George Vaillant is a Harvard research psychiatrist.   In his book Spiritual Evolution, Vaillant calls spirituality “an essential human striving.”  And he sites this striving in the universal experience of eight positive emotions—“compassion, forgiveness, love…hope …joy, faith, awe and gratitude”

Compassion.  Forgiveness,  Love.  Hope.  Joy.  Faith.  Awe.  Gratitude.

Vaillant claims that these positive emotions  “arise from our inborn mammalian capacity for unselfish parental love.”  That’s the “attachment theory” I was talking about earlier.  It’s a fancy way of saying how we bond to our ridiculously dependent offspring in order to keep them alive. We have evolved to love and care for one another, because if we did not, our babies would be eaten by predators.

Vaillant goes on to say that these positive emotions, “emanate from our feeling, limbic mammalian brain and thus are grounded in our evolutionary heritage.  All humans are hardwired for positive emotion, and these positive emotions are a common denominator of all major faiths and of all human beings.” 

It was George Vaillant’s definition of faith, finally, that satisfied the question at the center of my inquiry: How does trauma affect the spiritual self?

Vaillant writes:

Faith…involves basic trust that the world has meaning and that loving-kindness exists.  Such faith should be our human birthright.  An atheist may have faith.  The absence of faith is nihilism, not atheism, not disbelief in a lexical God.

Vaillant defines faith as meaning and connection. And this relates so closely to the experience of interpersonal violence that I got another of those scholarly buzzes.  Because what trauma does is interrupt a person’s fundamental ability to trust that the world is a safe, predictable, orderly place.  It interrupts an individual’s capacity for trust, and therefore, for connection.  

“Faith…involves basic trust that the world has meaning and that loving-kindness exists.  Such faith should be our human birthright.” By this definition, I think that grief calls faith into question as well.  How can the world make sense when the one we love is gone?  How can loving kindness exist when this, specific love, has been taken from us?  By this definition, any experience of despair that shakes our sense of order, that causes us to feel “radically separate” (Sinclair, 1993, cited in McBride & Armstrong, 1995, p. 8)   —any of our “worst things”—is essentially a spiritual experience.  Not just cognitive, not just clinical, not just emotional.  Spiritual.  Even for those of us who did not check “Yes” next to “believe in God?” on the study questionnaire.

And therefore, we cannot consider ourselves recovered from grief, from trauma, from despair, until these two pillars of faith—meaning and connection—are restored.  

***

There are times that I can feel the interdependent web of life shimmering all around me, when I am so humbled by gratitude for the opportunity to wear these body clothes (Oliver, 2006, p. 1) and walk in the presence of love and compassion, that my heart breaks with the joy of it.  

And there have been other times--rare, terrible times--when I have felt so shattered, so “radically separate,” that my heart has broken under the weight of that grief.  

In those times, faith reminds me that I find meaning in the balance between that which is knowable and that which is unknowable.  And faith reminds me of the existence of kindness, my witness and experience of loving kindness.

We don’t need to study brain science and evolution to see that love is how we endure and make sense of and finally survive our worst things. We each hold private gratitude for the love that blesses our lives.

Community is not just making each other meals and watching each other’s children and lending each other camping equipment.  It is also irritating and injuring one another—most often by accident, but sometimes on purpose.  And we may never be able to answer why.

But cruelty is, in fact, the minority experience.  Human beings are hardwired for connection.  And we are evolving towards more cooperation, more compassion, more love.  Science says so.

Grief breaks our hearts. But we grieve only because we relentlessly turn toward one another.  If our lives are marked by loss, it is because we love, we love, we love.

Community is not just making meals and watching each other’s children, but that is what is happening most of the time.  And in doing those small kindnesses, we weave a pattern of kindness in which we can have faith.

We become one another’s faith when we help each other.  Whether or not cities are burning. (Tippett, 2014) When we love each other, perfectly and imperfectly. 

 http://www.lmwsafe.com/30-hardwired-for-faith

The Messenger

Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness.

Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.

Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?

Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.

Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart

and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth

and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all,

over and over, how it is that we live forever.



http://www.onbeing.org/program/paul-elie--faith-fired-by-literature/transcript/6155

Untitled
by Willow Harth

This poem is not meant for you
unless you too have been underground
choking on your life's debris, and
playing peek-a-boo with death seriously

then the surprise of ten thousand buttercups
out of nowhere on every side where they'd
never been before on my daily walk
might have had the effect on you it did on me

because suddenly

I wanted to understand how these particular
flowers came to be—the whole evolutionary
history of mosses, ferns and angiosperms,
the miracle of photosynthesis and DNA, not

to mention the longings of the Milky Way
to reflect itself in the form called flowers and
in these buttercups, which seemed like a
visitation from the sun, urging me to tell you, in
case like me you had forgotten

we are the universe's latest way of blooming.