God as the voice in our heads

Part 4: Creating and nurturing the voice of God

At last we turn to my core point – which I will then use the idea of daemons to illustrate.

As a religious person, I believe that God is real, that I have met him, and that he talks to me. It is an absolutely crucial distinction for me to differentiate between what I consider to be “the voice of God in my head” and what I consider to be “me talking to myself in my own head”.

I think the idea of us having many voices in our head is well understood, and we accept that these voices are real. Please note: I am not in any way referring to those who suffer from mental illnesses and who consider themselves to hear “voices” telling them to do things. For everyone else, apart from the person suffering from these voices, it is clear that these voices are false – they are delusions that the person is experiencing, and healing would be represented by the person either not hearing them anymore, or at least understanding that they are “not real” and so ignoring them. However, the voices that we all readily accept that we hear in our heads are not like this.

So, we are well aware of the situation where we are having a conversation in our heads and we are presenting different points of view to ourselves, ready for us to make a judgement: perhaps I should do this – or, then again, perhaps I should do that. I consider that this is an inescapable way that our minds work, and it is entirely positive and helpful.

I think we also readily understand the person who says, “I have never really escaped the voice of my father expressing his disapproval of me”. In this case, the father’s oppressive personality has “taken up residence” in the person’s mind and become a permanent, negative reality. It is not – hopefully – an omnipotent voice that brooks no rivals, but we can see that a person might have to strive hard to overcome this negative effect by paying more attention to the more positive voices that they can discover within themselves. On the other hand, “an inherited voice” might be entirely positive, and we readily understand the person who says, “Whenever I’m feeling down, I just imagine my grandmother saying, “Come along now; it’s not that bad; you’ll find a way through”.

I believe – and this is of vital importance to me, though I do recognise that I could be mistaken – that I can tell the difference between me talking to myself and God talking to me. Quite how I do that is not very easy to say. Sometimes it is – sometimes I can spot the difference between the voice suggesting one course of action that appears entirely plausible to be God’s voice – until I spot the self-serving trick hidden within it that I missed initially, whereas the voice of God will always be speaking in tones of the utmost goodness, truth and love. However, I don’t say that it is impossible for people to find and pursue the path that is completely good, true and loving on their own – I think that we can do that without God. So, it is not just about the quality of what the voices say that enables me to differentiate between them, where the “truly good” must be God, but anything even a bit substandard must be “just me”. It’s rather that, over the years, I have learnt that it’s “that voice” which is God’s. It’s not like this, but trying an illustration to try and throw light on it, it’s not as though I have developed 5 key voices that I listen to, and each one can be imagined as speaking to me through a loudspeaker – and God’s loudspeaker is the second from the left. Rather, in the same way that we instantly know the voice of people whom we love, even if we have no sight of them, so I consider that I have learnt to recognise the voice of God when he speaks to me. To stick with the human analogy, there is something in the tone and rhythm of the voice that instantly tells us who it is. If someone did try and fool us by getting a brilliant impressionist to mimic our loved one’s voice, before long they would say something that would have us thinking, “Hold on, my loved one doesn’t speak to me like that; that’s something she would never say”. So, when I hear God’s voice speaking to me, this voice is true to the person that I have met and been in relationship with for over 50 years. There has been constant continuity in this relationship, and, built up layer upon layer over the years, I have learnt to know and trust this voice.

 I could never be fooled – in terms of if for some reason I suddenly thought this voice was telling me to do something bad. In that case, I would consider that perhaps I am developing a mental illness. However, the bigger question remains: what if I have been fooled in terms of making the mistake of thinking that this well-known and deeply-loved voice is the voice of God when, in reality it is something else – that is, that it’s one of my personal voices within my own head?

Having considered this very carefully, I have come to two conclusions:-

1. It is impossible to know for sure.
2. It doesn’t matter!

These might seem disconcerting and surprising conclusions, but I’ve decided that, “It isn’t a problem”.

Firstly, it just isn’t possible. It is not possible to look inside our own minds in order to “go behind” our minds, or to “peep behind the curtain”. Our minds look outwards – even when we are looking around at the different voices in our own minds. We have our point of view and our will power to make decisions and perform actions. These might result from quite a complex inner conversation, but eventually we make a decision and the “dominant voice” in our head (at that moment) takes charge and does what they want to do. We cannot “turn our minds around” to investigate, “Now what exactly was the cause of that decision? Come out now; own up. I want to examine the voice responsible for what I’ve just done”. So, I have learnt throughout my lifetime to discern the difference between what I believe to be the voice of God says and what the other voices in my head say. However, I can never extract that voice to examine what precisely it is. It is a possibility that this “voice of God” is in fact one of my own voices that I created so long ago it’s lost in the mist of time, and I have nurtured it over the years so that it has now “taken on a life of its own” (just like all the other voices in my head have). I recognise this voice, just as I explain above, just as I recognise all the voices in my head, it’s just that I’ve made a mistake in thinking that it’s God’s voice when really I should call it “My voice number 6, started to come into being 1971”. This voice has developed its own character, and I cannot tell the difference between the character of “My voice number 6, started to come into being 1971” and the voice of what I would consider to be the voice of God.

How might this have happened?

Quite easily actually. And certainly readily understandable. For over 50 years, I have paid close attention to listening to this voice. I have also paid close attention to nurturing it. Every day, as I mull over the multiplicity of things in my mind, I continually pose myself the question, “What does God think about this?”. I then pay attention to this distinctive voice which, as I’ve said earlier, I’ve learnt to recognise and distinguish from other voices that I might regard as “my own” voices (eg what does my selfish self-interest say?) or from the voices of what I think society might say about this. So, I’ve nurtured and prioritized this voice for 50 years. I’ve also nurtured it in terms of continually feeding it, to reinforce its character. So, I go to church, I read bible stories, I sing hymns, I say my prayers, I meet with other Christians. I return to the same readings and hymns over and over again, so that, year after year, I lay down new layers of richness in the meanings that my beliefs have. So, when the voice of God speaks to me, it’s with an overwhelming depth of richness – and this becomes another way of distinguishing his voice. Is the voice speaking to me with the tinny isolation of a single triangle or with the rich depth of a full orchestra?

Thus, I have a perfectly rational explanation for how the voice of God has appeared in my head. Please note: it’s vital to remember that in my own understanding, this voice of God exists because I met God and he started speaking to me. However, within a secularist’s worldview, we have a ready way of understanding how and why I “hear God’s voice”. I can never know for sure because I cannot prove it, whether this voice is the voice of God or whether it’s my “voice number 6”.

Remarkably, it doesn’t matter! Even though for me earlier in my life, as for countless believers through the ages, it has appeared to be of the most utmost importance, with a wrong answer leading to the abandonment of faith, I now consider that it doesn’t matter.

If – in practice – and this is crucial – I cannot tell the difference between “the voice of God” and “my voice number 6”, that is, I cannot tell the difference in terms of their origin, and even more importantly, I cannot tell the difference in terms of their character, then “my voice number 6” and “the voice of God” are one and the same! If God truly, really does exist and does speak to us, then his voice is the same as my voice number 6, and whatever my voice number 6 says is what God would say – if such a person exists.

This strikes me as an utterly stunning conclusion. It raises the question that – as the voice of God is always utterly good, true and loving – and anyone and everyone can freely choose to adopt listening to this voice, why would anyone choose not to? Thus, surely, there is no case for secular atheism and everyone should become a believer in God. This is because this “voice of God” is both true and real – it clearly does exist; it is true to say that we can hear the voice of God talking to us. If anyone is still doubtful about this and thinks that I must be pulling an intellectual fast one on you, then the reason for all to believe is because of the immensely beneficial effect. The voice of God is always completely good, true and loving. Whereas perhaps previously secularists might say, “I would like to believe in God if only I knew for sure that he is real”, now we can say that his voice of God in our heads is definitely a reality, and it speaks the truth, so why should we not all follow it?

We must immediately confront the key challenge: some people believe that God is telling them to do dreadful things. Some of these people are simply mentally ill, perhaps in the example of those who feel that God is telling them to murder people. Much, much more common are those who have adopted a corrupt God and who therefore believe that God is telling them to do dreadful things – as, for example, in the case of Islamic State. It is simply a true comment on reality that there is nothing so intrinsically good that it cannot be corrupted – just as, by faith, we hold that there is no-one no matter how corrupted who cannot be redeemed. There is no easy way out of this dilemma, for my argument rests on the claim that I have learnt to know and love this voice, and it always speaks words of goodness, truth and love. If a corrupt believer believes that it is God who is telling them to do things that we humans (in general, that is, non-corrupt people, but we’re still not out of the dilemma) regard as evil, lies and hateful, then we have to vote with what we regard as goodness, truth and love – that is, we judge God, in that we decide that what God was believed to be saying cannot, in fact, be God because it is not good. Of course, corrupt believers think that “evil” is “good” and “good” is “evil”. There is no easy way out of this dilemma. We simply have to learn to know which voice we trust and which we don’t. A tiny comfort is that this dilemma is equally one that secularists face. And, in practice, the vast majority of religious people find that God’s voice is a beneficent one. Plus I return to say, humankind must reserve the right to judge what religious people say God is telling them.

Here though we have my central claim. If we are ready to accept the idea of having a variety of voices in our heads, then I want to promote my idea of creating and nurturing the voice of God inside our heads. Of course, I hope I am right in saying the voice of God is there because I have met God, but if I am wrong then we have it in our power to create God – that is to create the voice of God in our heads. This voice ALWAYS says what is good, true and loving.

The final vital point to make is that IF this voice is mine, rather than the voice of God, it is still independent of me, and acts – or appears to me to act – as the voice of a personal agent over whom I have no control. To repeat, I think the easiest way to understand this is to say that I met God and he started talking to me. However, even if we say that it is I who created God – that is, the voice of God in my head – then I find an analogy with the Big Bang to be helpful. My understanding is that the Big Bang happened because prior conditions meant that the potential for the universe to exist became actual when the forces at work became sufficient for the universe to explode into life. In a similar way, the appeal of the knowledge about God and the experience of a life of faith that I was acquiring in my youth kept growing and growing until it acquired “a critical mass”, and the voice of God burst into life and became a reality for me – that is, the voice of God acquired its own voice in my mind. Before that moment I could say that I knew about God – now I would say that I know God. In practice, I cannot make this voice of God say what I want it to say – God says what he wants to say. And this voice says exactly what God says, or, if God does not exist as an independent personal agent, it says exactly what God would say if he did exist. As a certainty, in the form of the voice in my head, he does exist. As I cannot tell the difference between God as an independent agent and God as a voice in my head, it seems entirely reasonable to have an immense confidence that God does exist – and so to enjoy my relationship with him.

God as the voice in our heads

Part 3: My final defence of religion

While we are still on “preliminary matters” before – finally! – getting onto the subject matter of this article, I would like to mention what I consider to be my final defence of religion. Throughout my life, during times of doubt, it has been possible that I would abandon faith. This would never have been in terms of “falling out of love” with God – he has never lost his appeal for me. Rather it would be the possibility that I would decide, “Oh no! I’ve got it all terribly wrong!”. I might have made an intellectual decision that I am mistaken believing in God. Simple honesty and integrity would require me to “see through” the mistakes that I made in my youth and admit that the case for God’s existence is too weak to uphold any longer.

Through my introduction to the wonderful world of philosophy, I believe that I have found a truly impregnable position. It involves “moving to the anti-realist side of the board”. As a teacher of philosophy of religion, I would keep returning my students to “the 8 key words” that in themselves provide a key framework for understanding the philosophy of religion. They are as follows:-

Realist                                                                                Anti-realist

Correspondence (theory of truth)                     Coherence (theory of truth)

Cognitive                                                                          Non-cognitive

Verifiable                                                                          Non-verifiable

The 4 terms on the left work together, supporting each other, as do the 4 terms on the right, and each pair of terms are opposites. Popular demand might force me to go into the 8 terms in detail, but my particular point here is the question of whether “moving to the right hand” anti-realist side is the final, impregnable defence for God or “the last nail in his coffin”? Briefly, a realist statement is one which is intended to be actually true in reality. So, if I say, “God loves me” in a realist sense, I mean that there really is a God – as an actual, independent being -and he truly does love me. If I say it in an anti-realist way, I am saying that in my personal subjective belief system I have made a commitment to believing in God. Ultimately, it doesn’t actually matter whether there is “really” a God or not, because God “really does” exist for me because the idea of the person of God who exists and who loves me is an idea that has supreme significance for me. Thus, in my consciousness, God is a real being. Whereas for the realist it is of vital importance that they believe that the God in their consciousness corresponds to an actual God who exists outside of their consciousness, for the anti-realist this is not important because the key point is that this “figure of God” is important to me. Thus, no doubts about whether God exists outside of the person can ever assail the anti-realist, because this point simply isn’t important to them. The anti-realist inhabits an enclosed world where, provided the different bits of their belief system fit together successfully (that is, they cohere in the coherence theory of truth), then it is a “true” belief system, simply because it is believed to be true.

So, is this the final impregnable defence of religion in that your beliefs can never be undermined? Or is it the final nail in God’s coffin because you have only achieved this intellectual safety by abandoning belief in God, as he has always previously been understood, as an independent agent? Adopting an anti-realist belief system is, in fact, an excellent example of adopting beliefs within a framework of understanding, but, while all beliefs exist within a particular framework of understanding, those beliefs that depend on an anti-realist understanding of them, make no appeal to corresponding to any external reality. Thus, it is very important for my task in writing my blog that I do not retreat into anti-realism. My whole point is to NOT simply make religious claims – such as, “God loves you”, and call on people to accept this as an act of faith – this is calling on people to simply have a conversion experience from the secular to the religious worldview. Instead, I call on secularists to work within their own worldview, but to make connections between what they already clearly see is real, with what I am now claiming is real within the religious sphere – but secularists can see that these religious elements already exist within the world as they know it to be.

My aim to give people the freedom to accept and embrace their religious experience. Perhaps, previously, secularists felt unable to acknowledge the full range of their experiences or to accept their importance because – within their secular framework of understanding – this would mean abandoning their entire way of thinking. We must accept that this is as precious to secularists as their own framework is to religious people. Just as it is an awesome thing for a secularist to convert to become a religious person, and painful for a religious person to give up their faith, so we must accept that it is painful for a secularist to give up their secular framework of understanding the world. Thus, conversion, one way or the other, requires an enormous weight of substantive content to persuade a person to “switch sides”. I am hopeful that if I introduce religious ideas that make sense within the secularist’s framework, then it becomes easier for them to accept and so grow towards God. A conversion is still required! At some point, a person will find that they have adopted so many aspects of the religious worldview that it’s not entirely clear which side they do now stand on – until, perhaps, they come to the self-realisation that they have moved into God’s kingdom. It’s possible that they didn’t even realise when they crossed the border, but now something has happened and they realise that they have made a commitment to follow the Lord. Let there be no doubt, this still entails an act of faith. It is not possible to prove God’s reality, so faith is always going to be required. However, whereas perhaps before, the secularist understood faith in negative terms as an abandonment of reason and a retreat from reality, now, as a person of faith, they see that God is the ultimate reality and a life of faith is the most fulfilling way of life there is.

God as the voice in our heads

Part 2: The importance of the framework of understanding

I am very keen on analysing this, because I believe that it is vital for making sense of anything and everything. However, although everyone has a framework of understanding – this is inescapable – I think it’s likely that a very large proportion of people have never considered the matter, precisely because we usually take our framework for granted. It consists of ways of looking at the world and understanding reality, using absolutely core ways of thinking, principles and values that are so basic to our way of thinking, and which we adopted so long ago and have used ever since, that we simply have no awareness that we are using them. They are our classic assumptions that we have taken for granted. We regard them as so obvious, such basic building blocks of our thinking, that we do not think about them, find it hard to believe that anyone else could possibly see things differently, and are horrified when we find people who disagree with us because we literally cannot understand how anyone could possibly see things differently. How can they possibly be so stupid and/or biased? We find it offensive to be challenged in this way, for it seems to us that other people are saying “up” is “down” and “right” is “wrong”.

This is not simply about people disagreeing with each other. People have always done that, and very angrily and passionately too. It’s a more fundamental issue about how we see things, about the way we look at the world. Perhaps an example from politics will help. I think this is a readily understandable example because we don’t have to dig very deep to uncover the framework ideas, and for those who are politically astute, they may be well aware of the theoretical background in which their political policies are set. However, I hope a simple example will help us to see the point – and then we can appreciate that there are basic assumptions hidden more and more deeply.

So right-wingers and left-wingers always disagree about how high taxes and government spending should be, with right-wingers saying both need to be low to encourage business and although they’d like to spend more on the poor we can’t afford it, while left wingers want them both to be high because their focus is on helping the poor and they believe there’s lots of money to spend if only the rich paid the right amount of tax. Both sides may be unaware that these political arguments are supported by “hidden” framework ideas. So, right-wingers will have picked up from experience that government interference in the economy often makes things worse and so government needs to be kept small to allow the power of free markets to generate wealth to flourish – especially as government spending is often inefficient. In contrast, left-wingers see free markets as either bad, or, at least, a necessary evil to generate wealth, but they see government intervention as good – governments intervene to put right the injustices that free markets produce; government spending might be wasteful but all spending is good because you’re giving poor people money they wouldn’t otherwise have.

The idea of our framework of understanding goes even deeper than this, and we can bring in Wittgenstein’s idea of “language games” to help us. This is the crucial idea that words (and the ideas that they represent) get their meaning from the way in which they are used – Wittgenstein called this “the game” in which they are used. So, for example, a football team which had 5 “tries” but only scored 2 “goals” will lose against a team that had 3 tries and scored 3 goals. However, a rugby union team that had 5 tries and scored 2 goals has got 31 points, and has beaten the side who had 2 tries and 5 goals because they have only got 25 points. This is because the words “try” and “goal” have different meanings in football and rugby. This rather easy example alerts us to the fundamental point that the things we say get their meaning from the mental framework in which we use them.

If we turn to the world of religion and its utter contrast to the secular way of looking at the world, we can see why the two parties are simply arguing at cross-purposes. And this is why I try to argue from within the secular mental framework, trying to use ideas that they accept as valid ideas – even if initially they don’t agree with the religious points that I am promoting.

So, as a religious person, I believe that reality is made up of two parts: the physical universe, but also the metaphysical realm. In the metaphysical realm we might find entities like God, the soul and heaven. This is my basic framework of understanding – I walk through life with this point of view, and so I take it as a simple truth that I might have an encounter with God; I might not, but it is a possibility. You might think that this all sounds rather dry and theoretical, but not a bit of it, for the practical upshot of having this outlook is utterly transformative. So, when I wake up in the morning, as soon as I turn my attention to the fact that I believe that God is a reality and that he loves me, then I may well – and this often happens – experience a sense of God’s love enfolding me. It is, as it were, that the moment I remind myself of my basic understanding of my life, that I am opened up to the experience of all the good things that I believe about God and about my relationship with him. I don’t consider that this is wish-fulfilment or mind over matter. I am not conjuring out of nothing something that does not exist. Rather, because of my beliefs in what constitutes the sum total of reality, which includes the person of God, so meeting with him becomes a possibility. As I’ve said before, I cannot control this, because, in my view, God is not a creation of my own mind, he is an independent person. However, my framework of understanding sets out the parameters of what is and isn’t possible. In a most wonderful way, the very act of turning my attention to God, generates or “sparks into life” the very reality that I believe in.

Hence, we immediately see that the secularist’s dismissal of the reality of God closes down the possibility of meeting with God. As a believer, I consider that God does have the ability to “break into” a secularist’s consciousness, but, generally speaking, except in emergencies as it were, God does not force himself onto us, but “hovers” waiting to be invited in. Very often, secularists will have experiences that put them “on the brink” of meeting with God – circumstances have led them to a point where the gulf that usually separates them has grown thin, and then God and the person might “bump into each other” on the boundary between secular and religious ways of understanding the world. And then conversion, or a journey potentially leading to conversion might begin. However, very often, events and experiences that would have me dropping to my knees in adoration, because I quickly perceive the presence of God in this moment, are simply missed by the secularist, because the experience does not fit into any of their ways of interpreting the experience.

So, there is no point talking to secularists about God’s love for them, because in my framework, what I mean is that a person – God, who is different to and external to me, and who dwells in a metaphysical world of the spirit, which world also overlaps with our physical world, is reaching out to me to bestow his love upon me. However, the secular person simply “cannot compute” this because for them there is no God, no spiritual world, no spiritual entity who loves them.

I must just say that I don’t deny for a moment that secular atheists fall in love, are moved to tears by the beauty of nature and music, that they love their friends, their country and their football team. All these qualities of personhood can rightly be called “metaphysical” because they are intangible qualities. However, secular people will understand these things to be aspects of the physical world in that they are outcomes of the ways our mind works. However, they do not believe in the metaphysical realm that I believe in as a religious person.

(A theological reflection in 5 parts. Sections are somewhat longer than usual as there is quite a lot to say, and I hope it may be easier to grasp if I give a considerable chunk at one time, where readers can take on a coherent argument in one go. Please bear with me on part 4, as this is very long, but it is my core idea. There are a few key issues to deal with in preparation for the main argument, and I regard this article as expressing what I think is the very heart of my blog. I will finish by adding an analogy using Philip Pullman’s idea of daemons, which may possibly illuminate my point, but it is not essential to the argument and so please ignore it if it gets in the way)

God as the voice in our heads

Part 1: Moving onto the secular side of the argument

My personal journey of faith has led me to move onto the secular side of the argument. I became a Christian in my early teens under the influence of the very strong religious experiences I had, by which I came to be in relationship with God. My faith has brought me immense joy, insight and comfort. However, like many Christians, there have been periods of doubt, sufficiently severe that I could easily have given up my belief in God. However, I battled through these periods, and by the time of my 50s I found myself in a position where I understood my faith to be invulnerable to attack. This was because I could not imagine anyone saying anything that might threaten or undermine my faith that I had not already considered myself. Thus, as I entered into retirement, I found myself completely happy in my faith. I can only imagine that I will continue in this contentment, and that I will find a church to attend until the day I die. Therefore, “I am alright”. I need do nothing except to enjoy my faith – this wonderful relationship that God has graciously entered into with me.

However, as my faith is so important to me, I dearly want to share it with others, so that they can gain this same satisfaction. Yet I cannot help noticing that Britain has voted with its feet and we are now an overwhelmingly secular country. So, what am I to do? I realise that if I try to promote faith from within my religious understanding of life I will probably get nowhere, because secular atheists have completely rejected my world view. (I don’t take this personally: I have rejected theirs). However, I am intensely interested in the battle for hearts and minds, and it is clear that Christians in the UK are losing, and I would like to try and do something to redress the balance while I am still around to do anything. So, while I am entirely happy with the religious interpretation of the world, and could quite happily inhabit that world for the rest of my days, I have decided to leave religious people happily living their religious lives while I go in search of winning over some secularists to faith in God. To do this, I have moved my reasoning into the secular sphere, and attempt to explain my faith in terms that secularists understand and accept. This is because – for most secularists – there is no point appealing to them in religious terms – for they have rejected the entire package of religious understanding. So, if I appeal to them that, “God loves them”, and “Jesus has died to take away their sins”, it is all simply water of a duck’s back – it makes no connection whatsoever. If they have rejected God and believe that he simply does not exist, then God does not love them – because there is no God. They may accept that there was a man called Jesus; they may conclude that he was a very nice man – kind and loving, a good role model even – but they cannot accept Jesus’ status as having anything to do with God – who is not real – and so whatever Jesus did in his life it can have no effect on them – whether to redeem them from sin or anything else. As there is no metaphysical world – only the material universe – then there can be no religious transactions of any significance.

So, religious appeals tend to be at cross purposes with secularists’ way of understanding and looking at the world. Therefore, I am attempting to “translate” what religious ideas mean in the religious sphere into what they might mean in the secular sphere. In this way, my hope is that secular people will be able to make sense of these ideas and appreciate their appeal. If these ideas actually mean something in the secular sphere, then there is opportunity for secularists to value them, adopt them into their own lives, and then this might lead to them “transferring” their own worldview into the religious sphere. They would not have to completely “convert” to the religious world – as people still do do today, when an atheist turns to God and comes to faith. Instead, they would be adopting a new form of religion, that is thoroughly, genuinely religious, but which operates effectively in the secular sphere. It is my firm conviction that this “new form” of Christianity is completely in tune with traditional Christian faith. Of course, I would be perfectly happy if a secular person does do “the whole conversion” and find themselves in the religious sphere as traditionally understood. However, my particular aim is to see if I can clear the ground so that those with a secular understanding of reality can adopt a religious way of life that will bring them complete fulfilment – along with all joy, peace and love, meaning and fulfilment. Though language and concepts may vary a little from traditional faith, it will be immediately clear that this adoption of faith is real faith, and that those who adopt it are now in relationship with God.

Be thankful. Beloved. A song of incarnation.

Why should I feel loved? Why be thankful to be alive?

Religious people always go on about the love of God – but what if you have never experienced this, or don’t believe in God? I believe we can find joy and peace and love within our experience, just because we are human.

To be able to be.

This is the beginning of thankfulness.

I have the space within myself to be quiet.

In my inmost reflections I discover a capability to think deeply, to weigh up and to value.

When I do not allow the turmoil of distractions to rush at me from the external world and occupy my mind and unsettle my heart, I discover tranquillity, a pool of stillness, that is simply there. It is the greatest discovery of life – a reservoir of calm refreshment, unfathomably deep. Even the terrible anxiety of my frail and fearful humanity cannot taint the purity of the profound truth that wells up from this pool – I do not know what to call it. Names come with baggage and baggage that is unhelpful simply needs to be discarded – heaved off by an effort of faith and will. Is it my soul? Or God? I will let you decide. Perhaps something else. I really do not think it matters what we call it; it is there.

Perhaps you have not yet found this pool, in which case such words of mine can infuriate and hurt, though they are intended to point forward with hope. What I am trying to do is suggest that there is cause for great joy and peace – and hope, regardless of what you believe, or have experienced in life, simply because of how things are. That is, because of how you are. If you have not found this pool yet, or not realised how precious it is, that does not mean it is not there. It is always there; it cannot not be there – because this is who we are and how we are.

It is our very ability to look inwardly and reflect that is the guarantee that this reservoir of goodness is there – rather, that it is here at the very heart of you. Perhaps this again rouses anger: “How can you know what I have experienced in life in order for you to declare that there is something so positive and good and hopeful at the very centre of me?”.

It’s because our inner judgement is not simply a balance – think of those old-fashioned scales held by a figure of justice. So, we are not completely dependent on our experience – as though only if we are healthy and wealthy and have enjoyed a good life, or if we have a natural propensity to feel the presence of God, can we expect to find a pool of goodness at our heart – while those whose lives are blighted by war and poverty and hate must inexorably be led to drink from a pool of bitterness that has come to fill their heart.  It is not like this. We do have a balance within us to judge fairly what to do in the world, and that is vitally important. But with our inner judgement on ourselves, our balance has been tipped to the positive in the act of creation. For, within us, we have the ability to choose. We are not prisoners of our circumstances or our experience. Even though it is our ability to choose that is so often the cause of our despair, when we have chosen badly, yet the ability to choose is supremely beneficial. It is what gives us freedom and power. And when we choose to use those gifts to sit quietly with ourselves, we discover that the material of which we are made has a grain within it – like the grain of a piece of wood – and our grain tends towards the good.

Of course, this inner goodness is not invincible or incorruptible – many people are corrupt. But our natural goodness has to be distorted before corruption becomes our settled state. Perhaps if a person experienced nothing but suffering and injustice, we must expect it is likely that their inner nature will be atrociously damaged, but I think corruption does not take charge of a person’s life unless they willingly take it on board. Otherwise, the resilience of our goodness is truly a wonder to behold.

So, we sit quietly with ourselves, and we discover the freedom to choose, and so this raises the question, “What do I want?”. Immediately, our sense of direction bursts into life, and we realise we have a goal, and so a mission. There is something important for each one of us to do. And we have the freedom and power to decide what that is. Yes, it is true that so many of us find ourselves in terribly constrained situations where the desire of our heart is to all practical concerns hopelessly out of reach. Yet we still have a desire in our heart. Even if we are always frustrated in our aims, we are never impoverished, for we have this most precious desire within us. And this fuels our hope and our energy and our actions. We are never powerless because we always have this inner freedom. And nearly everyone of us finds some ways to express our desires. We use our freedom and power to create something good.

As we consider ourselves, we cannot escape the reality of others. To have desires and goals, to seek to act, inevitably brings us into contact with the other. So, the other dimension of our thankfulness is that we are not alone. Counter-intuitively, though our core inner experience is of the profound stillness of being alone at our deep pool, where only we can visit, and which gives us our essential view of ourselves, it is not aloneness that governs our lives. The supreme task of our existence is to meet the other, and to love them. All our desires, our goals, our striving, cause us to reach out beyond ourselves to encounter others and to learn to treat them as people like ourselves. To realise that each one has their own pool, ineffably precious to them. A pool where all their hurts and wounds are washed clean, just like we wash our own. A pool where treasures glitter to delight the heart and mind, which they pull up to show to us, as we seek to find something precious within ourselves to share with them.

I would like to say that the ultimate satisfaction is to invite an other to meet us at our own pool – but I don’t think that is possible. There is something about the way we are made which means that only we have access to that private place where we speak to ourselves beyond the veil. Yet this does not diminish, but enhances, the wonder that when hands touch in the world, so also hearts touch, and a draught of the other’s pool is poured into our own, and ours into theirs. This is the glory of being alive, to be able to share with others our unique self, and to treasure more than our own life what others have shared with us.

There is one exception. No-one can stand beside us at the pool where we are most truly ourselves, except for the one who was there at the very beginning of existence, and who is responsible for our existence, and, most of all, who is responsible for the grain within us that points to goodness. Perhaps you feel that I am suddenly cheating: I said that I would try and explain why we should feel loved and be thankful just from the facts of our existence, without bringing in any other thoughts. And now I have sneaked in God as though that were my aim all along. But remember, we are not bothering about names and ideas, only what we experience. I do not care whether it is God or something else, I am only trying to describe what we can discover within our own experience. The self is there – here within us.  We have been using the image of a pool to try and help us to think about it. I claim – and I think your own experience declares that it is true – that this pool has a character, a nature – one that is supremely personal to the individual that each one of us is, but with a nature that is ingrained with goodness – it is simply how we are. Or if you are still sceptical or even too pessimistic, it is simply that we choose – or at least that we have the capability to choose – goodness. This is the basis of our freedom, our power, our hope, our satisfaction and our achievement.

So, the greatest – nearly – gift in life is to discover our own pool, and to learn to visit it, and to delight in what we find in it. But when we sit quietly, all alone, discovering what we might find within, there is something even more, for we also discover the presence of the other. Not the other as when we were thinking about meeting other people – people whom we experience within the material world. There is “another other” whom we experience within the intimate privacy of ourselves. I claimed that no-one else could visit us there, and now I contradict myself. But not quite. Perhaps there is still no-one there, and we are still alone within the utterly private confines of our own person. Except that, like an echo in a cavern, we hear our own words coming back at us, but now no longer simply our words, but the words of this other other, who now speaks to us in what could – and perhaps we thought, should – be entirely our own domain. What would otherwise be entirely private has been entered by this other – except that it seems to us that this other was there before we were. Either way, the most profound discovery is that we are not alone – not even when to all observation we are. And this other loves us. The echo of our words is transformed into something entirely pure and good, and truthful and lovely. And we enter into a relationship with the other who is translating our words, whether good or bad, into an impetus to goodness and compassion.

Personally, I think that there is enough in the first part of what we have been thinking about to justify our thankfulness. But when we also consider the reality of what is there to be discovered: that there is a love at the heart of us that has no dependence on what is happening in the outside world, then truly there is cause for joy beyond measure.

So, I call this a song of incarnation. We are alive! And because we are alive we are thankful, and joyful and we know a profound love, here at the very centre of us, where no-one can come except ourselves – except ourselves and this other. So, if we are willing, our life is a communion of love between ourselves and the other.