love's location

An awareness of stuff I can't perceive is what I think comprises belief, or faith. It's not manufacturing an idea; it is based on an arrival and confrontation: the moment when something happens that I continue not to be able to explain away, even though I may test and compare and contrast and wish it would evaporate. Long ago as a Protestant I journaled, "Real stuff stays." My own academic, scientific statement.

This doesn't mean I can't be mistaken. It's just very compelling. My life turns (or lurches, in trepidatious moments) toward that which I can't escape and which I therefore believe.

Before her birth, my daughter was lifted temporarily outside my body, within my uterus, during a surgery to save my life after an intestinal block threatened both of us. Of course my daughter can't remember our first shared adventure—I didn't see it, either; I just take my mom's word, who spoke with the surgeon. But I know I was in a bad state before the doctors decided they'd operate on this six-months-pregnant person. And I reflect on Victoria's nearness, in that operating theater, to the reality she couldn't yet perceive but that existed all around her.

Three months after my surgery, Victoria exited the birth canal to experience the stuff she couldn't previously perceive but had been in closer contact with on the day of my surgery. Life "out here" had been affecting her all the time; she'd been a part of it without understanding. There's no way to know if she believed she had been in a situation portending more to come; she can't remember, because there was no language into which to put her perceptions. She was from the land of the womb, entering the foreign realm of the world. All was overturned. Adjustments abounded.

In the world's realm, perhaps especially in our cultural day, I possess little to no understanding of what I can't perceive with my senses. Authorities tell me there is nothing real that is invisible. Yet I note that I myself am both visible and invisible--there are aspects of me that can't be accessed by the senses, and when I die, those aspects will no longer exist in the world. This part of me will exit via the canal of death.

If death is final, of course, this invisible me will simply evaporate, absorbed by...something? The atmosphere? I have attended memorial, wake-type services where people talked about the whole person who had died. We didn't make any distinctions regarding the visible and invisible aspects of the person. We helped ourselves to cheese and salami while remembering them. It was fine, but for me deeply unsatisfying.

On the other hand, I've attended memorial services where people spoke as if the deceased were visibly and invisibly whole and running around heaven. And yet the visible part of them had been disposed of. What did and does this mean?

Platonists of old considered the invisible parts of a person to be better than the visible. They believed in a great god of the air who made immaterial stuff well, plus a demigod who messed up in making material stuff, and therefore we experience "all the bad feels," the terrible things of the world's realm some of us know extra well.

There have been many theories. My final Protestant belief was that I was created by God, but that God does not and cannot enter the realm wherein I live (though he can write himself into things, as a character—a burning bush, a savior, and so on). Ontologically speaking, God is real, and I am a character in a book or a player in a performance art piece—a tragic tale, important for some mysterious reason but only as real to God as a good story is to me. I believed this artwork had been in process a long while and would continue into the future after my death, but I had no idea why.

The Orthodox Christian view is that God, who is invisible, created all that is accessible by our senses—visible stuff, including our visible aspects—and that God prepared history for his entrance into the sense-accessible, the visible stuff. This is what's meant by the Incarnation. The reason for this has always been rooted in Love. God is Love. His creation is meant to love and to be loved. I was made to turn irresistibly toward God. As one Orthodox elder, Saint Porphyrios, said, "I have run to the fragrance of your myrrh, O Christ God, for I have been wounded by your love; do not part from me, O heavenly Bridegroom."

Yet the irresistible, the Lovely, can be resisted, because I am free. I can pull away (and I often do). What I do not want to do, sadly, I find myself doing. What I understand as sin is the state of the whole me moving away from Love. As a human being, I first do this inwardly, in my invisible aspect, but later it happens with my visible self. You see the flash of anger in my gaze and feel the sting of my words, while hearing the door slam behind me.

Where Love locates is meant to be within me—the invisible pouring forth visible, an overflow of sweet-scented myrrh. I pray and go to church in order to discover again the arrival and confrontation of Love in Reality. In many ways the invisible God has provided Traditions, the reasonable processes delivered and received from the beginning, to help any who wish to cease resisting and draw near to the visible God-man, Jesus. He still says, "Without me you can do nothing." His mercy is the only way I can imagine to face the coming departure from this realm, navigating an unperceived canal into the shining invisible.