Spiritual Physics

When it comes to this project of mine – my podcast, this Substack, other ideas I have, other places this may go – I have an over-arching conviction that can be hard to convey. It is my way, I suppose, of trying to make sense of all the mess I see in the world – especially in politics, and in the way politics has come to affect our relationships with one another.

I believe there is a truth to human relationship that is both deeper than and counter to our basic human inclinations. And I believe this truth applies to both small-scale human relationships (like family, friendship, and community) and large-scale relationships (like politics, society, and international affairs).

In my last episode (please note that you can also listen to a podcast version of this essay) I introduced this truth – a concept I call “spiritual physics.”

Now physics, of course, is not my usual subject matter. It is the branch of science that deals with matter and energy and how they interact with one another. It explains movement, gravity, magnetism, etc.

Well, in the past several years I have come to notice something similar when it comes to human interactions, and I have been thinking of it on two levels: a human physics (which is very basic and probably pretty intuitive to most people) and a spiritual physics, which operates on a deeper, richer level.

I see in both of them patterns, systems to how people relate to one another, and to how their actions play out on a moral stage.

In today’s episode we’re going to delve more deeply into both, but especially the spiritual physics.

I share these ideas with you in the hope that they will help you to make better sense of human relationships, from the family level all the way up to the global level. I hope they will spur you to consider our personal and political interactions from a new perspective. I hope they will help us (you and me both) to make constructive changes in our own lives, and therefore in the world.

First, though, let me briefly reiterate the disclaimers I began my last episode with:

One – I do not consider this podcast to be exclusively for people of faith. I hope it will be interesting and helpful to people of good will no matter their religious persuasion. But because I believe in being honest about perspective, I will keep explaining my perspective to you, and in this season of More Than Politics, that will involve a lot of talk about my understanding of God.

Two – I am no theologian. I will not pretend to be an authority. I can only promise to tell you what I have observed and concluded, and that I offer it to you in good will.

Watching the world – how we treat one another, how we strive to get ahead, how we think primarily of ourselves and those closest to us – it’s easy to see in our human inclinations a very human physics that describes and predicts our behavior toward one another:

People generally seek wealth. We seek power. We seek pleasure. We are most sympathetic and protective toward those who are most like ourselves. We are territorial. We are tribal. We are greedy for things and love and attention. We equate the good with our personal good.

But there is also something that operates on a deeper level than these human physics – a sort of “spiritual physics,” which describes and predicts the effects of our actions on a deeper, spiritual plane.

If I could boil my sense of spiritual physics down to one phrase, I guess I’d say that good and evil both want to keep moving.

Goodness pursued – through love, kindness, service, beauty, and a devotion to the truth – it spreads. It grows. It bears fruit. It begets itself.

But so does evil. Evil pursued – through hate, cruelty, selfishness, ugliness, and an attachment to lies – it spreads. It seeps. It shrivels. It repeats.

But that phrase is not enough. There’s another word that belongs alongside it: upside-down.

Scripture nods at this upside-down character of what I call the spiritual physics: “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” “For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

Good and evil both want to keep moving. And pursuing the good requires us to think and act differently; it requires us to take our inclinations and turn them upside-down.

In each case – good or evil – it comes down to the pursuit. Our wills are involved.

Our basic inclinations – the human physics – may lead us to focus primarily on ourselves and our group. But we can, of course, choose to pursue something greater than our basic inclinations.

If we’ve become obsessed with our self-centeredness, if we’ve fed ourselves with ugliness and hate and lies, we can come to pursue (and perpetuate) evil. But if we reject our self-centeredness, if we instead decide to serve, to feed ourselves with beauty and love and truth, we will pursue (and contribute to) the good.

Over the past few years, as I have observed this spiritual physics at work in the human relationships around me, I have come to see that we humans need to pay attention. We need to sort of raise our heads, look around, and carefully watch the spiritual physics at work around us. We should not sleepwalk our way to destruction. We should make our choices with eyes wide open: Which one – good or evil – do we want to pursue?

This will make me sound terribly boring, but whenever I read a novel, I find myself rooting for the book’s characters to find healthy solutions to their problems. In my head, I groan or cheer or yell, “No, don’t do that!” or “Yes, go that way!” or “Tell the truth!” or “Apologize!” I want the characters to redeem themselves, to act in ways that will heal.

I feel like I can see a beautiful, hidden path that the characters themselves often miss. I want them to follow it, to cooperate with it, to arrive somewhere worthwhile.

Of course, they usually don’t. They (like we) usually stumble along, taking the path of least resistance. Or the paths that advertise pleasure, or gain, or power. It’s hard for us to step off the easy paths, or the flashy ones, to take the harder, steeper upward journey.

Not that we never take the upward steps – in our daily life, we see plenty of goodness: We see generosity, we see loving kindness, we see service. Goodness is not rare.

But neither is it ubiquitous. It is not automatic. Rather, goodness seems to me to be a choice – a denial of our gut-reaction selfishness in service of something higher.

Sometimes our denials and our kindnesses are small: We hold a door. We throw a dollar in the donation bucket.

Sometimes they cost us something real, something dear: We resist temptation in the knowledge that it will cost us a relationship. We sacrifice our personal goals to care for someone who is vulnerable.

Where do these choices come from? They don’t seem natural to me. They seem to flout our most basic desires to be first, to be autonomous, to be liked, to be right. They seem to me to come from something else – from goodness and love itself. From God.

Just as Saint Augustine observed that “our hearts, Oh Lord, are restless until they rest in thee,” I believe that there is something on our hearts that invites us to participate in the things of God. There is something in us that draws us not just toward goodness, love, truth, and beauty, but invites us to participate in them and to share them with others.

And when we cooperate with that invitation? That’s when we move forward. That’s when we have the opportunity to make something – a situation, a relationship – more healthy and whole.

That’s when we point ourselves toward God.

Now, as I indicated when I introduced this idea, goodness is not our only choice. Sometimes we become so attached to the human physics that we allow it to fester, to distort us, to put blinders on us, to lead us astray.

While yes, there is something within us that invites us to participate in and share the things of God, we still have free will. We get to make choices, and that means we can choose to deny that (good) part of ourselves.

There is an enemy, of course, who will induce us to do that. The enemy wants to stop us from pursuing the good, and so will make evil look attractive, easy – even necessary.

Here in 21^st Century America, if we give the idea of evil any credence at all, we may tend to think of it as flashy. (And sometimes it is – you only need to look at pictures from Ukraine and Israel and Gaza to know that.) But I think evil is probably most common, and most effective, when it is sneaky.

Evil takes our basic human nature – that human physics – and twists it to its own end. It amplifies our self-centeredness into selfishness and greed. It distorts our inclination to community into tribalism and exclusion. It warps our desire for security into hungers for power, wealth, and territory.

And evil will use us – our cooperation, our sins – to induce the people around us to fall into the same traps.

Few of us would choose to walk down a path clearly labeled as “Evil.” But just about all of us are vulnerable to taking paths that, by funny little fits here and attractive-seeming stumbles there, lead us – and those around us – to the same end.

So we’ve got to pay attention.

When I say that I observe a spiritual physics in the relationships around me, I don’t just mean small-scale, personal interactions. I also observe it in how people behave publicly. I see it in how governments work, how nations interact, how politicians and citizens try to affect social and political outcomes.

Just as the private individual experiences the base inclination to act primarily for himself, so do political actors (and parties, and nations) experience the inclination to act primarily for their own benefit.

The dynamic feels as old as time: Nations want to expand their territory, to increase their influence and wealth, to value insiders over outsiders. Trade and taxes and military spending beget power, and power is valued for its own sake.

Politicians and political parties want to win. They want attention, they want to raise money, they want to use the system to their advantage – so that they can keep winning. They want to win because winning begets power, and power is valued for its own sake.

And we everyday people willingly play into these dynamics. We choose a political champion or a party or a social identity or a nationality and we play our part in buoying it, in advancing it, in defending it – even when it engages in morally problematic behavior.

It is far too easy for us to sacrifice our personal moral frameworks when it comes to politics and society. We have a tendency to identify a good that is supposedly advanced by our chosen side, and tolerate all manner of evils in aiming to reach it.

(But here’s the truth: You cannot achieve goodness with the things of evil.)

You cannot serve truth with lies. You cannot create beauty with ugliness. You cannot practice kindness and mercy and love with cruelty.