Fingerprints of God (11 page)

On June 14, 1995, around two o’clock in the afternoon, I lowered my guard. I opened myself up just barely to the notion that there might be a God who cares about me in the same way that Jesus cared about, say, his friend Mary. I prayed—and in that split second of surrender, I felt my heart stir and grow warm, as if it were changing. It was a physical thing, exquisite, undeniable.

Years later, I would learn about a far more famous heartwarming. In 1738, the British Anglican minister John Wesley was flailing about in his ministry, his faith intellectually strong but spiritually comatose. On May 24, he attended a small meeting of charismatic Moravians, who were known for their recklessly joyous faith. At that moment, a door inside Wesley unlocked, emotionally, spiritually. That moment left a visceral fingerprint. Later, he wrote five words that captured the touch of God: “My heart was strangely warmed.”

So it was for me. The moment was seared into my memory, and later, when I wondered if I had really encountered God, that warmed heart acted like a Polaroid snapshot, confirmation that a spiritual transaction had indeed taken place.

I wish I could tell you that I was blinded by a piercing light, as Saul was on the road to Damascus. I wish I could that say I smelled roses, the aroma that mystics inhaled in the presence of God. I wish I could tell you that I heard a roaring in my ears, or words, perhaps, like the few simple, ghostly words that Augustine caught when he opened his heart to God. My encounter with the unseen was not nearly so dramatic—not then, at any rate—and yet that quiet moment whipped me around with hurricane force. It became the continental divide of my life, the line that separates “before” and “after.” In the next several weeks, the colors I saw were almost unbearably vivid—the cobalt Los Angeles sky at night, the husky green of the summer grass. Even the tan upholstery of my car was so gentle and calflike, I ached to touch it. Things I once enjoyed became dust in my mouth. I walked out of
The Bridges of Madison County
because I could not bear the pain on Meryl Streep’s face—she was an
actor
, for Pete’s sake, but I could not tolerate even fictional sadness.

And I was terrified by the implications of my decision. My family jokes that all truth can be found in the movies. Perhaps, perhaps not, but the most authentic spiritual moment I have witnessed is not in church but in the movie
The Apostle
. Robert Duvall plays a Pentecostal preacher who murders his wife’s lover and flees to Louisiana. He starts a new church, and his flamboyant, holy-roller sermons on the local radio station draw devout, poor, black parishioners.

No sooner has the dilapidated church been repaired and painted than a redneck crashes the services and threatens the parishioners. He arrives during a church picnic on a bulldozer, prepared to mow the church down. Duvall places the Bible on the ground, in his path, and the irate man leaps off the machine. When he stoops to snatch up the book, the preacher kneels behind him, gently placing his hands on the man’s shoulders. Quietly, the man begins to cry.

“I’m embarrassed,” he whispers, and then he surrenders to God. The man weeps for all he is leaving behind—his friends, his tough image, the internal compass that guided his life. He weeps in terror for the future—where will he fit into the world now, now that his north is no longer true? He weeps out of utter humiliation, a strapping man lying facedown in the dust before the dark-skinned worshippers he has so long despised. It was the most realistic conversion I have ever seen.

I say that because this is what I felt. I, too, had much to lose by my spiritual transformation that day in Los Angeles: my friends, my ambitions, the educated image I held of myself and presented to others. Would I have to check my intellect at the door and take everything on faith? How was I to survive, a believer in a world of skeptics, particularly
journalists
? How would I navigate my world with this new spiritual compass? And at what cost?

In the next few days, I would get a glimpse of the price of wholesale spiritual upheaval. My beau, Steve, was moving to Burma in two weeks. He had managed to find a job there so that we could be together when I wrote my book. A day after this encounter with God, I telephoned Steve from Los Angeles.

“Steve,” I said in a tremulous voice, “I can’t go to Burma with you. I found God.”

An eternal silence ensued.

“Aw, honey,” he said. Another long pause. “I was waiting for this to happen.” Pause. “Your timing’s off, but I’m happy for you.”

Steve would spend the next four years in Burma. He eventually found someone else to love. As for me, it would take me another seven years—past the time I could have children—to find my wonderful husband.

My spiritual transformation blinded me with its intensity, a sunburst eclipsing the stars; it took some time for my eyes to adjust back to the more bearable, and dimmer, hues of daily life and work and love. God outshined all other relationships, which is why Sophy Burnham’s words years later gave me such a jolt. “How can I compete with God?” her husband had asked. And she responded, “You can’t
.
”

Ever since my own encounter with something mystical, I have wondered about the physical nature of these moments. I was relieved to find I was not alone: almost every person I interviewed spoke of the light or warmth or the physical touch at the moment they connected with the divine. Sophy Burnham heard a voice; Arjun Patel saw Buddha’s eyes; Alicia felt a shock of warmth straighten her spine.

These stories made me wonder how a scientist might explain these reactions. Perhaps that jolt of warmth that burned through Alicia’s body was a brief break with reality. Perhaps it was a mental delusion brought on by years of physical and emotional stress. Or perhaps it was the fingerprint that proves God was there.

I called Patrick McNamara, a neurologist at Boston University’s School of Medicine and editor of
Where God and Science Meet
, three volumes on the latest research exploring the science of religious experience.
⁴
I wanted to understand what was taking place at a biological level to bring Alicia or Sophy or me to—and through—that breaking point.

McNamara explained that no scientist can say with certainty what happens during these moments. No one, as far as we know, has ever hit bottom and undergone a spiritual experience while he happened to be in a brain scanner. Still, we do know a few things about the biology of stress and the neurology of meditation, and this allows scientists to make an educated guess.

Some scientists believe that just below a person’s well-tended exterior lies an underbrush as dry as timber, strewn with stress, trauma, or a search for meaning. These psychological states are quietly waiting, primed for a spark to ignite a spiritual blaze. That spark can appear insignificant or even random—a stressful day at work, a Zen haiku, a long-forgotten song—but it is enough to set in motion a chain reaction. As in the more dramatic cases, the prelude to this transformative moment is not just emotional. One’s body plays a part as well. Something is happening in the mind and in the body, in the psyche and in the physiology, at an emotional and at a cellular level. And at some point these two states, interacting, bring the person to a tipping point.

“There’s a whole series of stress hormones, so when the mind interprets a set of events as negative, the stress hormones get released,” McNamara explained.“And they function to recruit all kinds of chemicals to meet a threat. In the short term, these chemicals make you stronger and sharper and more vigilant. But in the long term, when the vigilant state becomes chronic, this leads to tissue damage and prolonged activation of the epinephrine system, which activates all of the parts of the body that are meant to meet a threat—the brain, the muscles—the hair, even. If you stay in vigilant state for too long, you’ll collapse sooner or later.”

When a person reaches “bottom”—if she is lucky—certain things begin to happen. The body may “up-regulate.” On the basis of meditation studies, some scientists speculate that when people “let go,” as Alicia did when she rested her head on the cool kitchen sink, that can set off a chain of events. The anxiety dissipates, leading to lower levels of stress hormones such as cortisol. The person feels less pain and fear, her breathing slows, and she experiences a sense of release and joy. This is associated with endorphins (natural opiates that the body produces), which are best known for the rush of good feeling called “runner’s high.” The sensation of happiness and euphoria is enhanced by an overall elevation of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. (Prozac, for example, works in the serotonin system to raise the bottom of depression.) Emotional release can also lead to a surge in a feel-good chemical called dopamine.
⁵

This goes some distance toward explaining the bodily mechanics of a conversion or a transforming moment. But does that mean that the “encounter” is nothing more than Alicia’s body readjusting itself to stress? Or did her body reflect the touch of “God,” of something spiritual, just as water forms ripples when touched by your finger? The answer to that question is not a matter of science—not yet at least—but of opinion, of what you believe about the nature of reality.

For people like me, this is not an academic question. After all, my own worldview changed dramatically, and it mattered to me whether I was touched by the Divine, or just plain deluding myself.Was that sensation of my heart warming no more spiritual than, say, the cold sweat a diabetic feels when his blood sugar dips?

These questions simmered in my mind for years, and in April 2006, I spotted an opportunity to answer them.While attending a conference on science and spiritual transformation at the University of California at Berkeley, I met two very smart and very sympathetic medical researchers. At the tail end of the conference, I asked to speak with them privately, and told them about my experience eleven years earlier when I had surrendered to God and felt my heart “warm.” They asked that I not identify them, because even tipping one’s hat to spiritual things can mar a career in science.

“Physiologically, what happened?” I asked them.

“Probably there was an increased blood flow to the heart, and that made it warm,” one explained.“There are two predominant systems that operate. There’s the parasympathetic system, which calms you down, and there’s a sympathetic system, which revs you up. And so what you’re describing, probably, is that the parasympathetic system kicked in.”

The researcher also theorized that a hormone called oxytocin might have been produced in the brain. Oxytocin is the chemical messenger that is produced when a mother is bonding with her newborn baby. And this hormone affects different organs—including, she speculated, the heart.

“I think she’s right on,” the other researcher said, nodding. He said that studies on primates, rabbits, and bulls suggest that oxytocin release is related to love, and some studies suggest it brings on an “oceanic,” sometimes mystical, feeling.

“I’d put my money on something that oxytocin is doing,” he said. He noted that in my own case, I had been strained with tensions over work, my boyfriend, and some problems with my physical health. Then an insight, a prayer, a moment of surrender, and the parasympathetic system took over, soothing and calming the body.

“We often underestimate the effects of just relaxing your muscles,” he said. “A good massage and suddenly,
Hey! The rest of my life is good!
And you probably had pretty powerful muscle relaxation.”

“But what does that mean?” the first researcher asked. “So there’s a physiological correlate of whatever is going on. So what? That still doesn’t explain it.”

Both researchers nodded, acknowledging a central tension in this line of inquiry: science may explain the
biology
of spiritual experience, but it cannot explain the experience away.

Neurologist Patrick McNamara warned me against pinpointing trauma as the primary trigger for spiritual experience.

“I agree that stress and distress and pain and suffering can certainly lead to spiritual experiences,” he said. “But in my experience, interviewing lots of people, and working with lots of different patient groups and reading the literature, I think the thing that consistently leads to spiritual experience is a concerted effort on behalf of the individual to grow in the spiritual life.”

He took a deep breath. “In other words, spirituality or religiosity is not simply a response to stress or brokenness or pain or suffering or joy, or any particular emotion. It can be a goal.”

This suggests another intriguing catalyst for spiritual experience, one that differs radically from gnawing stress and sudden pain. It is not a state but a journey. It is the search for meaning.

“The human creature is built to need a purpose in life,” observed psychologist Ray Paloutzian at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. “And if someone doesn’t have one, they’re going to invent one. And one of the ways that humans do this is by adopting a religious worldview, or some kind of spiritual approach to the world. If they don’t have it already—or if they’re not comfortable with the one they have—then, because it’s a need, they’re more prone to spiritual experience.”

You might think that spiritual experience should be in the same category as, say, fantasy football or learning Italian—a hobby to brighten one’s otherwise dull routine. Or you could conclude that spirituality is a mild psychosis that one develops to cope with reality. However you view it, one of the most powerful triggers for dramatic spiritual events is the desire for it, the kind of search that keeps one up at night, wondering about the universe.

When I began this book, I instinctively knew that my search would reveal a multifaceted “Other,” one perhaps more defensible than a list of attributes I memorized somewhere in my Judeo-Christian upbringing: God is love and spirit, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, to name only a few. It took no more than a few weeks investigating spirituality to stumble upon three surprising characteristics of this “Other” not found in any catechism: God as master craftsman, God as chemist, and God as electrician. The next leg of this journey, then, leads through the hard, sometimes reductionist, science, which in my opinion does not dismiss the notion of God but informs it.