Psychologists in the 60’s coined "S-O-R" at the same time a group called "The Teddy Bears" sang “To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him….”
A newborn baby, wrapped in a soft blanket, shiny, tiny face sleeping.
A shivering puppy nuzzling into your hand, feeling warmth.
A tender green leaf breaking through soil in the spring.
If you were not moved by any of these three, stop, take two deep breaths and read them again. If you’re still not moved, hold your thumb on the hollow of your neck and feel for a pulse. If you find a pulse, then imagine something else, beyond a baby, or a puppy, of a fresh green shoot that arouses you.
S-O-R represents a human experience: Stimulus, Organism (that’s us,) Response. S-O-R: try it. Choose one of the three examples above – baby, puppy, green shoot. Imagine seeing it. Now imagine yourself seeing it. What would you do next? I find myself coming closer, putting my face closer to the baby, the puppy, the shoot. And I find my hands reaching, as if they had their own sense, not even wanting to wait for my brain to inform them.
S-O-R was a pretty obvious model for the psychologists to invite us to consider. We see Something. Ohhh, something inside us happens, and moves us to Respond. It all starts with accepting the fact that the baby
, the puppy, the green shoot are really there, that seeing is believing. When Copernicus demonstrated that the earth revolved around the sun and ushered in the age of science, faith ran for the exit. We began looking for proof, and seeing became a requirement for believing. And for these 500 years we have been proving that you can’t prove the existence of God, or at least putting us a great argument.
Faith calls us to accept the Something, and leap straight to the Ohh, and to notice what Rises in us. That is the “Leap of Faith” If we can’t visualize the baby, or the puppy, or the shoot, we are bereft of the Ohh. And if there ain’t no Ohh, there ain’t no Response. If the response would have been to come closer, to reach out, to nurture, to love, it would not happen. We can’t love something we don’t know. We can’t be moved to reach out to something that we don’t believe is there.
Amy Winehouse recently recorded the song that plays in my memory, that was sung (more innocently) by The Teddy Bears in 1958, when I was 12. Love and God were things I wondered about. I found both. I can’t prove either, though I can present a lot of evidence. I choose to believe in both. Kathy is in another room. At least I believe she is (I cannot see or hear her at the moment) but I am moved by all the evidence of her love, (Ohh) and the natural Response is to attempt to return her love, to pay it forward to others.
To know, know, know her is to love. Would I love as much if I ceased to believe that she is there?
No. no. no.
As for God, if we see a stream flowing past us, isn’t it natural to look upstream, to instinctively wonder about its source, to want to know where all that water is coming from?
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