Fingerprints of God

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

  “Physiologically, what happened?” I asked them.

  “Probably there was an increased blood flow to the heart, and that made it warm,” one explained.“There are two predominant systems that operate. There’s the parasympathetic system, which calms you down, and there’s a sympathetic system, which revs you up. And so what you’re describing, probably, is that the parasympathetic system kicked in.”

  The researcher also theorized that a hormone called oxytocin might have been produced in the brain. Oxytocin is the chemical messenger that is produced when a mother is bonding with her newborn baby. And this hormone affects different organs—including, she speculated, the heart.

  “I think she’s right on,” the other researcher said, nodding. He said that studies on primates, rabbits, and bulls suggest that oxytocin release is related to love, and some studies suggest it brings on an “oceanic,” sometimes mystical, feeling.

  “I’d put my money on something that oxytocin is doing,” he said. He noted that in my own case, I had been strained with tensions over work, my boyfriend, and some problems with my physical health. Then an insight, a prayer, a moment of surrender, and the parasympathetic system took over, soothing and calming the body.

  “We often underestimate the effects of just relaxing your muscles,” he said. “A good massage and suddenly, Hey! The rest of my life is good! And you probably had pretty powerful muscle relaxation.”

  “But what does that mean?” the first researcher asked. “So there’s a physiological correlate of whatever is going on. So what? That still doesn’t explain it.”

  Both researchers nodded, acknowledging a central tension in this line of inquiry: science may explain the biology of spiritual experience, but it cannot explain the experience away.

  A Journey, Not a State

  Neurologist Patrick McNamara warned me against pinpointing trauma as the primary trigger for spiritual experience.

  “I agree that stress and distress and pain and suffering can certainly lead to spiritual experiences,” he said. “But in my experience, interviewing lots of people, and working with lots of different patient groups and reading the literature, I think the thing that consistently leads to spiritual experience is a concerted effort on behalf of the individual to grow in the spiritual life.”

  He took a deep breath. “In other words, spirituality or religiosity is not simply a response to stress or brokenness or pain or suffering or joy, or any particular emotion. It can be a goal.”

  This suggests another intriguing catalyst for spiritual experience, one that differs radically from gnawing stress and sudden pain. It is not a state but a journey. It is the search for meaning.

  “The human creature is built to need a purpose in life,” observed psychologist Ray Paloutzian at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. “And if someone doesn’t have one, they’re going to invent one. And one of the ways that humans do this is by adopting a religious worldview, or some kind of spiritual approach to the world. If they don’t have it already—or if they’re not comfortable with the one they have—then, because it’s a need, they’re more prone to spiritual experience.”

  You might think that spiritual experience should be in the same category as, say, fantasy football or learning Italian—a hobby to brighten one’s otherwise dull routine. Or you could conclude that spirituality is a mild psychosis that one develops to cope with reality. However you view it, one of the most powerful triggers for dramatic spiritual events is the desire for it, the kind of search that keeps one up at night, wondering about the universe.

  When I began this book, I instinctively knew that my search would reveal a multifaceted “Other,” one perhaps more defensible than a list of attributes I memorized somewhere in my Judeo-Christian upbringing: God is love and spirit, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, to name only a few. It took no more than a few weeks investigating spirituality to stumble upon three surprising characteristics of this “Other” not found in any catechism: God as master craftsman, God as chemist, and God as electrician. The next leg of this journey, then, leads through the hard, sometimes reductionist, science, which in my opinion does not dismiss the notion of God but informs it.

  By “God as master craftsman,” I mean the one who organizes a person’s genes into an astonishingly intricate code. Those genes give a person blue or hazel eyes, make him shy or extroverted, literal-minded or spiritual. God as craftsman helps me with a puzzle that has gnawed at me for years. Many people suffer traumatic experiences, but only some encounter what they believe is another reality. On the flip side, some people experience another reality without a psychological trigger. Why are some people predisposed toward God and others not?

  Enter the “God gene.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Hunting for the God Gene

  DON EATON TOLD ME he was born wondering about the universe. But he traced his first conscious memory of this passion back to his twelfth birthday, when he received a telescope.

  “It was a little five-inch telescope. And I remember the first time I took it out the back door and actually saw Saturn, with the rings on it,” he said. The immensity of space—of God—overwhelmed him. “And even at twelve years old I was thinking, How can you capture spirit? This is way too big for words and thoughts, it’s just all mystery.”

  Don was in his fifties when I spoke with him. His face was weathered, and laugh lines framed his wire-rim glasses. His goatee was flecked with gray. Don’s smile came easily, quietly, the smile of a man who knows a secret, which he would be glad to tell you if only you asked. And his lineage had a mystical strain. His father served as a minister in the United Church of Christ.

  “My father’s ministry was more a ministry of asking the question rather than coming up with answers,” Don told me.“I’d go to him with a question about spiritual matters and he would say, ‘That’s too small a question.’ Whenever I’d ask him for the answer, he’d say, ‘Well, my take on it is this, but you’ve got to come up with your own faith, because if you believe what other people tell you, you have their faith, not your faith.’ ”

  The spiritual wanderlust, it seemed, was passed down from one generation to another. For Don, the search culminated one afternoon in 1980, after lunch, when he was driving along the freeway near Board-man, Oregon, in his 1976 Datsun. It was ugly landscape, rocks and dirt. Don was an itinerant musician and activist. He had recently completed a three-week tour of Oregon high schools, a thankless job where he had been playing his guitar and lecturing about peace and justice to groups of cynical teenagers. He was thirty-three years old, married, underpaid, and on a perpetual search for spiritual answers. At that sweaty, fretful moment, his future seemed as bleak as the landscape.

  “I was hot and tired and bored. And I was going,‘Oh, man, I’ve got another four-hour drive to get home.’ I was just thinking, maybe I should get a job with benefits and a regular paycheck. I was feeling really discouraged. And suddenly this thing just happened.”

  Don poured these musings into a handheld tape recorder.When he traveled, he made audio letters for his friends, which back in 1980 was cheaper than a long-distance phone call. Gradually, the brown ocean of earth before him began to glow, as if someone had turned up the “brightness” knob on his television set. Then, in an instant, the world exploded into pixels of light. His hands began to shake, his breath became shallow. Don clicked the recorder off and veered to the side of the road. A few moments later, he reached for the tape recorder again. This is his account, and as far as I know, this is the only mystical experience narrated live.

  “I guess I’ve just had the kind of experience that Saul must have had on the road to Damascus. All of a sudden, just out of nowhere, I just got a sweeping experience of the Holy Spirit, I guess. That sounds kind of strange coming from me, because I don’t talk like this very often, but I was just moving along and Whammo!

  “I went all goose bumps and all the hairs on my arms and legs just started standing on end and I was just k
ind of full of electricity. Not exactly a voice or anything like that, but kind of a bright, shining message came through to me that said . . .‘Yes, you do understand me, and here is some more understanding,’ which is just . . . I’m starting to cry again . . . which is just an amazingly joyful experience for me.”1

  After the vision faded, Don leapt from the car and, crazily, a man possessed, started hurling rocks at the ground, one on top of another, splitting them open.

  “They looked like gold to me,” Don told me twenty-five years after the experience that still makes his skin tingle. “Everything, everything, was beautiful. There was nothing that wasn’t full of light—it was that kind of ecstasy. And later, I was reading the Gospel of Thomas, and I came to the phrase,‘Kneel down, break open the rock, you will find me there.’2 That’s exactly what happened to me. I literally broke open rocks, and they were full of light and beauty and everything was infused with God. I just burst into tears.”

  Don paused, gathering his composure. Then this guitar player in Oregon echoed the words of mystics through the ages.

  “It was the actual experience of unity with everything else. It was the classic drop of water in the ocean. But the thing that occurred to me that was miraculous was, I felt the ocean in the drop, not just the drop in the ocean. I felt I was God-stuff—that I was made up of the same stuff that God was made up of, and the only difference is God knew that, and I didn’t.”

  I heard familiar themes in Don’s experience: in the moments before the event, a soft brokenness, or sometimes a dark night of the soul; during the experience, the light and the voice, the joy and the unity with all things around him; and after the light ebbed, a radical shift in how he viewed the world that persists to this day. By now, I had heard so many stories like this that I could almost write the script.

  But there is something else, which is why I relate this story. From the very beginning, Don seemed wired to search out God, to place the eternal questions above all others. It was an urgent and sensory thing for him, and it was obvious to everyone else—his family, his wife, even the friend to whom he later described his experience.

  “And I said, ‘Man, I don’t know why I was blessed to have this experience, because it’s certainly nothing that I did. I was just driving along the road,’ ” Don recalled. “And my friend just looked at me and said,‘I don’t believe that for a second.’ I said,‘What do you mean?’And he said, ‘You have been knocking on the door one way or another as long as I’ve known you.You’ve been on a spiritual pilgrimage, you’ve been on a deep quest. I think the experience happened to you because you’ve been priming the pump for years.’ ”

  The question for me is, why did Don Eaton embark on a spiritual search from the time he was a boy? Why did he look through the telescope and see spirit, while others see the Big Dipper? Did he experience unusual transcendence because he pursued it—and if so, why did he want to pursue it in the first place?

  Then there are the other mystics I interviewed. Sophy Burnham jumped with both feet into Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and meditation, before going to the mountains of Machu Picchu. What drove her? And why did she hear the thunder of the universe, while the other tourists heard a history lecture about the fortress? Why did Arjun Patel see Buddha’s eyes when he meditated, while his friend sitting a few inches away did not?

  When I asked Arjun this question, he shrugged in genuine puzzlement.

  “I don’t know why it happened to me,” he said. “But I’m pretty convinced it has nothing to do with me being a special person. The only qualification was that I was a human being.”

  Yes and no. Arjun was pursuing a spiritual life with more verve than the average college freshman. Realistically, not many eighteen-year-old men meditate every day. An internal rudder steered him that way.

  You need not visit an ashram in India to recognize that some people are more spiritually inclined than others. The question is, why are some people spiritual virtuosos and others spiritual duds? Here the evidence is just emerging, but the research suggests that spirituality is genetically “soft-wired,” like intelligence or a gregarious personality.

  The search for those religious genes has barely begun.We are a long way from building a neuroscience of religiosity. But the concrete has been laid and you can begin to see the superstructure of this new edifice. I will begin, then, with the foundational work: the notion that spirituality runs in the family.

  A Knack for God

  A few years ago, shortly after I had joined National Public Radio, my mother went to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to hear the National Symphony. She was freshening up in the ladies’ room when in walked Nina Totenberg, NPR’s Supreme Court correspondent and one of the most famous of my colleagues. My mother identified herself and said, “Oh, Ms. Totenberg, I do so admire your work.”

  The next day, Nina dropped by my desk.

  “Barbara,” Nina said in her operatic voice, “I met your mother yesterday. She’s so . . . spiritual-looking.”

  Nina was right. My mother is spiritual. To my mother, events and even physical objects have eternal significance. They are Plato’s forms that are only a shadow of the real, unseen world. As a devout Christian Scientist, Mom relies on prayer for everything from finding a lost ear-ring to recovering from the flu. Although I am no longer a Christian Scientist, I seem to have inherited her transcendent view of the world. And although no one would describe me as “spiritual-looking,” I did for a few seconds peer, as she did, at the misty border of another dimension, and emerged, as she did, fundamentally changed. Of course, it is entirely possible that Mom did a very good job of training me to be spiritual—nurture at work. But I have often wondered, what about nature? Could genes be at play?

  It makes sense that some of Mom’s spirituality landed in my genes, since half my genetic coding comes from her. I decided to try to measure how much our sensibilities overlapped. I called psychiatrist Robert Cloninger at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis. Cloninger has developed what has become the gold standard of personality tests.3 His paper-and-pencil questionnaire measures, among other things, “self-transcendence,” or an inclination toward spirituality. That includes one’s belief, or disbelief, in phenomena such as mystical experience, or a belief in miracles, the supernatural, and a force greater than oneself directing one’s life.

  The four dozen or so spirituality questions are embedded in 240 questions, so you cannot really know which ones are aimed at measuring one’s propensity toward God beliefs or, say, optimism. After my mother and I took the test, separately, we found that our answers about spirituality were identical. I was impressed. Of course, that does not prove anything. But it is suggestive.

  Certainly, I wondered whether this was a rigorous enough instrument. And one night at dinner, my husband—a political scientist and an expert on South Asia—asked the obvious.

  “Is anyone concerned that self-reporting questionnaires are notoriously unreliable?” he asked. “If I wrote an article about India and said, ‘I interviewed the Indian government and they said they were into peace and disarmament, that they had no desire to threaten Pakistan with nuclear weapons’—if that was the extent of my research, people would question its validity.”

  Scientists admit this is the chink in the armor. Indeed, the test itself implied this weakness. Question 230 is: “I have lied a lot on this questionnaire. True or false.” But at this point, it is their best methodology. The self-transcendence questionnaire has become, for now at least, the basis for not only statistical twin research but genetic analysis as well.

  A few days later, I told Nathan Gillespie about the identical results my mother and I had scored on the spirituality test. Gillespie is a researcher at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics in Richmond, and he has been thinking about the interplay between genes and spirituality for some years now.

  “Spiritual beliefs tend to clump in families,” he replied. “That’s one of the questions
we’re interested in: What makes some individuals more spiritual than others? Why does spirituality aggregate in families? Why does the apple fall not very far from the tree?”

  To unravel that mystery, scientists look to twins—in particular, identical twins, who come from the same embryo and share virtually all their genetic makeup. (Recent studies suggest that there are tiny variations in the DNA of identical twins, but they are minuscule.)

  Of course, social environment or upbringing clearly plays a part in one’s spiritual yearnings. Moreover, researchers believe that which religion a person practices has almost nothing to do with DNA, and everything to do with parenting and culture. A person joins a Southern Baptist church not because there’s a Baptist gene but because he grew up in Mississippi going to his parents’ Baptist church. The same is true of the Hindu girl in New Delhi and the Shia Muslim boy in Tehran.4 Still, how intensely a person believes in Jesus or Vishnu or Allah is guided at least in part by his or her genes.

  Let me pause here, because the words that I have so blithely written represent a tectonic shift for me, and perhaps for anyone raised in a particular religion. While religions make claims to doctrinal truth, genetics points to the capacity in each of us to experience transcendence, to envision and connect with another dimension. Genetics—and science in general—cannot referee between Christianity and Islam, or Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. It cannot determine winners and losers. It can explain the mechanics of satellite transmission but it cannot say whether ABC or NBC has better content.

  This is not to say that the scales fell from my eyes and I suddenly saw that all religions are one and the differences can be handled in footnotes. Far from it. Rather, I realized that I needed humility as I thought about what faith I embraced. This was dangerous territory for me as a Christian, but I could not shake off the feeling that there might be many vectors to Truth.