Phronema

Meditation and prayer are very different. I find myself wanting to pray during meditation but cannot. Not because I cannot pray, in fact the impulse to do so is often urgent with eloquence, but because the way I see God has changed radically in the last few years. When I prayed it was, not just to a person, but to Person. It was to the Almighty who could, if he wished, grant any desire. Very often prayer was like a bleeding wound pouring out the blood of anguish and desolation, asking to be healed and comforted, what Jean-Louis Chrétien calls ‘wounded speech’. Often it was a cry for intervention, a plea for the rearrangement of events so that I might feel better – though I never allowed myself to think in such a blatantly selfish fashion and always put an altruistic spin on things. Even though I realised there were so many problems with a worldview that saw God as a Transcendent manipulator, as Someone who intervened in history in order to arrange events so they fitted his plan, this realisation did not percolate through to my emotional life. God the Intervenor fitted my emotional needs. The God that made intellectual sense did not. I lived quite happily with this dichotomy for a long time, never questioning the prayer of petition.

However, since I have retired and since I have been meditating regularly and seriously it has been less and less easy to pray like that – for a number of reasons. The sight of the starving children in southern Sudan on the TV screens nearly every day, homeless people sleeping in doorways, young people rejected by their families, the victims of war – there are so many who deserve divine intervention more than I that it is no longer possible to pray just for my needs, I can only pray for others.

In any case it is no longer possible to believe in a God who intervenes for some in response to prayer while he allows millions to continue suffering and dying. More and more prayer, and meditation, has become an exercise in searching for God in the depths of being. ‘Searching’ is the wrong word, as though God was some discrete being concealed from view. It is more an exercise in coming to see in a new way. The story of the little fish searching for the ocean sums up what I am trying to say. It is so difficult to say anything at all about God and yet he is the oxygen of life.

One of the problems with religious experience is that it is raw and unmediated. There are no labels attached, no identifying tags, no introductory explanations. It comes and, after a while, it goes. They are, as William James described, ‘states of absolute knowledge. They are states of insight into the depths of absolute truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance… and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime.’ (Varieties of Religious Experience, Fontana, 1970, p. 367) The recipients would often claim that they were never more certain of anything and that from that moment their life changed. And ever since Sir Alister Hardy set up the Religious Experience Research Centre at Oxford it has become clear that such experiences are far from uncommon. One of the more unusual experiences from the archives of RERC is the following.

Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre Record No. 000861 10.3.70
Name: {name} (Widow); Age 73; British. Father, a well-known author, dead. Mother, dead. Father an agnostic. Mother, Church of England. Neither parent tried to influence their children towards any religious faith; but we were taken regularly to church, and I was educated at a very religious Anglican boarding school where we were taken to Church three times on Sundays and once every day. My husband was a deeply devout Roman Catholic, converted by a vision of the Virgin Mary, which changed his whole life. We respected and never sought to change each other’s beliefs.

At the age of nine, at boarding school, I knelt one evening as usual to say my prayers, as I always had done, when suddenly, like a flash, came the question, as if asked from outside myself ‘Is there anyone to pray to?’ and the answer seemed to come: ‘No!’ There was no God. This was followed by a great sense of relief, thankfulness, pleasure. I need never pray again. Why pray to nothing and no one? I never did pray again. Even during the most tragic experiences, and one overwhelming tragedy when my husband died, I have never felt that I needed anything supernatural on which to lean, to whom to appeal, but just the reverse.

At the age of fourteen, standing alone in the stem of a steamer taking me to France, leaning over the taffrail, watching the wake and smoky wraiths from the funnel diminishing to the horizon, rising from the water as if the waves spoke to me, I heard a voice saying: ‘All men are brothers! Every land is home’. And I felt quite stunned with joy. Henceforth I had a sublime faith. The whole world would be home and every person in it my brother. National frontiers and racial differences would be no more than walls between rooms and variations between members of one family. Every journey would be from home to home. Thenceforth all barriers of class, religion, colour, culture, race, for me broke down, and all people in truth became my brothers. I travelled all over the world, and everywhere people were akin to me. With such a religion, no supernatural beings were necessary or needed. I feel no lack of one, rather joy. It is much easier to explain many problems – example, of evil – without god and devil etc. than with them.

I wish I could impart to everyone else my happiness and relief in being freed from any supernatural-centred religion – and I have studied them all with the deepest attention and sympathy – The universe became for me much more sublime and wonderful when I ceased to believe in such a faith. Man must be his own salvation. He can be, if he wills to be. So could he be his own destruction.

Her unbelief was not an intellectual one but derived from a profound intuition. She knew in some way that the God of school assemblies and childhood prayers – what Pascal called ‘the God of philosophers and savants’ – did not exist. Her initial intuition blossomed when she was fourteen, alone, leaning over the stern of a ship, between the sea and the sky. Her experience is far more complex than the brevity and simplicity of her account would imply. It’s noetic content is a clearly defined concept – all men are brothers, every land is home. She says the words were spoken in her mind ‘as if’ by the waves. I suspect, however, that what she experienced was an intuition which she herself interpreted and articulated and which included far more than two simple phrases. How otherwise can one explain, the unshakeable conviction, the ‘stunned with joy’, ‘sublime faith’ and the ‘sublime and wonderful universe’? The waves ‘spoke’ to her. ‘All men are brothers! Every land is home.’ With such a religion she said, ‘No supernatural beings were necessary nor needed.’ The most interesting characteristic of her experience, almost unique as far as I am aware, is that the profound sense of unity she experienced was not with nature, nor within herself, or with God as she understood him, but with others. Every person was her brother. Here is a penetrating relational consciousness. As she leaned over the stern she became aware, not just of the unity of nature, nor of her union with it, but of a deep bond linking her and all persons. She experiences a communion which remains just that and is not subsumed into a generalised other, nor merged into an absolute Other.

Are we missing something, I wonder, if we think of God only in a vertical dimension. When we receive communion why are we never aware of our union with each other in Christ? The scholastic theologians said that the essence of God is to exist. It might be more correct to say that God’s essence is to relate. As one theologian puts it – for God being is communion.

There was a report recently about a symposium on the Trinity in New York. Judging from the report most of the presentations seemed to be going over old ground. One idea that did strike me though is that in God there are no separate centres of consciousness and decision making. When I first started thinking that the key to understanding what it meant to be human was ‘relationship’ – to be human is not to be a distinct and separate entity but to be a nexus of relationships – I had the thought that this must also be the key to understanding the Trinity. As far as I can see most of the approaches to thinking about the Trinity come from a scriptural, or a philosophical perspective. But, if we are ‘made in the image and likeness of God’, why should we not be able to start from the human perspective. At one time it was thought that we humans were like monads, metaphysical units that have a self-contained life, independent and separate. This gave rise, among other considerations, to possessive individualists who still think like this. Much of our culture is based on the idea of individual freedom and independence. In such a climate the theology of the Trinity must seem incomprehensible. Yet, more and more, we are coming to realise that it is not separate individuality but interconnectedness which is at the root of things. This is not new and Donne saw it a long time ago when he said, ‘No man is an Island, entire of itself.’ Atoms are no longer the minuscule billiard balls we once imagined them to be but particular relationships of particles which are themselves something like packets of energy. There is no solid and substantial stuff out of which everything is constituted. There are only relationships of relationships of relationships. Nor is a person a monad-like spiritual soul which will exist eternally. I too am a relationship of relationships of relationships. Why then do we find it easier to imagine God as a single undivided unity and very difficult to imagine God as relationship? Part of the answer must be that when we look at ourselves we are so focused on the ‘me’ pole of the relationship that we see all the other poles as ‘thous’ or ‘its’. Sometimes, when two people are deeply in love, they can see themselves as a ‘we’; each is so much part of the other that each would be incomplete without the other. Sometimes this extends to a family. Rarely, I suspect, does it extend beyond this. It is not easy to grasp the idea that each of us is one aspect of a multi-polar unity. Or, maybe we can grasp the idea, but to so experience ourselves is another matter. That is the stuff of mysticism. One of the problems with this way of thinking, not only as far as Christians are concerned, but also as a result of the Christian influence on our culture and thinking for most of us in the West, has been the Church’s concern to preserve the absolute otherness of God at the expense of his immanence. We need to be more aware of the lesson of the the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matt 25:40). God is within.

One of the things that has gone is the search for God. We are not sure what we believe about him any more. Albert Nolan, in his book, Jesus before Christianity*, says that asking whether Jesus was God is to ask the wrong question. It imposes our preconceived ideas about God on Jesus. What must be asked is – what can we learn about God by looking at the Gospels, at what Jesus said and did? The God he reveals, if we disregard the various theologies that have appeared since his time, including Paul’s, is an indwelling God, a God of love who wants to serve rather than be served, a healing God who understands and forgives, a God of life and love; above all, a God who is to be found in people but especially in the poor and the suffering.

The idea of the immanent God is strong in Christianity, always has been, but it is overlaid by the idea of the transcendent God. Once Paul, and I suppose John with his high Christology, began the process of trying to interpret God with the help of the prevailing philosophies, it was inevitable that the transcendent would overshadow the immanent. Why? This is an interesting question and it is tied in with our culture because the opposite obtained in the East. Putting aside the influence of Greek philosophy at the time, which was considerable, I suppose it is easier to believe in a God who is transcendent – by definition he is out of reach, beyond comprehension and therefore we can be excused for not being able to understand, for not having any clear ideas or concepts of him. It also transfers the focus of our worship to out there rather than to within – much easier to do. I can see why beliefs in an immanent God and ahimsa have to go together, and why the emphasis on transcendence has been a factor in Christianity being so involved in violence. But if God is within, not only within me but also, shockingly, within the poor, the wretched, the dregs of society – then that is a major hurdle. That runs counter to our natural (or cultural?) instinct to equate God with the good, the beautiful, the nice, the comfortable, the correct (politically and otherwise), the reassuring. The God of Jesus is an uncomfortable God who challenges us to search within ourselves and within others for a reality we cannot begin to imagine.
*Albert Nolan, Jesus before Christianity, Darton, Longman and Todd, London 1992