Natural is the New Supernatural: Finding God's Love in Orwell's 1984

What happens when Psalm 23's 'goodness and mercy' show up in Big Brother's world

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✛Natural is the New Supernatural: Finding God’s Love in Orwell’s 1984

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✛Upcoming Substack Live Conversation with Tori E. Owens and Josh Scott this Thursday, 15th 2 pm Central. 🎙️📺

✛In other personal news: I’m proud of what the Curian Network is doing. Among other things, we started a new podcast. It’s for anyone who feels like a spiritual migrant, thought it’s slanted toward pastors, chaplains, professors, spiritual directors,and thought leaders. And now the post …

✛Natural is the New Supernatural: Finding God’s Love in Orwell’s 1984

Similar to a Substack note I posted in which I told you about a crazy, but true story, today’s essay tap into strange ways that love or God (or admittedly, possibly, my imagination) speaks. And it goes something like this …

A few years ago, when our youngest was still in high school doing book reports, he brought home a copy of 1984. I hadn’t read it in years—and since I actually lived through 1984 (the year, not the systematic destruction of independent thought via violence, propaganda, and the manipulation of language in order to maintain power… Oh, wait, maybe I’ve now lived through both). Either way, I decided to read it again.

Before I attempt to translate what happened, I want to highlight the word “supernatural” a bit, as I used it the title of today’s publication. Different open and relational thinkers will say it in different ways, but in using this term, I’m not thinking of the natural as something separate from the supernatural that then needs to get connected to gain life or goodness. Not really. No, what I’m saying is that the natural is already teeming with the divine.

This is generally speaking, an idea we call panentheism, God in everything. Not pantheism, which is that God equals nature, but panentheism. Lots of folks are writing about this, but for more, see my friends like Thomas Jay Oord, (Re)thinking Faith, Tim Miller, Chris Hanson, and Gayle Hansen Browne. Too many to name here.

I think it’s safe to say that panentheism is a bible-idea. (See Ps 24:1, Col 1:17, Acts 17:28). I also think it’s in alignment with God as the “soul of the universe,” which is a John Wesley idea. So, we got the Psalmist, Paul, and Wesley all going in the same direction. I mean, you could do worse.

We don’t mean God can be reduced to nature, but that each independent (or interdependent) thing contains something of God. The quark isn’t God, but God is entangled within the quark. Same with the quail, and the quasar. (Same with the gluon, gopher, galaxy … cell, chicken, celestial … haha, all right enough of the alliterations, you get the point.)

The old, tired way of using ‘supernatural’ presupposes God living outside natural experiences, but the fresh, evolutionary-resonant way presupposes God is already a part of everything. There are so many implications, but here’s one 👉🏼 We no longer have to try to move people from ‘here without God’ to ‘there where God is.’ No. God is everywhere and within everything, or as JC said: ‘The kingdom of heaven is within you’ (Lk 17:21). So, yes to the supernatural, but only as it’s already infused within the natural.

So much so, that’s it might actually make sense for grieving fathers to be reading dystopian novels and to hear from God! (I wonder what you think? You should leave a comment below.)

So, there I was, on a Sunday afternoon, which in those days meant a winding-down type of energy that always came in the wake of the Sunday morning preaching. I was in our bedroom turning pages, reading intently, searching for, well, I can’t say what I was searching for exactly, but as I was deep in psycho-spiritual forests of grief related to the loss of parent, niece, and daughter … sigh … yeah, it’s safe to say I was searching for something.

The short story (about the longer 1984 story) is that the protagonist, Winston, lives in constant fear of his government; of the systems they had in place to watch him, to observe his actions, and even read his thoughts. He knew that he was guilty of having anti-establishment thoughts and as such, he was worried. And then, he noticed someone following him; a woman who showed up in his periphery one too many times. He assumes she works for the government. He imagines it’s only a matter of time before his life is over. And I read:

The light was failing, but there was no difficulty in recognizing her. She looked him straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.

For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed to move. Then he turned to the right and walked heavily away, not noticing for the moment that he was going in the wrong direction. At any rate, one question was settled. There was no doubting any longer that the girl was spying on him. She must have followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure backstreet, kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived. It was too great a coincidence. Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly mattered. It was enough that she was watching him.

As I read this, I absorbed Winston’s anxiety and agitation, at some level, indirectly recognizing that his uneasiness was my uneasiness. Not necessarily in a government coming to get me (at least, not at that time), but more in the lack of peace I had felt and was feeling.

Hmm, is that the best way to say it? I don’t know, all I know is that when my daughter died a part of me died, and at the very least, it was that part that had to do with who I had imagined God to be. And yes, it had led to a “lack of peace.”

The answers the religious system kept giving weren’t adding up. And I use that verb adding intentionally, as it was supposed to counter all the subtracting that had been happening in my life. Life, in many ways, is about how we’re verbed. How we respond to being verbed. The role we think God plays amid such verbing.

Looking back at that time, I recognize that I was pulling apart my idea of the divine and refashioning it. In real time. This, of course, is the only thing one can do when the very sense of who they are as a human being has been pulled apart. Good grief, I was being refashioned myself. Why wouldn’t I be interested in refashioning my understanding of God?

Back to the book: I was reading about Winston’s lack of peace and very much feeling it myself. I read about a hundred pages in, where Winston has an interaction with the woman he had seen previously. She, walking toward him in a crowded area, pretends to slip and fall and when he picks her up, she slips a note into his hand. I read:

Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of political meaning. So far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the Thought Police, just as he had feared. He did not know why the Thought Police should choose to deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons. The thing that was written on the paper might be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description.

But there was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police at all, but from some kind of underground organization. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all! Perhaps the girl was part of it! No doubt the idea was absurd, but it had sprung into his mind in the very instant of feeling the scrap of paper in his hand. It was not till a couple of minutes later that the other, more probable explanation had occurred to him. And even now, though his intellect told him that the message probably meant death—still, that was not what he believed, and the unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was with difficulty that he kept his voice from trembling as he murmured his figures into the speakwrite.

He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into the pneumatic tube. Eight minutes had gone by. He re-adjusted his spectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the next batch of work towards him, with the scrap of paper on top of it. He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting: I love you.

What can I say? How can I put this? Words fail me (despite the reality that I’m literally using words to convey the moment). When I read about Winston fearing for his life, but also feeling hopeful … the way he carried that note around, not wanting to read it until he was ready … the way hope itself is actually the most intense kind of terror … when I read all of that and then got the simple message of I love you, it was as if God had spoken to me. Or if not me, to humanity.

We (humanity) keep thinking something’s out to get us, to track us down. And ironically, something is—but not to harm us. It’s out to get us for good. (Ps 23: “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.”)

Yes, the thing I felt that day is consistent with what I’ve felt on a handful of other occasions throughout my life. And I’m quick emphasize it’s only been a handful of other occasions. But what I dared to hope in that moment (and still do in various ways) is that that thing pursuing us is goodness and mercy, not that other thing. We all know that other thing. It’s also hard to define, but it’s that thing that hounds our limbic system, stirs up our shame, and creates obstacles to forgiveness, grace, and unity. It pretends to be God, but it’s lying. It’s not God, though I do imagine that we’ve given it God-like powers (which I think might be a bit of what 2Tim 3:5 is getting at), but either way, I think the real God is love. Ironically, love is tracking us down every bit as much as any negative force anywhere.

What I heard in that moment, in those three words, in the simplicity of the whole thing, is that God is not out to get us, but to love us.

Was this what Orwell was trying to do in that moment? Ha, perhaps? Who knows? I will say that art is art not in how it controls the message but in how it changes and evolves in the relationship between artist and those experiencing the message. I think George would be down with that idea. He probably knew that he wasn’t able to control the whole process. He probably knew that real art could never be reduced to one side because the artist never really knows what’s going to happen until it’s experienced by the other side. Art isn’t a finely tuned, controlled monologue; it’s a hands-off, see-where-this-goes dialogue.

Not unlike how God is God not in how the divine controls the message, but in a willingness to adapt and change inter-relationally and inter-carnationally. I think God would be down with that idea. S(H)e probably knows that S(H)'e’s unable to controll the whole process. Love doesn’t come packaged with a preprogrammed plan; love comes packaged with risk.

Meanwhile, you and I would’ve never asked for the circumstances we’re living in. Good grief, what an intense time. Like many of you, I am deeply troubled by just about every piece of news that has anything to do with the way migrants are being demonized in the US. It is mind-boggling what we’re dealing with. I posted the following online a few days ago 👉🏼 “We have now sunk to a depth,” as Orwell said, “at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” And my restatement of the obvious is as follows … paying masked men to round up people without due process and murder innocent bystanders while doing it, is wrong. 💔

God help us. More than once recently, I have been reminded of Mordecai’s line to Esther, “who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this”? Or as Gandalf responded to Frodo, when he expressed regret about the times they lived in: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

That’s us. That’s you and me. All we have is what we have, but if we can operate by faith and lean into the risk of love, maybe we can make a difference.

May it be so.