I once knew someone whose rationality I respected in general, but who strongly held the belief that eating pork makes one stupid.To him it was simply a fact that the more pork one ate, the more stupid one became.In this rational age, there are many who think the same thing about religion. Many of my closest friends believe this.They dont hold this against me, any more than my pork hating friend held it against me when I would order a juicy delicious barbecue pulled pork sandwich at Little Porgys. After all there should be more to a man than a pork sandwich or even the church he goes to.On my side, I believe that my conversion experienceyieldedto me some new knowledge. I had expected this from my reading of conversion accounts, where things like discernment and theology completes philosophy are thrown about.But the thing about this new knowledge is that it is very hard to talk about unless one has had the experience.To one on the outside, the language used to describeconversion experienceslooks pretty strange and opaque, and I suspect that sometimes this isnt an accident.To be honest, writing about ones spiritual experiences is a bit like writing about ones sexual experiences. Your friends dont really want to read about them, or if they do, its for the wrong reasons (Im laughing with you, not at you.) If one succeeds in writing about these things well enough for readers to get past their uncomfortable blushing (never have anyone readsomething you've writtenabout spirituality or sex while you're standing there; you will never seehim again), the response one will invariably get is some form of Well, good for you.Spiritual experiencehas something in common withsex. (But Ill state right now that sex does not produce mystical experiences, whatever that guy standing at the bar with the gold chain, white shoes, and bad rug may have told you.) But spirituality and sex are both things that.. cant be adequately described quantitatively but only qualitatively. No one other than high-school students and people so young at heart that they should not be trusted with adult responsibilities will try to seek the heart of either through scientific studies. To be sure, both spirituality and sex can be described in terms of quantities. But they are both things that are impoverished by scientific description.In fact, spirituality and sex fall in that class of things that only exist in full as qualities. There are other things like this. Beauty is one. Art and Love are two more.A Frenchman might include food and drink whose flavor rises to the level of art. Or that special moment in place or time that sticks in ones mind as perfect, even though nothing in particular was going on at that moment.Despite the fact these things seem to exist as qualities rather than as quantities and therefore cannot be expressed in scientific terms, people do believe that beauty, love, art, the moment, and even sex really exist. (In fact, a trip to any bookstore in America will immediately convince one that more people believe that sex exists than believe art exists.) But as qualities, while they do seem to have an objective existence, they seem to live this objective existence subjectively. I know that this is a paradox. We can all agree that beauty exists, but no two of us can entirely agree on what is beautiful. We can believe in love; we all hope to find it. But even when two people happen to love the very same person, they never seem to love that person in exactly the same way.We can see why this might be so hard to talk about in a world that wants to talk about reality in scientific terms and where subjective choice in placing meaning upon the world is itself so sacred.In a scientific and capitalist world, things that exist as qualities are really no more than residues of things that have yet to be (but will be) captured by science at some point. And when ones subjectivity is held sacred in the way that it is in our consumer society (and not in theother ways it could be held sacred) any claim that something that people believe to be a matter of subjectivity might actually be rooted insomething objectiveseems like nothing more or less than a form of bondage.In my conversion experience, the first secret revealed to me -- there is no other way to put it -- is that the essence of love in the form of lovability exists as an objective attribute in all people. This elusive thingwhich we think we discover when we fall in love (but which we think is put there by other people when they fall in love) is based on a true reflection of each person as they really are. The experience of love is therefore not some sort of attitude. It is an unveiling.The second secret was that even more than this ALL beauty is just such an unveiling. We see the true beauty in the beloved and call the beloved beautiful, but all created things have a part of this beauty. I believe that most people sort of know this, even if one is an atheist and cant express this scientifically. And the reason that they do is the third secret: the name of all this beauty is God.This wasnt revealed to me in the form of some sort of esoteric angelic joy, where one might someday see the statue of St. Theresa hauled out of St. Maria della Vittoria in Rome and replaced by one of Unagidon in (or on?) Ecstasy. In retrospect, this was probably a good thing. For had the moment been like those opium-laced hashish cigarettes I smoked in Cairo one summerthirty-five years ago, I would have eventually discounted it like all those other metaphysical experiences I seemed to have.No, the beauty was revealed to me in a terrible momentin whichI was shown how I had been abusing and killing it all my life. Do you know what it is that you have been shitting on forfifty-five years? said the revelation. That was your parents, your brother and sister, your children, and the Pieta as well. A terrible moment, but one that did drive itself into my body like a spike.It is not that I have decided that I need to believe in God in order to believe in this beauty. And why should I have to? The beauty is available to all, whether they believe in a god or not. People who can see it are not imagining it.Even a blind man can feel the sun.But in my conversion, this particular form that beauty took at that particular moment looked like God to me and also looked like God as described in all the theology books that I had been systematically misunderstanding in years past. I know that this is God.This knowledge, which lives like love, in the gut, gave me a new base from which to see everything else, as though for the first time.In the end there is no scientific vocabulary that can capture that which is expressed as a quality. There never will be. Science works, and works well, where it can disaggregate qualities into quantities and measure them. If the object is in fact something that can be looked at that way, then science can talk about it. If the object in fact is something that no longer exists when disaggregated, then science cant talk about it. It doesnt have a vocabulary for it.Still, even those who claims to lead empirical lives nonetheless believe in these qualities. Humans cant live without them. And the differences between people in matters of belief may not be between those who believe in the power of science to answer all questions and those who dont. It may be between people who see these qualities as subjective and those who think that there is some kind of objective core to them. And if there is one thing I have learned in life, it is that flexibility and growth come from a faith in possibilities. If one doesnt have faith that something is at least possible, it usually doesnt become possible.

unagidon is the pen name of a former dotCommonweal blogger.  

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