This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
The DWD goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
Thirty years of conflict
I came of age at the crest of materialism’s hold on western culture. As a teenager, pretty much all my friends were atheists. In college, secular sensibilities chewed at all the edges of what was supposed to be BYU’s religiously-based education. Even in Boston, many of my church-going peers — grad students and young professionals who hadn’t yet paired off and started making babies — might have been termed “religious but not spiritual.” They were people who went to church for the cultural and communal continuity, but who also harbored deep misgivings about the so-called truth-claims of the institution that supported those things.
It was inevitable, then, that by the time I reached my mid-thirties, despite never having relinquished my religious birthrights, I had become profoundly worried that the materialists were right all along.
The problem was that I hated their cosmology. I had always hated it. To accept it felt like a betrayal of every scrap of religiosity, spirituality, or frankly humanism I had. If the universe was as dead and meaningless as all the smartest people seemed to believe, then human awareness of it seemed like an unspeakably tragic accident.
I lived with this conflict for quite some time.
But then, thanks to some sympathetic ears, some very significant books, and my own willingness to set all of my assumptions and suspicions aside in my perilous search for truth, the pendulum began to swing in the other direction.
Lately, I’m beginning to think that rather than lifeless particles, the universe might actually be made of meaning and intent, energies corralled by agents, and for a purpose. It also seems evident to me that we participate in this creation, our bodies and brains a collaborative manifestation of these intentions and purposes.
Most of us are mostly blind to this, to the creative agents with whom we are collaborating, even to our very own deepest selves. But being blind to something has never been any evidence against its existence. We should know that by now, after the many millions of times we’ve breathed in and out invisible lungfuls of air, and all the years we’ve spent glued to the ground by invisible gravity.
If we can’t see something, it’s not because it’s not there, it’s because we haven’t yet learned how to look.
Little by very, very little, I am learning how to look.
The universe is made of meaning