Phronema

I feel as though I am in a dream, as though nothing I am engaged in is really real. The worst part is, as in a dream, that I cannot get a grip on what is real. It is not just that God is absent and the yawning gulf of his absence is a felt emotion. God has become a meaningless word. There is nothing to be absent. There is no emotion. There is this fuzzy, hazy, cotton wool shrouded existence and nothing else.

After living for so long in a warm and comfortable cocoon of my own making I am now exposed to the elements, faced with uncertainty and nagged by anxiety – all on a homely domestic scale – nothing major or life threatening like that faced by billions of people down through history and in the world today. All the time a little question has been niggling away on the edges of my attention – Where does God fit into all this? 

The God I have been accustomed to dealing with has been, partly a mental construct (of memories, of experiences and speculative thoughts), partly a void beneath the surface of reality (with all the terrifying attraction of the plunging fall of a high cliff beneath ones feet), but most of all, the focus of a deep and persistent yearning. He seems to have no place in this mundane world of practical things, of tasks and shopping, work and leisure. He does not enter into our plans, is not a factor in the negotiations and decisions of our daily lives. Moments of prayer, meditation and worship are, more often than not, a hiatus in the daily course of events, a suspension of important and necessary activities. We have become completely secularised and there is no longer a link between the secular and the sacred. There is no longer a sacred.

And yet beneath all this, soft, half felt, an undercurrent runs, of yearning and desire – an impulse to love, to be and be with –  all without a who and without a why.

I have been reading Thomas Merton’s journal – my bedtime reading – the one written at the time of his affair with M. What I find really interesting is not what he has to say, but what he does not say. It is full of the events of his daily life – the books he is reading, what he is writing, life in the monastery, his comings and goings and mainly his relationship with M. Sometimes he talks about enjoying the peace and silence of his hermitage. But he does not talk about his prayer, nor about his relationship with God. OK, perhaps that is understandable at a time when he is having an intense relationship with a woman, a relationship with an important sexual dimension. For a celibate monk who had hardly spoken to a woman for years this must have been completely bouleversant. (Sometimes the French word is so much more appropriate.) How could such a thing happen to a monk/hermit after years of prayer, ascetical living and solitude? And happen so easily and quickly, with him rationalising it and seeking to justify it as loving God in and through her. The obvious thought is that for some time before this his prayer and his sense of his relationship with God must have been very stark and empty. He was finding little, or no emotional solace in it. (I haven’t read the previous journal to this so I don’t know. I guessing.) But this is to be expected and he, of all people, knew this. After the initial honeymoon period there comes the long journey into an increasingly arid and empty desert. This was his chosen way to God. He could have chosen love and family life, but that is a journey through a different landscape with its own difficulties. He chose the starkness and simplicity of abandoning everything in pursuit of the All. In fact, he did not abandon everything. He had quite a privileged position for a monk, a life of writing and research with access to pretty well anything he wanted to read and to a wide circle of people. Nor did he deny himself little trips out with friends and visits to restaurants and bars. All understandable and no doubt it kept him a rounded person. But it meant that instead of striking out into the desert he hovered on the fringes still a way to go to the inner mountain.

I think too that after a long time in what Belden Lane called the fierce landscape of the inner desert the expectation of arrival any time soon diminished. The journey was going to go on and on. Little consolations along the way, instead of being seen as distractions, or diversions, were welcomed and savoured. And this is where I think he got sidetracked. One has to give up all thoughts of arrival. The goal is not a goal. One has to give up all thoughts that one makes this journey in order to arrive at a terminus. There is no goal, no terminus. There is only the dark and empty desert. This is how Lane puts it –

In the practice of contemplation, one comes eventually to embrace an apophatic anthropology, letting go of everything one might have imagined as constituting the self – one’s thoughts, one’s desires, all one’s compulsive needs. Joined in the silence of prayer to a God beyond knowing, I no longer have to scramble to sustain a fragile ego, but discern instead the source and ground of my being in the fierce landscape of God alone. One’s self is ever a tenuous thing, discovered only in relinquishment. I recognise it finally as a vast, empty expanse opening out onto the incomparable desert of God. [Belden C. Lane, The Consolation of Fierce Landscapes, OUP, New York 1998 p. 11]

• There is a large gap between talking about reality and reality as experienced. Perhaps it is just my ageing mind, but erudite discussions on the nature of the Trinity, the relations between the Persons and the relationship between it and us leave me cold. It seems so much froth. At least in our discussions of empirical reality our concepts are rooted in experience. We do not, cannot, experience God as he is in himself. In mystical experience it is not God we experience but God’s (for want of a better word) touch.

• The absence of ‘God’, darkness, emptiness, the Void, sunyata – is a truer experience of God than any ecstasy or vision.

• How can we discuss Christ’s nature, divine and human, the hypostatic union, the nature of his sonship etc. when we do not even understand our own nature?

‘The religious life does not depend on the dogma that the world is eternal or not eternal, infinite or finite, that the soul and body are identical or different, or the dogma that the saint exists or does not exist after death…’  (Buddha, quoted in The Three Pillars of Zen, Philip Kapleau, Anchor Books, New York, 1989  p. 75) 

A very interesting point.  Reality does not depend on theory, or dogma, but so often we shape our lives according to theories and dogmas which may be a long way from reality.  First get in touch with reality then start thinking about the theories if you feel the need but by then they will be superfluous.

There was a programme on the other night of Michael Palin following in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway. There was quite a bit of discussion about bullfighting and some of the ritual in the arena was shown, though not the actual kill. It struck me how little those who protest at the cruelty to the bull understand what is going on. Bullfighting is all about the triumph of the slender fragility of humanity over the wild and chaotic forces of nature. The matador represents us all. Beautiful in his suit of lights, elegant and graceful as a dancer, he faces the savage energy and brute ferocity of the bull. Alone on the open expanse of the arena, armed only with his intelligence and the dexterity of his movements, he channels the destructive charges of the bull, diverting them round himself. He choreographs a dance of life in the face of death. Again and again, black death fixes him in its sight and bears down on him only to be delicately diverted. Sometimes, so close is the encounter, death brushes him with its flank as it charges by staining him with its blood. Eventually death stands exhausted, head lowered, glowering. The matador provokes one last charge, leans over the horns of death and kills the bull.

This is not cruelty or wanton destruction. This ritual addresses the fears and hopes of us all and affirms that humanity can transcend the terrifying forces of nature. All identify with the matador, although few are brave or dextrous enough to be him. He wears our bright hopes as he walks out onto the arena of life and death. His fears are our fears, his wounds our wounds, his triumph ours too. No one likes to face up to the brute facts of existence. We feel too inadequate, too powerless. This is why we need heroes who will act on our behalf. This is what Jesus did. He walked out alone to face the greed, the vested interests and the inhumanity of the powers of his time. He opposed them and they killed him. That was the worst they could do to him, that was the extent of their destructive power. It was not enough. The forces of life are greater than the forces of death and by rising again Jesus deflated the power of death. He emptied it, voiding it of its fearfulness. He widened our perspective so that we could see beyond the circumscribed arena of our daily striving. He showed us that death is not terrifying, all-engulfing darkness but a door.

The contemplative stands before that door every day. He, or she, steps alone into silence, leaving aside the practicalities of living for a time, to stand before the darkness. Mute. Alone, entraining a skein of the relationships that make him who he is, he arrows into the darkness. Like a matador he carries the hopes and fears, the yearnings, voiced and unvoiced, of all and holds them up in the empty darkness at the boundary of existence. That is all he can do. That is all anyone can do. 

I know that the answers that I am seeking are not to be found in books, or in ratiocination, but in experience. That, like thought processes, is not available on demand. Meditation – from which I once had such great hopes, continues as a struggle against wayward thoughts and distractions. I do not seem to be getting anywhere. So I continue to read and make notes in a haphazard fashion.

I am reading Teilhard de Chardin seriously for the first time. His mystical experience informed his thinking and I think this is the way it should be. Experience is our contact with reality. It passes through the filter of the discursive mind where it is interpreted – not always correctly. I was interested to come across this by Bernadette Roberts this morning.

I learned that a single insight is not sufficient to bring about any real change. In time every insight has a way of filtering down to our usual frame of reference, and once we make it fit, it gets lost in the milieu of the mind – the mind which has a tendency to pollute every insight. The secret of allowing an insight to become a permanent way of knowing and seeing is not to touch it, cling to it, dogmatise it, or even think about it. Insights come and go but to have them stay we have to flow with them, otherwise no change is possible.*

Perhaps it is a good idea to call these experiences insights. We tend to consider the tangible encounters with empirical reality and with other people as real experiences. Insights, intuitions and altered states of perception are not in the same class. They are put down as vague feelings, or all in the mind, and not really considered to be in the same class as empirical experiences. Sometimes these insights and intuitions of being can be overwhelming, but other times – more usually, perhaps – they are very, very gentle, quiet intimations which are easily overlooked, or drowned by the cacophony of the material world.  

*[Roberts, Bernadette; The Experience of No-Self, SUNY Press, Albany 1993 p. 30]

No amount of reading is going to provide the answers. I have the strongest feeling now when I read theology that it is all so much speculation. In contrast much of the Bible, and the mystics, speak from experience but they can only speak in metaphors, using symbols and allusions, and it is just not possible to grasp the metaphrand. I know too that such experience is not something extraordinary, not something miraculous, or unusual. It is not necessary to go off into the desert, or find a cave in some remote mountain. It is in this ordinary, everyday experience, often banal, often inconsequential, tedious and dull, that answers are to be found. We are all like Anthony de Mello’s fish looking for the ocean. Like the fish we are immersed in the stream of life without knowing it. It sustains and supports us. We breathe it through the gills of our being and yet we are oblivious to it.

I am gradually beginning to understand. We mustn’t think in terms of before and after death, of this life and the next life, of natural and supernatural. All these are false dichotomies and as long as we think in those terms we will continue to see and experience in those terms. 

Later…  I kept making an effort to see things differently, especially people. The immediate tendency is to categorise the people we see on the basis of clothes, attitude, first appearances, etc. This is especially the case with the superficial encounters on city streets. Today I tried to look at people without making judgements. It immediately shifted the centre of gravity from my perspective – interesting, not interesting, I-would-like-to-get-to-know-him/her, sad, pitiful, etc. – out into what Watsuji calls the aidagara, the betweenness of person to person.

Later again… There is an idea running around the periphery of my mind which I cannot quite bring into focus. It is that God is only to be found in the ordinary and everyday structures. It is not necessary, in fact it may be positively harmful, to engage in the spiritual gymnastics of vigils and fastings, elaborate liturgies and journeys into the desert. These focus the attention on the effort and on the individual. We must be de-centred so that we can find the true centre, the still point. The great temptation is to be doing, to be active. We are reluctant to enter the silence and be still.

Reading an article by John Crook* on authenticity in Zen.  He says, 

‘The living circumstances into which human beings are thrown have been described in terms of four main issues; finiteness, potential to act, capacity to choose, and the realisation of human aloneness.’ 

I was immediately struck by the similarity with the three brute facts of existence as described by O’Dea*.  These are contingency, powerlessness and scarcity. O’Dea and the functionalist theory of religion are looking at the problems of human existence in an objective way. Whatever the person’s inner dispositions, these facts are, sooner or later, going to impose themselves. That is why he calls them ‘brute’.  Whatever one’s beliefs in the goodness of God, however much one hopes that ‘all shall be well’, the death of a loved one still hurts. So too does the inability to do much to ease the suffering of the innocent, or the hunger of the starving. We are immersed in a reality that seems cold, impersonal and totally indifferent to our feelings. 

Crook approaches the same situation in a more subjective way. We only have finite, limited understanding of ourselves and the world and such understanding as we do have is contingent upon circumstance, the availability of others, health and well being, none of which can be taken for granted and none of which are permanently available. Here the meaning of ‘contingency’ is different from that of O’Dea, who understands by it something akin to uncertainty due to dependency on factors over which we have no control. For Crook ‘contingency’ asks ‘Why?’ Why are some born with every advantage and others are disadvantaged? Why are we dependent on circumstances? Beneath these questions lurks the fear that the cosmos really is cold, impersonal and indifferent, that there is no personal God and there will be no final judgement when the inequalities will be addressed, the good rewarded and the wicked receive their deserts. 

Yet we have the capacity for action and gradually realise our responsibility for action in the world. No action can be perfect so we are faced by the risk of condemnation and anxiety generated by guilt or shame. We can only act within that context. So we have to choose a path and in such choice we experience autonomy.  Every action, because it affects others, requires a judgement and a decision. Therefore autonomy can never become being a law unto oneself.  It must recognise that we are social beings and that it is these relationships with others that make us what we are. This is why morality lies at the heart of what it means to be a person.

Yet within that very autonomy we experience our finite limitations and may thus be faced by a sense of meaninglessness. Seeking a meaning beyond our finite worlds we may get lost and experience such emptiness as a great fear. Yet, even while we experience our lonliness we discover we are not alone. We are ‘alone with others’, as Steven Bachelor puts it. In this however there remains the threat of the disappearance of the other or withdrawal from us leaving us in total isolation. Such anxiety is terrifying and the terror genuine. The essence of being human is that we are persons. Being a person means being one pole of a relationship, many relationships – some intimate and formative, others more superficial. The cold impersonality of the cosmos is only tolerable because we have humanised our environment. In trying to answer the existential questions which nag at us we need to know whether this human environment is simply a transient epiphemenon or whether there is a personal driving force at the heart of things. 

Even the most intimate and loving of relationships does not reach to the core of our being. There remains always a part that we cannot open to others, cannot share – perhaps partly because it remains mysterious even to ourselves. Similarly, however much we might love and wish to be united with another we can never reach to the core. There remains always an element of mystery, a private dimension not in their gift to reveal. We long to be known, to be loved and possessed utterly, just as we long to know and possess, so that the inner emptiness might be filled. 

*[John Crook; Authenticity and the Practice of Zen, in Pickering J. (ed.); The Authority of Experience, Curzon Press, Richmond, 1997

 O’Dea, Thomas F.; The Sociology of Religion, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1966 p. 5]