Soul Food

Michele Marr

If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the

most pitiable.

-- St. Paul to the Corinthians 1-15:19

In the days following George Harrison’s recent death, his wife Olivia

and his son Dhani described him as believing, foremost, that “everything

else can wait, but the search for God cannot wait.”

His sentiment has stood for years on a small sign tucked among the

landscape of the Lake Shrine at the Self-Realization Fellowship on Sunset

Boulevard in Pacific Palisades. It is attributed to Paramahansa

Yogananda, the fellowship’s founder.

Long before I came across that garden sign I’d come to believe its

message. The urgency of it hit me one Christmas season while I was still

a teenager.

I had gone with a friend to a party in Beverly Hills. In the midst of

the music and merriment he jumped up on a table, clapped his hands and

shouted, “Nobody gets out of here alive!”

Every voice fell silent. A sense of horror shot through the rooms.

Only the hi-fi resisted the silence. Seconds passed like hours.

Then my friend laughed. He threw his arms open wide and took a

sweeping bow. “Sorry,” he roiled on, “but, really, sooner or later we all

will die! Nobody gets out of here alive.”

Guerrilla theater. My friend had a fiendish humor.

The merrymakers threw him out and I went with him. His point was not

lost on me. Not long before that Christmas my grandmother died.

I had wonder then, what did life really amount to? Did it matter how

much fun we had, or how much good we did, or how successful we became, if

in the end it all simply ended in death? That night as my friend and I

rode home, I wondered about those things again.

It was hard to find God, though, in a world that often made him out to

be man-made. God is so often portrayed as a human device, akin to a

strict parent who is always spoiling our fun, or a make-believe friend

for the weak and dimwitted.

It was just as hard to find God in a world that offered a smorgasbord

of religions. Their differences regarded as inconsequential, the world

politely explains them away, perhaps as Gandhi once did, as “beautiful

flowers from the same garden, or branches from the same majestic tree,”

all “equally true.”

Could this be? What scientists made such claims about contending

theories? We don’t create or choose the physical nature and laws of this

world, whether or not we like or understand them.

We discern them. We experience their consequences. Who chooses to

breathe water instead of air? Why would the spiritual world be so much

more flexible?

Did man make God or did God make man? Is man mortal or eternal? If

mortal, to what end? If eternal, to what estate? And how should we then

live?

So I came to believe that everything else could wait. But searching

for God cannot wait. It is never to soon and it is never to late to

begin. It is always to soon to stop.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer and graphic designer from

Huntington Beach. She has been interested in religion and ethics for as

long as she can remember. She can be reached at o7

[email protected]