In the morning darkness

Silence, waiting.

Once, there was expectancy.

Once there was a presence.

Now, silence,

Solitude.

It is not

uncomfortable,

or upsetting,

this waiting.

No one knew he was doing it.  He was trying to swallow all the sounds of the world and then there would be no more world because everything would follow its sound into the silence and then it would be gone.  What the owl had in mind was to get it all swallowed and then fly away.  He only did it at night.  He thought he’d get some of it swallowed every night until the whole world was gone away.

No one knew what the owl was doing except for a child.  He didn’t have any eyes.  He listened all the time.  When he heard the owl saying the silence in his other voice he heard the silence swallowing up the sounds of the world, little and big, from the wind sighing in the trees to the ants crying in their holes.  The child knew the owl was trying to say the whole world away and he knew it was up to him to stop the owl, so he began to listen everything back.  He listened far and wide when he began, he listened tiny when it came close.  The eye of the goat and the dance in the stone and the beetle digging a grave for the sparrow. He listened them into his ear holes and he kept them all safe there.  The foot steps of the moth and the sea foam hissing on the strand.  He listened everything back.

The child only kept the sounds in his ear holes at night.  He kept them safe till morning.  When the cock crowed in the middle of the night it never fooled him, nor when he crowed again before first light.  He kept the sounds safe in his ear holes till the day stood up and the cock of the morning crowed everything awake.  Then the child unheard the sounds and they went back to where they lived.  The child was laughing at the owl, but the owl didn’t know it.  He thought he had done a good night’s work.  He sat in the world tree grooling and smarling all day, thinking he would get the whole world gone, only he never did.

The owl keeps trying and he’ll do it one day.  All it takes is for no one to be listening everything back.  He will go the world away and himself with it and that’ll be the end of it.  But it may not be for a while yet.  Not as long as there is a child to listen.

I would have taken a different route. I think that philosophically all one can do is demonstrate that belief in God can be reasonable. Because God is transcendent he does not exist in any sense that we can understand existence. Therefore his existence cannot be demonstrated. To paraphrase Luis Nordstrom

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.

Which is to say more or less the same, in less elegant terms, that Taoism, the Upanishads, Zen, Eckhart etc. say.

I would have gone down the religious experience road. With regard to the religious experience argument Caroline Franks Davis in her The Evidential Force of Religious Experience concludes –

If the evidence other than that of religious experience does not show theism to be improbable, then the evidence of the many religious experiences which escape pathological and other challenges will be sufficient to make some relatively unramified theistic claims probable.

However you explain it religious experience has been a factor in human awareness as far back as we can go. There are many kinds of altered states of awareness (why they always call them ‘altered states’ I don’t know. They are just different.) of which some are mystical, i.e. they are an experience of God. This is the extraordinary thing. The transcendent God somehow enters human awareness.

Lonergan explains it this way – that there is a distinction between knowledge and experience. Mystic experiences are precisely those that are conscious but unmediated, conscious but unknown. Consciousness refers to experience, whereas knowledge is a composite of experience, insight and judgement. Knowledge occurs only when experience is mediated by images and ideas and brought to reflective awareness.

To say that dynamic state [of mystic awareness] is conscious is not to say it is known. What is conscious is indeed experiences. But human knowing is not just experiencing. Human knowledge includes experiencing but adds to it scrutiny, insight, conception, naming, reflection, checking judging… the gift of God’s love ordinarily is not objectified in knowledge, but remains within subjectivity as a dynamic vector, a mysterious undertow, a fateful call to dreaded holiness. Because that dynamic state is conscious without being known, it is an experience of mystery. (Lonergan, Bernard, Method in Theology, Herder & Herder, New York 1972  p. 106)

Mystical experience, because it transcends conceptual knowledge, leaves no trace of itself within the memory, except a sort of aftertaste, a fading glow. This is that of which one cannot speak. This subliminal awareness sometimes hovers at the threshold, there but not there, a sort of corner of the eye experience which, when looked at is not there. These experiences do not come with any labels, like God, or Jesus, Krishna, or whatever. Labels are the product of later reflection, efforts to understand and make some sort of sense of what really is ineffable. This is why above all others I prefer the Buddha’s approach.

It struck me during the mass that it is a pity the deceased does not get a chance to say anything to the congregation. Much is said about him, or her. Much is remembered, but it is all one sided. So I thought that when it comes to my turn I would prepare something to be read out. There are many references to ‘eternal rest’, ‘at peace’ and ‘resurrection’ etc., but all these are stale metaphors and convey nothing of the death event itself, what it might have meant to the individual (and surprisingly, what it must mean to the family). Nor, not surprisingly, apart from the conventional metaphors, is anything said about the post-mortem reality. So here goes.

To my family and friends

“I would just like to say a few words about dying and death. Obviously these lines are written pre- and not post-mortem. It will not be possible for me to make any comments after the event. And the reason for this is very simple. Death is a radical transition from one state of being to another – so I believe. Others question this. They say death is the end – finish. Not so. Just as there is no way a child, a twin, just born can convey the reality of life after birth to a sibling still in the womb – how does one convey the experience of freedom of movement, the clarity of sound, music and laughter, the brilliance of light and colours, what it is like to be cherished and cuddled! So too with death which, I believe, is our definitive birth after the long years of gestation as persons. A foetus could never even begin to imagine the reality of life after birth, so too with us with regard to life after death.

However, a foetus, were it able to think rationally, could easily deduce that there is life beyond the womb. Similarly for us with regard to death. It is no coincidence that religion, with its concomitant belief in an afterlife, is a universal phenomenon. People, from the time of the Neanderthals and down through history, have been aware that there is more to reality than the surface appearance of things. For someone brought up in the wild beauty of West Clare how could I not be aware that there is more, infinitely more, than the material constitution of things. Tennyson confronted by the sheer mystery embedded in delicate beauty said –

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower— if I could but understand
What you are, root and all, all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Later Matthew Arnold, in a more philosophical tone put it thus –

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel – below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel – there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.

When it comes to exploring this deep and obscure central stream of our feelings and thoughts I think poets have an advantage because they are not bound by the prescriptions of religious orthodoxy. They do not have to prove anything, or define anything. They simply want to unearth (in more senses than one) the experiences and let them speak for themselves. Living is shot through with hints, glimpses and intimations of a reality that is more real than anything we can touch, feel, or examine. Wordsworth got it the wrong way round. We are not born trailing intimations of immortality, but that is how we die. Heaven lies about us in our old age as the light of common day begins to fade.

When I was younger this obscure stream of thoughts and feelings ran just beneath the surface. It was common to feel a sense of a pervading presence, a sense of union. As I got older the stream plunged, deeper, taking with it the clarity of thoughts and feelings. All became dark, but like R. S. Thomas I could say,

Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking

It sounds strange, even paradoxical, to say that God is ‘absence’ and ‘silence’. Yet that’s the way it is. God’s absolute transcendence creates a sort of vacuum into which we are all drawn. So, for me there never was a sense of loss, or doubt, but rather affirmation. In the darkness there was always that gentle pull of the obscure current. Everything is caught up in it – the smallest birds, the song of the bumble bee, light dancing on the sea, children’s laughter. To paraphrase slightly something a Japanese philosopher said, ‘Over time, I came to realise that it is not that love exists because there are individuals, but that individuals exist because there is love’.*

And dying itself? – I suppose one of the advantages of growing old slowly is that one has plenty of time to reflect on death and how it affects the meaning of life. When one is in one’s prime life is for living, living as fully as possible. Old age inevitably means a reduction of energy. Physical systems begin to fail, or work less well. The end is, if not yet in sight, in the fairly near rather than the distant future. This proximity turns a spotlight on the present moment. Of what value is this life now, this moment, this apparently non-productive waiting for the end? I have written about this before in the context of the contemplative life. This seemingly non-productive time spent thinking, contemplating, reflecting, praying – is it simply a solipsistic activity? To the external observer it might seem so but it is not, in fact. There are no private moments. There is no solitude. Experience tells me that all of us are bonded and linked together and that this bond is God’s love, God himself. To quote that Japanese philosopher again, “The centre of the self is not limited to the interior of the individual; the self of a mother is to be found in her child.” So too with God. He is the unseen presence and

…the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence
we call God.

…Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

* The original quote was, ‘Over time, I came to realise that it is not that experience exists because there is an individual, but that an individual exists because there is experience.’  (Nishida Kitaro: 1990) An Inquiry into the Good

From time to time I am seized with a sort of anguish at this unresisting slippage into a mental twilight. Questions arise, recurring again and again, seeking and not finding answers. ‘Of what value is this human life, me?’ ‘What significance has this moment?’ ‘Do these thoughts, hopes, wishes, prayers mean anything at all, or are they simply mental fluff stirred up by the cold winds of reality?’

Against this, never has human life seemed more precious. I exult in the energy and joyfulness of young people. I am full of admiration for those whose generous commitment and willingness to go beyond the mere requirements of the job leads them to help others. And yet, never has the human biosphere been more raw and bleeding. There is the calculated and unapologetic abuse and exploitation of ordinary people by governments, financial and business institutions. There is the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by the Israelis – the mindset which led to the ethnic cleansing and extermination of the Canaanites thousands of years ago still flourishes in Israel. There are large sections of the Old Testament I can no longer read and I wonder how formerly I was ever able to consider them the word of God and accept the horrors they describe so uncritically.

These thoughts are all the more poignant today, Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. Nothing has changed in the two thousand years since that first Palm Sunday, nor indeed in the last fifty thousand. We are as we have always been, a mixture of good and evil, and the strong continue to prey on the weak. Which makes me wonder why we continue to celebrate the passion and death of Christ and recall in such detail the suffering and cruelty of his last few days. Did his death and resurrection really signal an end and a new beginning? Have hopelessness, despair, suffering and death really been conquered? We would like to think so and perhaps this is why we continue to believe. But reality would seem to indicate otherwise. No change.

If faith is just a warm blanket to shield us from cold reality it is an illusion and worse than useless. Sooner or later, it and everything else that is personal will erode and fall away leaving leaving us exposed and naked on the verge of the abyss. We too, like Jesus in the garden a few days after his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, will face the horror of extinction. Faith is not a comfort, or a shield. Faith, true faith, is standing where there is nothing on which to stand. It is seeing where there is nothing to be seen. It is hearing where there is nothing to be heard. True faith is to stand at the verge of the void without flinching, held there by hope and by an ancient memory of loving and being loved.

At Mass when it comes to the consecration I am always acutely conscious of the linkage going back two thousand years to the time when those words were first pronounced. This linkage operates in two planes, as it were, a horizontal one going back in time and a vertical one, now, with Christ. But the linkage is not really a tangible one. Simone Weil uses this analogy. There are two prisoners in adjacent cells with a common dividing wall. Over time they learn to communicate with each other by tapping and scratching on the dividing wall. The wall which separates them is at the same time the link which joins them. So too with us and God, says Weil. That which separates us is also that which links us.

This is fine as far as it goes. There is no doubt a tangible link with Christ extending back through time and through his words his presence extends down to today. But with the vertical link, the now, what separates us is not a solid barrier but a void, an empty nothingness. As R. S. Thomas puts it

Is there a far side

to an abyss, and can our wings

take us there?

And again

For me now

there is only the God-space

into which I send out

my probes. I had looked forward

to old age as a time

of quietness, a time to draw

my horizons about me,

to watch memories ripening

in the sunlight of a walled garden.

But there is the void

over my head and the distance

within that the tireless signals

come from. And astronaut

on impossible journeys

to the far side of the self

I return with messages

I cannot decipher . . .

But at least there are messages.