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.