The Intellectual Pursuit of Spirituality

Can God be understood, intellectually speaking, or has he allowed us to experience Him in more supernatural ways?

Where do we draw the line between intellectualism and spiritualism? Does a line even exist? Or is the line so profoundly distinct that there can be no convergence?

We all have questions about the deeper things in life. Some of us instinctively know there’s something more to this reality that we see. We intuitively know we are more than merely a materialistic world. And some of us who are spiritual, are looking for something more substantial than a religion that solely appeals to our feelings. We want real, tangible evidence. We want to know that what we believe is not just something we feel is true, but something stable, something so real that we can build a life on it. We want to have absolute conviction that our faith is true! And many of us go searching for deeper answers.

I LOVE to learn and I mean that whole heartedly. Not just as a general statement like “I love coffee,” but as a deeply passionate life long, mainly spiritual pursuit. Even as a young girl, I’d sit back and study people, watch them, observe how they interact, their moods, how they relate to others, and what drives a person to do what they do because I love to learn about people. At various times in my life (pre-Google), I’d go to the library and research whatever it was I was into. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE books. There is something nostalgic about the smell of a bookstore, the feel of turning pages, and the insight encased within its covers. Clearly, I have an intellectual side, which I didn’t realize until adulthood because I was a screw up in school. But, my parents have passed on to me a love for reading, especially my dad’s passion for non-fiction. He’s one of those self-taught type of people that can do research and be proficient in what he does. I like to think I inherited his traits. So for many years I searched for meaning within a plethora of books from psychology, philosophy, Islam, Buddhism, and new age spirituality to Wicca. I was always a deep person asking hard questions. I never, in a bajillion years, thought I’d find the answers to so many of them within the pages of the Bible. Never. But God has a funny way of turning things upside down. Of making us doubt everything we think we “know.”

The beginning of my walk with God began almost two decades ago, and the first “Christian” book I ever read (even before I ever opened a bible) was titled, “I’m Fine with God, It’s Christians I Can’t Stand,” just to give you an understanding of where I come from. I never liked Christians. I never thought I’d become one! Haha… God’s humor again. But God. Met. ME. When I least expected it, when I least desired it, He dragged me kicking and screaming. And I remember str-ugg-eling to understand this whole God thing. I just could not wrap my head around it. Nothing made sense to me. Was Jesus God or God’s son? How can 3 be one? I mean, these are legitimate logical questions. Why is there evil? Why can’t God just make all this pain go away, say the word and make this world brand new? Remove sin? Start over? What the hell gives?! The truth is… I wasn’t ready to understand. I wasn’t open minded, I was cynical. I wasn’t looking to learn, I was looking for flaws and loopholes. After looking back and analyzing this journey, I realize we can’t understand the mysteries of life until we’ve connected with the Creator himself. It wasn’t until I FINALLY came to the end of myself, my pride, my ego, my arrogance, my insistence that all this religious stuff was non-sense, until I gave up, let go, and allowed GOD to speak to ME (not the other way around you stubborn little girl), that I began to learn. But I needed to stop thinking I understood it all to allow God to speak to my heart. And so I will always remember that first prayer because it was so hard for me to say … I basically told God that I didn’t believe in this whole Jesus thing, I dont understand any of this religious stuff but I know, deep down in my gut that there’s something real going on in my spirit. And so I literally let go and let God take the wheel of my intellectual understanding about who He is. What. A. Journey!

I tried reading the bible in basically every way possible. From beginning to end. Fail. Chronologically. Fail. With a 365 day plan. Fail. With a friend. Fail. With a group. Fail. With an alarm. Fail. And so I became reeeeeeeeeally discouraged. But then… I finally found the only way I could understand the bible… through experience and connection. Whenever I was going through a trial in my life, I used those experiences to draw me closer to God, to abide in Him, and it was through my brokeness while reading those bible verses that God spoke to my heart and taught me. Yes I know, all you junior theologians out there are yelling at me, “but that’s not in context!” Haha yeah I know, but the beauty about God is that he works in the macro and the micro. He works in the general and the specific. He created the expanse of the universe and subatomic particles. He speaks to the whole of human civilization and to the individual. So yes, dare I say it, I read the bible for comfort, inspiration, guidance, and wisdom. And I began to connect with the bible in such a way that it drove me to understand it deeper. To know more. To dig and dig and dig. To learn the context. And the more I dug, the more treasure I found! Gorgeous jewels of truth. Precious metals of spiritual armor. Delicate tapestries of wisdom. I discovered that my faith, built on the most loving relationship with my creator as a foundation, could stand up to the framework of intellectualism.

There are much more intelligent thinkers than I, who have found truth in Jesus. By all means, I don’t claim to have all the answers because I most certainly don’t. But I do know that the answers exist. Many of them in the bible. And it’s up to us to discover them. I find that everything I learn intellectually whether it be biology, archaeology, philosophy, psychology, quantum mechanics, whatever… there are elements of everything I learn that highlights the many truths in the bible. And my writing is an outward attempt to articulate these ridiculously complex concepts that live in my mind (Sorry if I fail to do so, but these ponderings are a novice’s work in progress).

The better educated I become about the world and how it works, the more astonished I am by it’s complexity. We see reality as a blurry image but the more we learn, the better we become able to connect the pieces, that our image of reality comes into focus at a higher resolution to see things as they truly are. Ideas. Dreams. Desires. Compassion. Innovation. Creativity. Justice. Morality. These are all biblical as well as biological as well as psychological as well as sociological as well as philosophical concepts. They are each and all of them at the same time. One cannot truly make sense without the other. They all work together synergistically to help us live out our potential.

We are not just minds. We are not just hearts. We are not just spirits. We are not just bodies. We are each of those things and all of them at the same time. I was not made to think without feeling. I was not made to have faith without thinking. I was not made to be a biological entity devoid of morality. I was not made to live in the abstract without being able to connect to the concrete.
When the mind, body, and spirit connect, we become whole people. Its only within this synergistic relationship that we can clearly understand who we are and all that we were created to become.

And so, as it seems, the faithful and the intellectual are not two end points on a spectrum. They can be one in the same. Christianity has stood the test of time for 2,000 years. It was withstood torture, persecution, empires, rulers, philosophers, scientists, historians, archaelogists, atheists… all these years later, the truth of the bible still stands firm because you and I are not the first people to ask those hard questions. There are rational, logical reasons why people believe the bible is true and there are answers for our questions. If you are struggling to find them, I’d suggest connecting to God, the Creator of all things, and asking Him to guide your understanding. Even if you dont know what you believe… he still knows you and how you learn. He created you to be a rational, thinking person and he wants us to find Him first so that He can teach us the truth. The world will only discover partial truths. There will always be an element to human understanding that just doesn’t quite line up. That is missing something. If your heart is genuine and pure in motive, God will open your mind up to an endless revelation of truth. To the humble hearted with an open mind are the mysteries of God revealed. Intellectually. Spiritually. Emotionally. Physically. All parts of the same whole.