCH 6, 2004, exploded with promises of spring. I had spent the past two days moderating a forum on the history of faith and law in a hotel conference room in Walland, Tennessee. It had been heavy intellectual lifting, and when we finished the last session late in the afternoon, I burst outside like a kid at recess, sprinting to my hotel room and throwing on shorts and a sweatshirt. The hotel sat at the base of the Smoky Mountains, and my forty-four-year-old heart raced as I made a dash for the trail that led me into the nearest set of hills.

The sun was already hovering just over the horizon. But I only planned to hike a three-mile loop. Plenty of time. As I left the road and started up the trail, a longing swept over me, a memory of what it felt like to be young. Perhaps it was the smell of the spring moss, or the way the shadows dappled the path, but my mind’s eye scanned back twenty-five years to those summers I had spent backpacking in the Colorado Rockies, in that pink dawn of life when your future fans out before you and you instinctively know that
now
is the time to risk everything because you may never have another chance.

The exhilaration did not serve me well. It blinded me to my surroundings and the stealthily setting sun. Only after I had hiked up and down one of the foothills did I notice it was growing quite dark. In the mountains, night dims gradually for a while—and then instantly, like a towel dropped over a birdcage, it is black. I started to run along the path that I knew would lead me back to the main road, when the trail simply ended. Curving from the left roared a small churning river, swollen from melted snow. On the right, the hill swept up vertically, thick with trees and prickly bushes. There was no path forward.

Perhaps, in retrospect, I should have waded into the ice-cold river and followed it to the main road. But doubts crowded in.
Maybe I took a wrong turn. Maybe I misread the map and this stream doesn’t return to the road.
I decided that the only way back to safety was to retrace my steps.

For the next three hours I raced up and down the densely forested hills, blindly stumbling down one trail after another, unable to see my hand in front of my face. At some point, I became genuinely frightened. The Smoky Mountains are home to bears. A few days earlier, I had been warned (wrongly, I later learned), a serial killer had been caught in these very woods. Finally, I sat down, closed my eyes, and prayed. I prayed to a God who engages with His creation, a personal God intensely interested in every one of us, an all-seeing God whose GPS would guide me off the mountain. I began to sing Psalm 139, sotto voce at first, then louder in case the All-Hearing didn’t pick it up.
“Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit, and whither shall I flee from Thy presence . . .”

This is the image I hold in my mind: singing a psalm at the top of my lungs, clapping my hands to scare away the bears between verses. Bolstered by the prayer, I ventured down one more trail, and in a few moments I saw—
Thank God!
—lights from houses in the far distance, with people inside, tucked in for the night with a book. I careered down the rocky trail, relieved that my small nightmare was over. It was a perfect story for telling at dinner: a
little
dangerous but not too.

But the scene I was already imagining, regaling my dinner partners with this small adventure, abruptly ended. Between me and the little white house that had become my passage out of these black woods rushed a torrential river. Admittedly, it was more like a stream. But in the dark, it was a loud and angry stream, and dangerous, too, swollen to about forty feet wide by melted snow. Carefully, I waded into the water, hanging on to a tree branch that extended over the stream. The current instantly swept me off my feet. I clung fast to my sturdy little branch, surprised and grateful that it did not snap. Scrambling back onto the bank, I imagined some poor fisherman finding me three days later, miles downstream, caught in the brambles, my bloated body slapping softly against the bank.

Gazing at the racing water, I listened as carefully as I could. It sounds childish now, but at that moment the existence of God hung in the balance. At my core I believed I would hear a “voice” telling me what I should do. For several minutes, I strained to hear it. Nothing. Nothing but my own sullen admission that I had but one choice. I could stay on the mountain or cross that river.

And so I stumbled into the current as far as I could stand, and then, with a huge inhalation and a small cry, I heaved myself into the stream, tumbling and flailing until, miraculously, I smacked into the bank on the other side. I staggered out of the river, up to the little white house.

“Hello! Hello!” I yelled, banging on the door as I watched the lights turn out in the back. Then, timidly, a frail, white-haired woman peered out her window.

“Please,” I begged, “I’ve been lost in the mountains for
hours
!”

“Oh, you’re all wet,” she said softly, opening the door a sliver.“Come in, come in.”

I began to sob—relieved, yes, safe, yes—but feeling
alive
in a way I had not felt in years.

 

 

 

TRANSFORMING INSIGHTS USUALLY COME in small moments and pedestrian crises. So it was for me. In those few hours alone in the Smoky Mountains, in the dark soil of my fear, a seed split open. I realized that for nearly a decade, I had been running down one trail after another, keeping to the familiar safety of a path that would leave me dry but never lead me home. At some point, I needed to cross the river and immerse myself in the unnerving questions about God, and reality, and whether what I instinctively believed was true—or rubbish.

I was, to be honest, skittish. Skittish about ruining my reputation in a career where few people believe in God and fewer still bother to distinguish spirituality from religious politics. More than that, I was skittish about submitting my faith to scientific tests, exposing it to the possibility that the most profound moments of my life were nothing more than, say, electrical activity in my brain.

But in the end, I had to cross the river, and on the other side I found a small, brave band of scientists who had far more to lose than I did. They had slaved away for their medical degrees or their Ph.D.’s in neurology or biology, building a reputation in mainstream scientific research. And then they had risked it all by pursing the taboo questions. Is spiritual experience real or delusion? Are there realities that we can experience but not necessarily measure? Does your consciousness depend entirely on your brain, or does it extend beyond? Can thoughts and prayers affect the body? And that question I cannot seem to escape:
Is there more than this?

Every generation claims a few scientists at the fringes wrestling with these questions. Sometimes they are called parapsychologists, a demeaning title that makes them sound illegitimate if not a little bit unhinged. But today’s iconoclasts have an advantage their predecessors lacked. They have technology. They can peer inside a brain as it meditates in prayer or trips on psilocybin. They can look for markers in the brain, and, like forensic detectives, they are studying the evidence left behind by “spiritual” events that occurred out of their eyesight. They are trying to discern the fingerprints of the one—or the One—who passed through a person’s psyche and rearranged his life. They are analyzing these “spiritual” moments, in the form of epileptic seizures or psychedelic experiences, meditations in a brain scanner or out-of-body experiences. In the process, they find themselves in a world of mystery.

I have been privileged to spend time with some of these scientists, as well as the people whose stories they are studying. Along the way, my own spiritual journey has taken a surprising turn. I have shed some beliefs as untenable. And I have reclaimed some beliefs I had long ago discarded—because science may be proving them true, or at least plausible.

I wrestled with the approach to this book. As a journalist, I naturally gravitate toward the safe, clinical, third-person approach to the science of spirituality, setting aside my personal predilections and laying out the evidence for the reader to evaluate. And yet, the questions in this book about the nature of God and reality—these are
my
questions, this is a
personal
quest, and therefore I have woven my own story into the larger quest.

Like anyone else who has lived nearly five decades, I am hardly a blank canvas. My life experiences have nudged me into my particular perspective. But I have tried to draw on two experiences to help steer this book. The first is my quarter-century as a print, television, and radio journalist. I habitually shelve my preconceived ideas to try to glean the truth. I have learned to ask questions and really listen to the answers. If the science surprises me, or if it simply does not fit into my worldview, I must take that into account if I am to be an honest guide. Even if the science contradicts what I feel in my gut to be true, I will relay it to the best of my ability.

The second influence is my particular faith journey. Even though I now consider myself a mainstream Christian, I have never entirely shed the perspective of Christian Science. Christian Scientists do not evangelize or impose their truth on anyone else, and they are graciously tolerant of all other faiths. I am not going to foist my findings on you, and I will certainly not advocate a particular religious view. I wrote this book because some questions plagued me. I set about answering them—not by gazing at my navel, for there is only so much information that any one navel can provide. Rather, I am examining the science and the scientists, the “neurotheology,” that might explain those numinous moments that most everyone has enjoyed.