Phronema

Thinking about prayer and the intercession of the saints leeds to much reflection on the actual state of these saints now. Why should requests to them be more favourably received than requests to God, or Jesus and anyway, whatever their preoccupations and interests while alive, why should they be concerned with me and my problems now. On the other hand my problems are insignificant compared to those of others in so many places. So what right have I to any preferential treatment, especially since evidence of divine intervention in peoples affairs is patchy, to say the least.

This raises the much more profound question of God’s relationship to us and to the world in general. The more I think, pray and meditate the more I become aware of the absolute transcendence of God. On the one hand there is all that tradition and theology have to say of the immanence of God and which I believe. The idea that our Christian destiny is a process of theosis makes much sense. It integrates religious experience with lives of self-sacrifice for others and for God. It explains why loving self-sacrifice for the sake of others does not have to be overtly, or even consciously, religious. But suffering I do not understand. The suffering resulting from self-sacrifice I can understand and I can understand how it can be something willingly accepted, embraced even. Love is kenotic; it is an outpouring of self; it is creative and life-giving and birth always includes a death. But I cannot understand how destructive suffering, the suffering resulting from evil and hatred fits in – the suffering that corrupts, perverts and ultimately destroys the receiver and, more often than not, the giver as well. In the face of the destructive  power of evil, as in Iraq or Palestine, individual acts of self-sacrificial love, of altruism, of generous forgiveness even of the enemy, shine as feeble guttering candles in an all-pervading gloom. 

If God is immanent one wonders why the progress towards theosis has to be so tentative and halting? Why something generated so deep in the depths of the individual that it rarely rises to conscious awareness and then only ambiguously? If above all we are social beings (as even Marx was aware), if our very humanity is dependent on our sociality, if in Christ, and in the Eucharist, we are members one of another, why is each so alone in his suffering? Pain scours and abrades to the depths of being. Perhaps it is cleansing us of self but in doing that it reveals nothing there in the depths, not God, not light, only emptiness and darkness. None of this makes sense. There are no answers, none that can be articulated anyway, or expressed. There is a feeling, however, no more than that, of being on the brink. Of what? A mystery so vast… 

Came across an interesting article the other day. In What Sense a Saviour? The nature and function of Jesus in Radical Theology by Trevor Greenfield.* It was the question itself rather than the radical theology bit that interested me. It was also interesting how quickly and easily Greenfield accepted the premises of radical theology and dismissed the supernatural. OK, we no longer accept the three-decker universe of early and medieval Christians. We are now used to thinking in more than three, or even four, dimensions, but Greenfield dismisses the idea of the supernatural as another, or even fundamental, dimension.

An attempt can be made to circumvent the problem of the seemingly ever-increasing distance between man and God by another simple replacement, namely, ‘out there’ can become ‘beyond there’, taking God and heaven out of the universe altogether whilst still allowing the basic original concept to remain intact. At first glance this would seem to solve the problem once and for all as heaven is moved to another dimension, a realm that science and cosmology can never penetrate. But this time, however, it doesn’t work as well as earlier changes because, as Robinson observes, the paradigm shift resulting from our changing cosmological understanding has brought with it fundamental changes to religious language. Whilst, for centuries goodness and profundity were expressed in terms of height and elevation, now man thinks of profundity in terms of the depth of experience. Man has no desire for a heaven above the clouds or above the universe. He now searches innermost, not outermost, for truth and understanding.

I don’t see a problem here. The needs of many people are still met by an ‘up there’, or ‘in Heaven’ metaphor and a fairly literal understanding of the New Testament and the creeds is not an obstacle to faith, prayer, or a sense of meaning. For others the ‘out there’, or another dimension will suffice. Ultimately no metaphors, symbols or language can deal with the Transcendent and anyone with a basic understanding of the New Testament should realise this, at least implicitly. The problem lies not with philosophy but with psychology. How does one make the transition from a faith based on symbols and metaphors, a faith that can be articulated and explained, to an apophatic faith where all is silence and darkness? Greenfieldacknowledges this, that it is not so much a theological problem as an existential one. It follows that it is in the existential moment, in the ‘now’, this moment that I am living through, that I must look for answers, for meaning. The Protestant tradition seems to have a problem with an immanent God, but the fact that the idea of a transcendent God no longer satisfies the quest for meaning, as Greenfield would have it, does not mean that all is lost. Ultimately each person must stand alone in this now and look within himself, look into the depths that fall and fall into the darkness. To do so is counter intuitive . It is the last thing you want to do. Shaken by a sort of existential vertigo you want to turn away, run away to somewhere bright and solid and secure. To do so is to turn from Reality back to reality, back to the familiar, warm, comfortable reality we have always known, which promises everything but sooner or later ends in suffering and death. And so, for some, it is the last thing they will do. At the point of death there is no turning away. Far better, then, to prepare for this existential possibility earlier rather than later, when you have all your faculties and are not debilitated by illness and pain.

 *http://www.quodlibet.net/greenfield-saviour.shtml

It struck me the other day that the greater emphasis in much that I am reading is on consciousness and awareness and that there is little or none on relationships and love. This is only half the picture. As Marx said we are social creatures, always have been. There is some evidence that language developed in order to manage complex social relationships, and philosophy and theology developed from language in response to the cognitive imperative. While entropy seems to be the way of things as far as the material universe is concerned, there is a drive in the sentient universe towards increasing organisation, complexity and interconnectedness. Perhaps Absolute Reality is ‘That’, neither objective nor subjective, the coincidence of opposites and, transcending all categories, One. And perhaps we, in our deepest being, are oned with the One. To focus exclusively on That is to diminish our present reality, which ephemeral and transient though it may be, is the stepping stone to the truth. Even if we are, like shooting stars, brief trajectories in the darkness, emerging from and disappearing into nothingness, we need to know why. We cannot know what is this nothingness from which we emerge and into which we vanish. What was before we were cannot be part of our experience, nor what will be after we have been. All we have is this now. But if this now, while it may not be really real, is the conduit to Absolute Reality then we need to understand the why of it. And none of the great religions seem to be able to do this.

There are plenty of creation myths, myths to explain the brute facts of existence and salvation myths. But there is no satisfactory explanation, that I am aware, as to why, to put it crudely, there is God and not-God. This is not a proper dichotomy but an apparent one because ultimately everything either is, or within, God – depending on whether one is a monist, pantheist, or pan-en-theist. According to Bernadette Roberts (and, mutatis mutandis, Buddhists) the only thing that is not God, that stands over and against God, is self. So why the apparent dichotomy? Why selves? Especially ‘Why selves?’ if the self is only a relative and conditional phenomenon. I think the ‘only’ in the last sentence points to an unquestioned assumption that the relative and the conditional are not important, or at least much less important than the absolute and unconditional. This assumption may be due to a tendency to think in reified terms, misplaced concreteness again, rather than in processual terms. We have got it into our heads that Ultimate Reality, because it is absolute and transcends spatio-temporal categories, is static – the unmoved mover etc., the ground of being. Maybe. I think our categories of absolute and relative, unconditional and conditional are too crude. I have a gut feeling, no more at present and I cannot explain it, that the self, or rather the person in whom are many selves, is more important, as is the imperative to love, than the fact that it is relative and conditional would seem to imply.