A Preface to the Quest for Completion

I wrote recently a personal collection of essays which are meant to be an explication of my spiritual beliefs. I would gladly share these essays with any of my blog readers. Just send me an email to ricklaw5@msn.com for an electronic copy. The collection is called The Quest for Completion.

A Preface to The Quest for Completion.

Time has passed since I composed segments of The Quest for Completion. I have to say at this juncture (Thursday, August 12, 2010), I am not discontent with the effort and result of my efforts at personal remediation of the human condition and its relationship with a loving God in the Universe (or outside of the universe). While I am the first reader of my writing, I am still too close to my writings to conclude the essays are quality work or not. I can only say that the writings are helpful to me personally on my faith journey.

Since I am not a trained theologian, philosopher, or savant, I can only say I do not as yet worry too much about an audience for this book written by me, a lay person. I am an individual who wanted to write a street view of God and personal morality that would be a help to others who perhaps in transit like myself would receive encouragement from me. Essentially, I wrote these essays because I needed clarity in my personal beliefs as I live in a world fraught with disbelief, cynicism, and despair.

This preface is actually prompted by a recent rereading of a favorite book rather than by my own essays. This is a book extremely helpful to me in its discourse on reality and idealism, what is unknown and known, how we know it and how we come to know it.

What I came across today in rereading a recent edition of this book, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is interesting to note in relationship to my efforts. In tackling the "quality" perspective on art and rhetoric and even mechanical or architectural efforts, author Robert M. Pirsig had to settle on a duality aspect of quality and the resolution of what is successful as art, rhetoric, or even scientific theorem. If we just know what is quality but are unschooled in the elements or characteristics of great art, rhetoric, architecture, science, et cetera, then is our finding of quality valid? He concludes that it is.

I think so too, but our ability to discuss the quality of something reflects only on our lack of schooling. A person's subjective and perhaps pre-verbal response to something is not invalid but itself a measurement on the effectiveness of some effort.

In a classical education of the artist, if one has precursors in a domain, one has to meet, match, and transcend the masters to make something truly new and different. However, that classic understanding of art education, is confounded by the making of something of quality when one is unschooled (romantic notion and "no school for geniuses" required concept).

The really good news in Pirsig's novel/essay is that which is successful can not be wholly captured by formal education on any topic. The frontiers of science and art are by definition outside of schooling. Albert Einstein in his evolution as a profound thinker was lucky to have survived formal education such as it was in his youth and locale.

I am reminded of Einstein's resolution of models for light which to me represent a way of reconciling seemingly irreconciliable opposites. Particle theory explained in part the behavior of light and so did wave theory explain the behavior of light and neither theory wholly encompassed what was known of the behavior of light. To close the loop here, the non-existence of God and the existence of God theories are seemingly incompatible except for the explanation each makes.

If I have settled on the existence of God, it is because for me it covers the most ground. The fact I can not resolve the God question on merely rational grounds, means I ultimately have to resort to my innate sense of incompletion (1) as an individual, (2) as a human community. Hence the growth in awareness that I am not God (Hitler needed this realization before all the evil he dealt) and We are not God (Nazi Germany rhapsodized by its leaders as the Master Race fell into sorry ruin). Which is to say we are in quest of completion in unity with God to whom we must answer to be whole and at one with him. That's it in a nutshell.


Theology can be defined as the the knowable about God, a final science at the edge of and beyond the end of material world in which we live and have our being. I am as a "romantic" convinced that theology is not the ultimate resolution, while our rejoinder to God is. It is a delicate knowledge we pursue for in coming to know God we are in pursuit of our calling to transcend an animal nature and keep company with the angels whose sole purpose in not being in being is to glorify God. We have the marvelous task of coming to glorify God in all of our being.

In all humility, as a "classicist" I am respectful of those in science, philosophy, and theology who have given a lifetime of efforts in disciplined study, trial and error. I just have to accept that my efforts here in these essays benefitted from learned predecessors of whom I am so unschooled I could not properly attribute to them each his or her due.

RJH. Revised on Sunday, August 15, 2010 and again Friday, October 1, 2010.