Our Search for Cosmic Specialness
Jan 26, 12:57 PM
A "hug club." That’s the concept someone came up with for a TV commercial spoof. I overheard a guy at a coffee shop laughing and describing to a friend the zany idea for the ad. As best I could tell, the send-up would make a pitch for folks to meet somewhere to get (and give) hugs.
The only membership requirements: hug softly, and tell friends so the word spreads and the club grows. It made a funny picture: Earnest folks gathering for hugs. Nothing more. Just hugs.
I think my coffee shop neighbor found the ad idea humorous because a part of us (certainly a part of me) understands the longing. Amid the flurry and hurry of our days we can sometimes think (or even say), "I need a hug!" We laugh and say it with exaggerated emphasis and an end-of-sentence rise of pitch. But while a typical day has us in plenty of conversations, much of our relating skirts along the surface of things. More and more of our relational business gets conducted through a smart-phone screen of social "networks." Even the phrase "wireless connection" has a kind of irony, suggesting something that’s ultimately insubstantial and ethereal—a connection, but with no basis in physical reality.
And there’s a personal history for many of us with all this. When I was maybe ten, one evening, as I usually did, I kissed my dad good night, gave a perfunctory hug. He and my brother Kevin lay sprawled cover a couple of sofas in our den, eyes on some TV show, and I, teeth brushed and in my jammies, made my way around. Dad acted as though he barely noticed my kiss on his forehead. I thought I caught some nonverbal signals, that maybe he was letting me know that I was growing up, as if to say, "This is about over, son." Not in an unkind way, just in the sense of letting me know that things change. That big guys relate differently than little boys.
I see spiritual ramifications in such experiences. Our needing a high-touch grounding contributes, I think, to a longing for connection in the depths of the soul. We want not to think of ourselves stuck within a universe of indifference, shuffling along in a world that shrugs us off. Rather we prefer to think of the universe as a friendly place, as Einstein supposedly and famously said. A matrix of interconnected, purposeful compassion. We ache for a sense of cosmic specialness, to paraphrase Ernest Becker.
My imagination for God matters here. For the picture I’m working with in prayer has much to do with an overflow of God’s affection. It has to do with Paul the apostle’s talking about a God who pours out his love in his Son, spreading it abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
In contrast, Arius, an early leader of a heretical movement in ancient Christianity, portrayed God as "the alone with the alone." For Arius, God was loftily distant in his solitariness. Which is one reason Arius could not accept Jesus as God made flesh, much less accept what would become a church-wide conviction about God as three persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
But God seems full of eagerness to relate, and encouragement to come and share in his relational world of divine love. We are made for that.
I think of a Muslim scholar who insists of God: "He does not reveal himself to anyone in any way. God reveals only his will." But what if God turns toward us with arms opened in a welcoming invitation? I don’t think anything could matter more.