Rung Three: Are you there, God? It's me, Benjamin.
"There is one God who made all things," says George L. Rogers in Benjamin Franklin's name. For the nonreligious, this will be a sticky wicket ...
“[Franklin’s] sole study in religion was to understand those principles he could apply to make himself a better person, more useful to others and more acceptable to God.”
—George L. Rogers
This rung might be tough for some, but it doesn’t need to be.
Let’s start with Franklin’s take on God, shall we?
Rogers explains that Franklin was schooled as a non-Anglican (“in the Dissenting way,” opposing state interference in religion) by his parents, then fell in love with Deism for a while. What’s Deism? That belief in the “Blind Watchmaker,” the God who made it all, set the laws and wheels in motion, and never looked back. Doesn’t care. Isn’t involved. Deists believe our reason, without revelation, is enough to know there is a god. Whether anything follows from that—as in, can we divine a moral path?—is another question.
Deism didn’t stick for Franklin. He said the doctrine, worst of all, “was not very useful.” After all, Franklin was interested in becoming a better human being, living more virtuously, and of what use was a creator, a divine being, an over-arching concept, that didn’t care about that? In his autobiography, Franklin’s practical interest suffused his thoughts:
Revelation [divine moments between God and man] had indeed no weight with me, as such; but I entertained an opinion that, though certain actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by [laws through Revelation], or good because it commanded them, yet probably those actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us, in their own natures …
So, like many other modern religionists, Franklin seemed to reject miracles and revelation, but … there was something. Strangely enough, or not strangely, the “something” was, I think, gratitude.
There is God, Franklin says in an essay he composed as a younger man for his study group (the Junto), because of:
“the admirable order and disposition of things” and
God’s “giving life to so many creatures, each of which acknowledges it a benefit, by its unwillingness to leave it” and
God’s “being able to form and compound such vast masses of matter, as this earth, and the sun, and innumerable stars and planets” and so on.
This is probably some logical fallacy. You’ve heard this argument before: How could this wild, weird, amazing world be so without a Good Orderly Direction (a nice way of framing a belief in “something” from creativity guru Julia Cameron)?1
So, let’s duck that question. Let me tell you, instead, about gratitude. Because that’s what I think Franklin’s points also get it. And gratitude is one way I came into my own religious practice of Judaism years ago. I first studied Judaism for the ethics (sounds like Franklin), and I stayed because my delving into prayer for the first time in my life gave me an outlet for a tremendous sense of gratitude that could not point at my friends, my family or my parents. The Jewish God stood there, away from all of it, among all of it, and became a focus for my gratitude at being alive, marveling at everything, learning and growing, etc., etc. Whether I was talking to a Creator God standing outside the universe (not really for me, no) or some sense of the Emerging-of-the-Universe-Together-With-Me (much closer to my feelings, thank you), there was a god or God or energy or Will or whatever. There was a unity to talk to, from my small, divided self, to say, “Why, hello there, everything! I’m everything, too! It’s just marvelous! May I be grateful? I didn’t do it! I can’t thank myself! It was like this when I showed up! Fantastic!”
I’m not promising this is what Franklin ever thought about God and Creation. I’m just saying that his sense of awe at the order of the universe represents gratitude. He is grateful what is is. I don’t want to argue about what to call that. I just want to say, it’s a yearning that, perhaps, explains God and religion far more than, say, the old story that our tree-dwelling ancestors were spooked by lightning and made lightning gods.
As Tolstoy argues in “What Is Religion, Of What Does Its Essence Consist?,”2 we may have come up with religion to make sense of our finitude, our smallness, in comparison and relationship with the infinite all around us. And that, happily, awfully, frighteningly, joyfully, includes us.
Rung Three—
There is one God who made all things
Questions to Maybe Ask During Rung Three
Do you believe in God?
If you don’t believe in god/gods/God, which god/gods/God don’t you believe in?
What religious/moral/ethical principles do you live by?
If you do believe in God, what god/gods/God do you believe in, and why?
Exercise to Try During Rung Two
Contemplate divinity: When and where do you feel strong emotion about your smallness or the bigness of the universe? Does that feeling lead you to slow down or speed up? Does that feeling drive you to change your life, or other times does it keep you centered and sure you’re on the right path?
Experiment with gratitude: I’ll puke if I have to tell you to journal every day about three things for which you feel gratitude. But religionists and psych folks argue that this focus on gratitude can 1) get you closer to God and 2) make you feel better over time. I don’t do this practice. I am asked to contemplate gratitude regularly over the course of my days—in sporadic prayer and in reading about religion, philosophy, history, and more. So, yes, I have some gratitude practice. So, try it out. Contemplate how things could be worse. Contemplate how you can make things better. Contemplate how terrible tragedies transformed over time into scars that made you who you are. Contemplate how undeserved lucky spun you from dangerous cliffs into meadows of plenty.
My Plan for Rung Two
I am continuing Franklin’s rungs.3 But I’ll also be reading more in this rung on Franklin and his ideas about God. I’ll share my thoughts about them as I continue in the next couple weeks. Next up, I will compare and contrast Leo Tolstoy’s basics on God with Franklin’s basics. Do they match up? They’re both seeking some cross-religion unity, truth in different religions that fits together, not in opposition. So … we’ll see.
What Did I Miss?
I didn’t want to go into theodicy (why is there evil?) or religious apologetics (this god is better than that god!) or modern atheism (religion is stupid and backwards!). So, I skipped all that. But, in the spirit of full disclosure, this first part of Rung Three in the book included excerpts from a lengthy four-part essay Franklin wrote to argue for a god that made the world and still enters it regularly. He argues that for us to have free will, the whole thing can’t be set in motion and left behind. And, from another option, what good god, what divinity that wishes well, would leave it all to an eternity’s worth of crashing billiard balls? But I don’t care about arguing for or against a god, or gods, right now. So … that’s missing.
Be well.
“ … this religion will be a powerful regulator of our actions, give us peace and tranquility within our minds, and render us benevolent, useful, and beneficial to others.”
—Benjamin Franklin
Julia Cameron had a huge effect on me after grad school. Her book, The Artist’s Way, was recommended to me by my therapist in school as I left, and I followed her path to great emotional and creative growth. Get a flavor for her delightful, trusting, friendly hippie-dippie-ness here.
I highly recommend A Confession and Other Religious Writings, which includes “A Confession” and the religion essay mentioned above.
You missed the virtue chart? Oh, dear. Well, I got you.
“Why, hello there, everything! I’m everything, too! It’s just marvelous! May I be grateful? I didn’t do it! I can’t thank myself! It was like this when I showed up! Fantastic!”
Delightful!!! Thank you for expressing that so perfectly.