Phronema

… contacts with others invariably alter you, even if only a little. We are like chemicals processed all day long and constantly compounded with other materials. One great continuous process. But which part of you is the original element? It’s almost frightening when you suddenly start to think about such matters. That you pass through the many hours of the day and at the end you are a different person from the one you were at the beginning. [An Interrupted Life: the Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-3, Persephone Books, London, 1999 p. 148]

I came across this the other day. It is always heartening when you find that others are on the same wavelength. Etty says ‘contacts’, I would have said relationships, but it comes to the same thing. We are all inextricably linked, and it is her awareness of this linkage that drives Etty to go with her people to the concentration camp when she might have escaped. She sees herself as a link with God, a conduit through which His love is expressed.

It is really very interesting reading both Etty Hillesum’s diaries and those of Thomas Merton at the same time. At first they seem a bit banal, other people’s preoccupations, not really of much interest to anyone else. But, as you become more and more immersed in their lives, even if it is only a small part, you are drawn into their minds and feelings. They cease to be historical characters and become real people, and you begin to be able to read between the lines and see how their underlying feelings and preoccupations colour their responses to particular situations. You can also see how they develop, how what was initially just an idea, or an insight, or an inchoate feeling, grows and expands to become a major theme governing their personality, their relationships with others and how they react to events. Etty is particularly fascinating because religion played little or no part in her upbringing and development. Her religious awareness develops slowly, at first something so intensely private that she hardly admits it to herself  but which soon becomes inextricably mixed with her reflections on her relationships with others and with nature.

The absence of God. I am not sure how to describe this. It is not the ordinary, everyday absence. Normally people go around not thinking very much, if at all, about God. He is just not there, never has been and so there is no sense of absence. What has never been there cannot be absent. But for me there is a deep sense of absence – a sort of coming home to an empty house feeling. People ought to be there but they are not. God ought to be there but he isn’t. Because of the absence there is a sense of helplessness and powerlessness. There is a void where there ought to be a place to stand. 

God has no name. There is a difference between the Christian personalist approach to meditation and the Buddhist impersonalist approach. What would be the experience of Ultimate Reality for those coming from such different directions? Obviously an individual’s worldview and historical context is going to colour his perceptions. This reminded me of something I read by Denys Turner this morning – ‘the undetached person denatures her world and cannot even properly enjoy it. She cannot meet with reality on its own terms, but only on her own.’

 The possessive self gets in the way. We give things names, not because a name is something inherent in them, but for our benefit. By naming something we are asserting a certain propriety over that thing and it is then labelled and categorised and placed in our inventory of things. But God is not a thing among things. When Moses before the burning bush asked God his name the reply was, ‘I am who I am.’ This is not a name, though for the Jews it was to become a name, the tetragrammaton. But they always retained the intuition that it was not really a name by insisting that it should never be spoken. It is not a name because God does not have a name. We have names so that we may be identified, so that we may be distinguished one from another. In the encounter with God we do not meet a, or even the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Spirit. These are names we have applied to particular concepts. God is the wholly Other, utterly beyond any concept, or anything we could imagine. Language and concepts do not apply – only silence.

[Turner, The Darkness of God, p. 183]

Thinking about God. I had an email from someone worried about eclecticism, about picking and choosing from the various religious offerings. It set me to thinking about God and how we persist in believing in simplistic concepts which, after a little thought, could not possibly be true. Miracles, for example. If God worked a miracle he would not be God. Miracles are divine interventions which alter the natural course of things, usually to some particular person’s advantage. For God to work a miracle he would have to choose to help one and not to help others. The idea of a god who has favourites, who chooses to help some, the few, and allows others, the majority, to suffer and die is not one I can subscribe to. But I can understand why many people do. It is a lottery syndrome. You pray, make novenas and sacrifices etc. and who knows, maybe it will be your turn for a bit of divine intervention. Worse still is the idea, perhaps your prayers have not been successful, that Our Lady, or a saint, will be more kindly disposed towards you and intervene on your behalf persuading God to change his mind. This may fit the picture of a fickle despot but it does not resemble what I recognise as God.

We tend to see God as up there somewhere, in heaven –  a transcendent Being set over and against the world. I think for many people this transcendent dimension is like another universe. We can only get there after death, how is never made clear. From time to time God does cross this gap and intervene in our affairs. The most important occasion when this happened was the Incarnation. Catholics also believe that God intervenes through the Sacraments – though nothing is ever perceived. This is not what transcendence means. Louis Nordstrom puts it well.

‘To paraphrase from the Mahayana classic The Heart Sutra: to have gone thoroughly beyond is to have gone beyond beyond. The point is that true transcendence leaves no conceptual (or conceptualizable) trace – no trace of what has been transcended, what it has been transcended toward, nor any trace of the experience itself. True transcendence can neither be understood in terms of anything else nor in terms of itself: the former because it cannot contain any trace of the relative, the latter because it is, like all things, empty or devoid of self-nature.’*

God is not a being, i.e. a member of the category ‘beings’, or ‘entities’. He is not the most powerful being, not even an Absolute Being. Although he is referred to as Absolute Being this is not, strictly speaking, legitimate. God is not, cannot be an item of experience, not sensible, not emotive, not conceptual. God is ‘beyond, beyond’ any sort of experience it is possible to have. But it is possible to experience the effect of God’s ‘presence’. This is an experience which Stace calls ‘both something and nothing’.

 It is negative, nothing, in that nothing is experienced. It is something in that there is an awareness that this ‘nothingness’, this empty experience, is of profound significance. It is not the nothingness of dreamless sleep, or absent mindedness, or vacuity. It is a nothingness pregnant with meaning. This experience comes with no labels. It cannot be categorised. But it does come with the conviction that, somehow, one is in touch with Reality, with what is not ephemeral, not empirical, not contingent. Christians interpret this experience as an experience of the Divine, Buddhists as an experience of Sunyata. 

The intriguing question which emerges from this is, ‘What is the ‘relationship’ between this totally transcendent God and the human person?’ I put ‘relationship’ even though, as Nordstrom pointed out, God ‘cannot contain any trace of the relative’.

*[Mysticism without transcendence: Reflections on liberation and emptiness, Louis Nordstrom, Philosophy East and West, Vol 31 No. 1 January 1981 Pp.89 -95. Cf. Forman, RKC., Meister Eckhart: Mystic as Theologian, Element Books, Shaftsbury, 1991 p. 111]

The thought that has been uppermost lately is the absence of God. This is easily dealt with at a philosophical level. God is utterly transcendent and that is the end of the matter. At the personal level, however, it is not so easily dealt with. This is because in human experience there is often some leakage across the void of transcendence. Something of God is experienced by many people from time to time. OK, not God as he is in himself. He is utterly transcendent, but something of God, something divine – his energies, according to Orthodox theologians. My problem is how to account for this waxing and waning of religious experience. Why is it the experience of some and not all? Why are the earlier stages of the religious life often rich in such experiences while the later stages are, more often than not, arid and barren? More fundamentally, what is the spiritual dimension of existence? How does it tie in with the physical, interpersonal and intellectual dimensions?  I have always wondered whether this tiny spark of individual experience, at times so intense, at times so dull and banal, has any cosmic significance. Does the subjective experience of the individual reverberate beyond its immediate environment?

But who really knows, who can say

whence it all came, how creation happened?

The gods themselves are later than creation. 

So who knows truly how it all came to be?

Whence all creation had its origin,

whether it formed itself, or whether not,

he, who surveys it all from the highest heaven

he truly knows – or perhaps he knows not.

This is from the Rig-Veda. It is staggering to think that 3,500 years or so ago people were asking questions like these. 

Reaching out is all there is at present. God is not there. I seem to exist on three planes – the material world of my bodily existence, the chaotic world of my convoluted mind and the dark emptiness of the existential now. Although I believe that in the depths of my being I am in God, I do not know that, nor do I experience it. God does not exist in the three dimensions of my experience, only the thought of him.

And yet in some strange way God is present. He is an unseen, unfelt presence – if that makes any sense. How can one know of a presence that is unseen and unfelt? Well, I don’t know it. There is nothing I can point to and say – this is why I know. This is not empirical knowledge. It is some other kind of knowledge which is not knowledge. Neither is it wishful thinking.

Does God answer specific prayers? My feeling is that this is not what God is about. He is not a benevolent fairy godfather fussing over the needs of his godchildren. God’s design for us is that we should be led to transcend this empirical existence, with all its worries, preoccupations, passions and joys, so that we may die to self and go beyond beyond, beyond the temporal and the empirical into the Void where divisions and distinctions cease to exist. This is not to say that many prayers are not perceived to be answered. Nor is it the case that healing, for example, does not occur. Many have the gift of healing. Ultimately all depends on God. Everything flows from Him and to Him but He does not manipulate the trillions of events that occur in a day of the world’s existence. Nor is it to say that the temporal and the empirical is not important. It is. It is the perceived foundation of our existence, into which we emerge and from which we progress. 

It would be lovely to have a kind fairy-godfatherr type God who looked after us and answered all our wishes, but that is not the way it works. To want to have such a God is to fail to understand. It is to look at things only from the perspective of the self, to have an ego-centric viewpoint. Julian of Norwich understood.

Sin is behovely,

but all shall be well,

and all shall be well,

and all manner of thing

shall be well.

For ‘sin’ you can also read suffering, anguish, angst, dukkha, and even death itself. 

Christianity is in a mess at the moment.  Those who believe with any sort of passion and really try to live their religion tend in the main to be fundamentalists and one is always wary of fundamentalism, of whatever flavour.  Why?  Because, I think, it is just not possible to have absolute certainty.  It is arrogant to say that what I believe is true.  It implies, even if it is not stated, that all others are wrong.  There are many people, of course, who are filled with doubts and uncertainties, who dearly wish not to doubt but to be sure and have something solid, clear and explicit to which they can adhere and by which they can judge all the other claimants for belief.  These are sort of people who are attracted to fundamentalism and to the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church in the past claimed absolute authority, it still does but not with anything like the assurance or the general acceptance of former times.  It avoided the fundamentalist position by allowing neither scripture nor the teaching authority of the Church to become an absolute.  Each is tempered and interpreted by the other; both are seen in the light of what has always been traditionally believed.  

The Church is no stranger to crises or to challenges to its authority.  From the very beginning it has had to face other interpretations, which it called heresies.  Sometimes the struggle was long and bitter.  Sometimes the alternatives were more appealing, more warmly human, more idealistic than the inflexible and, at times corrupt, institution.  But they were always ruthlessly put down and none of the good, and there was much good in many of them, was recognised.  The Church lived in a black and white world, an either…or world, with no shades of grey, nor the slightest compromise.  As time passed the challenge of these alternative Christianities faded; some disappeared, others were marginalised, still others split and argued amongst themselves.  None achieved anything like the breadth, the diversity of spiritualities, or the universal dominance, both within and without, of the Catholic Church.

But now the Christian churches, all of them including the Catholic Church are faltering.  How does one go about being a Christian in this world of ours today?  There is no clear cut answer.  Some see abortion as an evil so great that it justifies the murder of those who procure it.  Others could never justify the use of a condom, AIDS notwithstanding.  Some bishops see the expression of homosexual love as intrinsically evil while other bishops describe how the realisation of their homosexuality made them aware of the dimensions of love, including Christian love.  Some Christian groups throw themselves into the struggle for justice to liberate both the oppressed and the oppressor.  Others would deny the Church any role in politics.  The Catholic Church still upholds the ideal of celibacy as something wholesome and good while for years it refused to acknowledge the appalling abuses perpetrated by its priests.  

However, to an extent, these are peripheral questions.  They grab the headlines but for the majority they are not the stuff of daily life.  The underlying question is how does one go about being a Christian in a world where most are not Christians and those who are are not sure what that involves?  “But wait,“ I hear you cry.  “Of course we know what it means to be a Christian.  You keep the Commandments, go to Church every Sunday and say your prayers.  Everyone knows that.“  

True, many people do know just that but if that is all there is to being a Christian it is not surprising that, in the developed world at least, Christianity is declining.  Is this the religion that took the Mediterranean world by storm two thousand years ago?  How could anything so bland, dull and unexciting have been the impulse that led the martyrs to go singing to their deaths?  What was the secret of these early Christians which led them to put their lives on the line rather than compromise their faith?  Whatever it was we have lost it.  Now, rather than making converts, we inoculate our children against religion.  We expose them to bland platitudes in sermons, hypocrisy and double standards.  With our mouths we say one thing but the witness of our lives says another.  It is hardly surprising that they look the other way.

“Ah,“ you reply, “but Christianity is about faith which leads to salvation.“  I think Christianity in the past has been a religion fixed on death.  In the early days it was a serious commitment and included the possibility of martyrdom.  After Constantine and the establishment of Christianity this hankering for an absolute commitment persisted.  Many felt that it was not really possible to be a full-blooded Christian and live an ordinary worldly life.  In fact worldly and Christianity were contradictory terms.  In the Middle Ages the monastic life, with its withdrawal from the world was seen as the nearest it was possible to get in this life to life as it would be lived in Heaven.  Christianity was all about world denial, ordinary life denial, self-denial.

That too has changed and today the problem is the absence of God. An obscure sense of something missing pervades our secular age. What? We are not sure, only that there is a lack. There is suddenly an interest in religious experience. It has become academically respectable and is offered as a course by universities. And then there is an interest in meditation. Many, many people wish to learn how to meditate. Not necessarily because they are searching for God. After all, God is not there, not even as a possibility. But it might put them in touch with themselves. It might delineate what exactly is missing. In a strange way, the more keenly we experience the absence the more we come to understand what is missing. We need to look beyond religion.

 Why is the absence of God a problem? The Big Bang initiated time and space. Hydrogen is transmuted in the stars into the heavier elements of which we, and the world we live in, are composed. Tiny plankton are transmuted into mighty whales. People are born, live for a time and die. The process works fine and is not a problem except for us thinking reeds, le plus faible de la nature, as Pascal said. We wonder how the process came to be and then we wonder why. The ‘how’ we know a lot about and are learning more every day. The ‘why’ is another matter entirely. We don’t know why. Many believe, and nearly all the major religions teach, that God has something to do with the explanation. But what? The world and mankind is taken for granted. OK, God created it and us, but why he should do so is never made clear. It is simply accepted as a fact of life. Thomas Aquinas says that creation is an act of love. Love pours itself out. This may be true but it raises more problems than it solves. Traditionally the main problem has been the fact of evil. If God is all-powerful and if he loves us why does he allow evil? But equally difficult is the problem of the absence of God. If God made us to know and to love him, as the Catechism says, why is it impossible to do either of these things?

I used to think that St. John had it all sorted out. He said that no one has ever seen God but that in loving our neighbour we love God because God is love. He doesn’t say that in knowing our neighbour we know God although in the OT the two terms are often interchangeable. So how can loving our neighbour be loving God unless the act of loving itself is divine, is of the essence of God. In which case we need to ask what is love? 

But none of this solves the problem of the absence of God. Granted that in loving we may be loving God and granted too that God loves us, that his Spirit dwells within us, but none of this impinges on our consciousness. We are not aware that in loving we are engaged in a divine activity. Nor are we conscious of God’s love for us. When we pray our words fall into silence. When we sit, mute, attentive in the stillness for some sign of the loving presence within, or without, there is only an empty darkness. God is not there. Why? 

It is not possible fully to understand what it means to be human without having some understanding of God. At least we have an experiential understanding of what it means to be a person, but God, for the vast majority, is a matter of concepts and those concepts light years from the reality. ‘God may be loved but not thought,’ the Cloud of Unknowing says. So, it is possible to speak with authority only of one’s own experience. This is why the teaching of Jesus is so important. He spoke of what he knew. We too can only speak of what we know but, unlike Jesus, this does not include God.