Anirniq.

In Tim Keller's "The Reason for God", chapter nine, titled "The Knowledge of God" talks about the knowledge we have of God that seems to come innately. As he puts it, "I think people in our culture know unavoidably that there is a God, but they are repressing what they know." (p 146 in the hardcover version)

But what if believing in the Christian God represses what we know to be true of a different God or a different set of truths? Or what if there is more than one truth?

While watching "The Snow Walker" the other day, I felt immersed in Inuit culture, even if for just a small fraction of time. Everything has a spirit. Everything works together in a certain brutal harmony. Everything is important and the spirits must be respected. I won't get into too much detail, both because I don't know most of it and because I don't want to be disrespectful and write things out of context without doing them adequate justice. But the principles in the movie, which were very influenced by the Inuit people in the making of the movie in an effort to be accurate, are the principles I know and have always known.

Ever since I was little, I've been an animist. As far back as I can remember, my soul felt connected to the moon somehow, as though it was watching over me. When I was young, probably around four, one of my earliest memories was rejecting the moon and feeling alone in the universe for the first time. But the moon still affects me. I can't pretend it doesn't. On a warm summer night, when its blue glow hits my skin, there's something different about it.

And as I studied biology, one recurring question or idea bothered me: how do we know what they think or why they do things? How do we know they aren't making concessions for us?

The analogy I used to use jokingly was of a bear. We think we're smarter than a bear because we've invented things like guns. Throw a man naked into the woods and see how long he survives. Are we really smarter than bears? Or do they just not need guns and cars? It wouldn't occur to us to invent tools and arms if what we were given physically was adequate for anything other than hiding.

Another example is the dog. There's a poem going around about a dog who gets rejected because he snapped at his owner and the owner reacted badly to it. I am the alpha in my house. I rule over my dogs. They listen to me. And if they don't listen to me, there are consequences. But my big dog's mouth, when fully opened, could fit the majority of my face. He definitely could fit my neck in there. Those jaws can snap beef leg bones in half. And my little girl? Her jaws aren't all that big, but she's agile. She could probably go for my jugular before I had time to react. But why don't they? Because I've trained them not to? I doubt that. I never pulled my dogs aside and provoked them to go after my jugular in order to correct them. "Never! Never touch my jugular!" No. Why don't they?

Obviously, there are stories where the dog gets aggressive towards its human, but usually, those stories follow years of neglect or other abuse, a traumatic incident or a head trauma. Dogs don't just "turn".

But I play with my dogs fairly aggressively and more often than not, I end up hurt in some way and they stop immediately and wait to see if I'm ok. They can't not know they're more powerful than I am. My big dog certainly knows he's smarter than I am and uses his intellectual powers for evil, so why not his physical strength?

How do we know what they think? How can we be so arrogant as to presume we understand their thought processes?

One morning, a dog kibble rolled under a closet door. My little girl saw it go under and tried to get it but wasn't able to. A few days later, when I'd totally forgotten about it, I got something out of the cupboard and walked down the hall, leaving the door open. My little girl wandered behind me and the second she had totally passed the closet door, I saw her remember. You could see her eyes change and she stopped and retrieved the kibble from inside the closet. Did she smell it? Or did she really just remember? If she remembered, she had to have a thought process about it.

Another time, I said something really quietly to her, something like, "Do you want to go out?" or "Do you want a cookie?" and she didn't fully hear me, so she stayed laying there, her eyes shifting around the room. About a minute after I had said that something, she suddenly got up and ran to whatever it was I had asked her (either the door or the cookie stash, I can't remember which it was). It was like when we humans barely hear something and then replay it in our minds trying to figure out what it was we'd heard.

My point being, as a child I was raised in the woods and spent hours alone in the forest or with my dogs and I could always feel them. I could feel the trees watching over me. I could feel my dogs doing the same. There was something very spiritual for me when I was young and surrounded by living beings who weren't human. It wasn't a God-human relationship though. It was more of an earthly partnership- we're all in this world together. We all have a certain level of suffering and of joy. We may as well share it and share the burden.

Maybe it's just shared energy rather than spirits. Maybe it's the way our molecules interact. Maybe it's anthropomorphism. Or maybe, as Tim Keller accidentally suggests to me, it's something my heart just knows is true.

But how does it fit with Christianity?

I'm a scientist. The major stereotype and prejudice against Christianity up here is that only irrational people can believe in it. And so, as a scientist, it wasn't easy to believe it. I had to work out all the kinks and loopholes and apparent inconsistencies. One of the means by which I did that was by acknowledging that if God (and consequently, the Bible) is the truth and science is the truth, then they must match. Of course, sometimes, the science we know to be true today is wrong tomorrow, but some things stay constant. Like... constants. So it's never either/or for me. As a simple example, if science points to evolution, somehow the Bible has to fit.

The same idea can be applied to animism or the sort of nature-based spirituality I've felt my whole life and Christianity. If I know one to be true and I know the other to be true, they have to match.

At first, I thought it'd be a fruitless endeavor. Christianity was on the right and animism was on the left and getting the two into an area of common ground seemed impossible. But it had to work because these are my truths and letting one go would mean letting Christianity go and I could not do that.

Why Christianity?

Because it's the one that comes least naturally to me. While my soul loves both, I can't deny the things I've felt and experienced that led me to animism so early on. I will always feel them and remember them and know, deep in my soul, that they are true. But in the same way, after months and months of research, prayer and reading, I feel God too. I feel Jesus in my life. I know Him to be the truth now, although the process for me to come to that was not nearly as fluid, especially since it has always been far easier for me to reject Him.

While animism feels inherently natural, there are times when Christianity feels like a human concoction. There are aspects that are so quickly converted to religion and duty and those things consistently rub me the wrong way. The world is chaotic, yet ordered. It's beautiful, yet brutal. It's fantasy and reality all wrapped into one intense, powerful package that we get to experience for such a brief time. We do put too much pressure on the temporary to make us happy, but at the same time, we often don't experience the world for its awesomeness. Animism kind of allows that. It allows us to feel the world as a soul among many, as one togetherness, as Creation- the way God intended.

Earlier on, in the Intermission section of Tim Keller's book, he talks about how if you were forever a character in a play, you wouldn't know about the playwright unless the playwright wrote himself as a character in the play. And in our story, God did write Himself in, as Jesus. So we know about Him because He became a part of the story.

Elsewhere in the book, Tim Keller refers to the analogy of the elephant in describing truths. He says (although I believe the idea is attributed elsewhere) that often people look at the truths of the different religions as a group of blind people would experience an elephant. One would grab the trunk and say, "An elephant is long and flexible," while another would have the foot and say otherwise. They're all parts of the truth, but only the sighted observer from afar has the superior knowledge it takes to see the whole truth (which is impossible, really, and quite arrogant, but I digress).

But if we look at said elephant along with the fact that Jesus wrote Himself into the play, would it not make obvious sense then that each group was given a piece and all the pieces put together would form the elephant? "I am He," Jesus says when they come to arrest Him (John 18:5-6). What if God put people all over the world, in places isolated from the words of Jesus, to give us an idea of what the shadowed side of the elephant looked like while we were on the sunny side, or vice versa? What if we know it's an elephant, but the size of it and the complexity of it make it impossible for us to know all there is to know (and understand) about it? What if while Jesus told Israel He was God, God was elsewhere telling other nations truths also? The only way, apart from God Himself showing us, that we would know the whole truth would be to all come together and share what truths we know. Some perceived truths might be proven otherwise. And others might fit together in a perfect puzzle of complements, which, from the Christian perspective, would end up ultimately pointing to Jesus.

Apparently (according to the ever accurate wikipedia :D), the predominant religion among the Inuit is Christianity, but the Inuit have managed to intertwine their natural spirituality into Christianity. How did the Inuit, who became isolated from other societies so early on, somehow develop a spirituality that could line up so naturally and profoundly with Christianity? What are the odds that a nature-based belief system and a humanity-directed faith in Jesus could complement each other that peacefully and gracefully?

And so, thus far, I have no choice to make. For God so loved the world, not just the humans. He created all of it, and as I am but a mere human who will never fully grasp the greatness of God, I can't take for granted the partners He's given me to share in this earthly life.


Anirniq: Breath, spirit of life.
p.s. this book looks interesting.