A Theory of Everything

No, this post isn't about Stephen Hawking or the biopic about him. (Although it is a wonderful film. See it if you haven't! Eddie Redmayne fully deserved his Best Actor Oscar.) Rather this post is an attempt to unpack a worldview, to make some sense out of nearly fifty years on this earth. Or rather, it's a starting point. To fully discuss my theory of everything would take hours of discussion, and likely an adult beverage or two!

When people ask me if I believe in God, I will say yes. If they ask if I am spiritual, my answer is unequivocal. When asked if I am a Christian, however, I cannot answer so quickly. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it depends what the definition of "Christian" is. I would guess that by some of the more dogmatically religious, my Christianity would be in question. I certainly don't mean to offend anyone who more readily identifies as Christian, but I don't think I fit neatly into that camp. I don't claim to have arrived at any high level of spirituality, but I have been through some stuff.

The big thing for me is that we can have these ideas, these notions about God, spirituality, etc. It's actually good to have such notions as a starting point. But at some point, life happens. Our pre-conceived ideas come smack up against reality. And then one of a few things happens. The first–and sadly all too common–response is blindness. We don't–or won't–see things as they are. We just fail to realize or acknowledge that there is any kind of incongruity between our mental blueprint for how things should work and how they actually do. A second possibility is that we see the disconnect, but we try to fit reality into our idea box. It's the old image of trying to pound a square peg into a round whole. "See, it fits!" we proclaim, as the peg sits askew and both it and the whole are splintered. In both these cases, we go through life so out of touch with the world and people in it that no one wants to be around us. And we don't want to be around anyone else either, at least not as they really are. We only engage with people on a superficial and mostly unrealistic level.

When we honestly and truthfully see the discrepancy between our preconceptions and real life, we must consider altering our ideas. It's rather like the scientific method. Here's a very simple example: I have a theory that 20 percent of all cars in a parking lot are blue, so I count the total number of cars and the number that are blue. Turns out that there are 300 cars and 15 are blue. That's a far cry from 20 percent! So I could try to say that of those other 285 cars the green ones are a shade of blue, and that the black ones are just very dark blue, and that the silver ones are a very pale blue. Wouldn't you question my intelligence (and possibly my sanity)?

So what's the upshot of all this? We must be willing to at least entertain ideas that we either hadn't considered or that we had previously dismissed. Refusing to do so is the height of arrogance. "I'm right. I always will be right. There is no possibility that I am wrong." Many would not voice these thoughts, or possibly don't even think them. But the way they act, and particularly the way they treat others, gives them away. Sure, we may have our preferences, and our traditions; again, that's good! It gives us a point of reference. It's how we personally relate to the transcendent in a way that has meaning and makes sense to us personally.

But we seriously miss the mark any time we think we have the market cornered. How dare we say that someone else's way is less than ours or, worse still, dead wrong? I'll close (for now!) with a Hindu teaching that says it pretty well:


There are hundreds of paths up the mountain, all leading in the same direction, so it doesn’t matter which path you take. The only one wasting time is the one who runs around and around the mountain, telling everyone that his or her path is wrong.