Adulthood
Hinduism considers that there are four stages to a person’s life. The first is that of the young student, whose duty it is to acquire the knowledge and skills he will need through life. The second is that of the householder, preoccupied with career, marriage and family life. Adulthood is a busy time. There is so much going on that, if they have not already been alienated from all things religious, people find it difficult to fit in time for prayer. Going to Mass, for those who still go, tends to become a routine social activity rather than a deeply spiritual experience. There are exceptions and for many the Charismatic Movement provides the excitement and fervour lacking in a tired institution struggling to come to terms with modern life. The birth of children, though, is a major event, a life-changing event, charged with awe and wonder at the profound mystery that is human life. The birth of a child strikes a major blow at the dominance of the magisterial self. Up until then self has probably had it pretty much all its own way. Now self yields second place to another, gladly, joyfully, with a deep sense of humility and inadequacy, prepared to give all, make any sacrifice, for this little person who has just emerged into life. As the Japanese philosopher Nishida puts it, ‘ 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.’ This is the beginning of a sort of reverse pedagogy as the child, children, lead the adults back, or maybe for the first time, into an awareness of the mystery at the heart of life, a sense of the indwelling Spirit.
I cannot stress too much the importance of this blow to the self. All the religious institutions have strategies for dealing with the domineering self. The most famous is probably the Ignatian ‘agere contra’, go against your natural feelings. Whenever presented with a choice choose the least preferred option. All these are self-defeating (no pun intended) because they are unnatural and more likely, if one is successful in living them, to lead to self aggrandisement than the opposite. On the other hand, nothing is more natural than loving another, and/or others, more than one loves self. Perfect training for prayer because in prayer, as we shall see, the biggest obstacle is self. With the birth of children we discover what it means to be for others, rather than, up till that moment, to be for oneself. The meaning of my being a self is found in this relationship to others who are more important to me than I am to myself. The experience of loving others in this way can develop our understanding of God. It can be excruciating to see those we love suffering, or in trouble, or in harm’s way. Even worse, to be ignored, or disdained, or rejected by those we love. There is a story about children playing hide and seek. One little boy hid himself so successfully that the others could not find him and eventually gave up. Tired of waiting the boy came out and found they had all gone off. Crying he went to his father, who was a rabbi, and explained what had happened. The old man wrapped his arms around the boy and said, ‘Now you know what it is like for God. He is everywhere hidden and no one is looking for him.’
Old Age
The third age after youth and adulthood comes with retirement, when the children have left home and when the first grandchildren appear. For many it is a time when at last they are free to pursue all those things they have long wanted to explore but never had the time. It is also a time when the immortality they were blessed with in youth evaporates and words like ‘decline’ reverberate unpleasantly. Existential questions which up till now we may have avoided; questions about meaning, about life, about death, force themselves upon us. A void opens up and we are not sure what to do about it. This is how R. S. Thomas describes it.
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 . . .
In the beginning, when we were young, there was the self. Then we discovered others who became more important to us than self. Now, in this third age we begin to suspect that, like the far side of the moon, known to exist but never seen, there is a far side to the self. And we begin to wonder what it is that lies beyond self? When we were young the future stretched before us into a distance without end. Now that we are older the future has shrunk so much that we prefer to live in the now, appreciating each day as it comes. The third age is the age of now – this present moment. It is a reflective age, a contemplative age, the age of the inner room.
I would like to say something about the inner room. Jesus said, ‘When you pray go to your inner room, close the door and pray to your Father in secret.’ The inner room is not any part of the house, though it is good to get away and be private. The inner room is within. It is what in India is called the cave of the heart.
In this body, in this town of Spirit, there is a little house shaped like a lotus, and in that house there is a little space. One should know what is there. There is as much in that little space as there is in the whole world outside. Heaven, earth, fire, wind, sun, moon, lightning, stars; whatever is and whatever is not, everything is there. [From the Chandogya Upanishad]
It is customary to think of God as utterly transcendent – up in Heaven – beyond all thinking or imagining. We talk so glibly of God, but Eckhart told us off – ‘why prate you of God?,’ he said. ‘Whatever you say of him is untrue’. God is beyond all our imagining, all our concepts. But God is also immanent – transcendentally immanent. That is God is within. He is within in the sense that it is he who holds everything in being. God is not transcendent in the sense that he created everything that is and it exists over and against him and he sustains it there in existence. He is not transcendent in that sense. Simone Weil thought something like this when she said that the original sin was creation because then something came into existence which was not God. Creation was not the original sin in that sense but perhaps self comes near to being. I’ll come back to that.
God is immanent in the sense that he is intimior intimo meo, as St Augustine said, that is, more intimate to me than I am to myself.
“Too late have I loved you, O Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! Too late I loved you! And behold, you were within, and I abroad, and there I searched for you; I was deformed, plunging amid those fair forms, which you had made. You were with me, but I was not with you. Things held me far from you—things which, if they were not in you, were not at all. You called, and shouted, and burst my deafness. You flashed and shone, and scattered my blindness. You breathed odours and I drew in breath—and I pant for you. I tasted, and I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for your peace” [St. Augustine, Confessions, Book 10, Chapter 27]
Unfortunately for us, Augustine’s experience is not that of the average person. And what he describes is like talking about landmarks to a blind person who has no way of verifying them. Nevertheless, in the depths of our subjective awareness God is present. We don’t know this. It is not something we can grasp. It is not part of our ordinary experience, but if we are going to pray, if our prayer has any meaning, we need to believe it.
Let me try to explain. Take a moment in a person’s life, a significant moment of heightened awareness. A person, for some reason, is suddenly acutely conscious of his environment – sights, sounds, colours and smells, of beauty and of the coherence of everything, or he becomes aware of the tragic unfairness and impersonal cruelty of events. The person is conscious of this and of his mental state, which includes both awareness of involvement in and, at the same time, detachment from these events. Out of the sense of detachment rises the question: of what significance is this moment? Is it merely a moment of subjective consciousness, meaningful to me but of no consequence to others, or in the universal scheme of things? Or, is the significance of this moment something which transcends the purely individual and personal? Has it a significance which transcends the here and now?
If subjective experience has no transcendent or cosmic significance, if experience is trans-subjective only in the sense that it impinges on the subjective experience of certain related others, and then only in a way that affects the subjective experience of the other without any sharing in the subjectivity of the other, then human life has no meaning other than that which an individual, or a collective of individuals, chooses to assign to it.
If there is no transcendent dimension to human experience then human life is only relatively more significant than that of ants and then only because of our enormous power to affect the existence of our own and other species, even the eco-system of the planet itself. Life is only worthwhile as long as the individual feels that it is. All values are relative, even those commonly agreed to be universal. But, if there is a transcendent dimension to our existence, if, as we believe, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, does dwell within, then each human person is priceless beyo
nd measure, holy, sacred, a temple to the indwelling God.
Let me try and put what I have just said in the simplest possible terms. Mary Murphy is kneeling by her bed saying her prayers. Is what is going on in Mary’s head, and heart, just a personal and private experience, purely subjective, of no consequence to anyone or anything other than Mary, or is what she is doing something which reverberates far and wide? If Mary’s prayers count for anything it is because, there are depths and depths within of which Mary is not aware. Ruth Burrows says that there are two kinds of contemplative prayer – what she calls ‘light on’ and ‘light off’. There are a few who are aware of the presence of God within, people like Julian of Norwich. These are ‘light on’. But for most of us it is ‘lights off’. We are not aware. We cannot see. We have to trust, we have to believe that prayer is not wishful thinking, or words falling into silence.
We are not used to praying to the God within, or better, with the Spirit within. It can be difficult, almost impossible, to think that this person with all his warts and blemishes, both physical and moral, with all his failings, this very ordinary, nothing-special person, me, could be loved so much that God wants to dwell within him. Gerard Manley Hopkins felt this intensely.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
But we need to remember that however disgusting, or unattractive we may appear to ourselves at times, however ashamed we may be of what we are, we need to remember that God loves us more than we can ever know. There is a lovely little poem that I came across a long time ago from somewhere in the East, I am not sure where, about a barber, someone at the bottom of the social pecking order.
The Spirit of Blessing has passed before my house
The house that belongs to me, the barber!
I ran, He turned and waited for me,
Me, the barber!
I said, “May I speak to you, O Lord?”
And he said, “Yes.”
And I said, “May I follow you?”
And he said, “Yes.”
Even me, the barber!
And I said, “May I stay near you, O Lord?”
And he said, “You may.”
Even me, the poor barber!
I remember reading a story about a political prisoner in Romania during the communist days who came across a copy of the Gospels for the first time. The thing that really impressed him, that completely bowled him over, was the fact that Jesus was such a gentleman. He went out of his way to be kind and considerate to the poor, the outcasts, the least respectable people. So this is why the inner room is so important. It is where, though we are not aware of it, where the Spirit dwells. The question is, do we enter with, or without all our baggage?