While still treasuring the written and spoken word, much of my journey has led into (re)sanctification of the body and into knowings that elude literacy. Early years were entrenched in fundamentalism, guarded against indulgence of the body (especially sex outside marriage); scripture was selectively forced to desacralize knowing through the body. Absolute priority was given to legalistic reading of biblical text as pronounced by persons asserting scholarly superiority. The decree was mind over body.
For many of us, this patriarchal model collapsed of its own bent when we pursued intellectual activity. Bart Ehrman’s account of his passage out of fundamentalism offers a clear example as he describes going from Moody Bible Institute to Princeton Theological Seminary (see “Commitment to Truth,” pp. 2-6 in Forged: Writing in the Name of God). As we advanced in academic degrees we found that sacred text yields a multiplicity of interpretation and not the prescriptive conclusions evident in fundamentalism. In a way, this emphasis on the mind leads back to the scripture in Philippians concerning the unique workings out of each individual’s prayerful accountability. (For more on this, see previous blogs: Oct 4, 2017, One God; many faiths and Mar 12, 2017, Going Where… )
The charge to work out one’s salvation with fear and trembling properly brings a person to one’s knees which can also occasion a feeling of need to reclaim the authority of the body, not as indulgence but as grounded knowing, true to one’s own fingertips. As noted in other blogs, my personal attempts to recover authentic voice of body have featured natural horsemanship (e.g., Mar 27, 2017 To Tell the Truth and Jan 4 2018 Faces of the Beloved ) and plant ecology (e.g., Jan 3, 2018 These Frosty Woods). Special gifts from these engagements include increased sense of and appreciation for harmony, for beauty, and for the interconnection of power/love.
It’s far too simplistic to discuss the pathway to God in only two dimensions: body and mind. A more complete and more provocative notion of the Pathway for “spiritual wayfarers on their journey to God” is given in the commentary on Quran 2:189 in The Study Quran:
“Ibn ‘Ajibah, for example, notes in his commentary on this verse that spiritual wayfarers on their journey to God have three houses whose gates they must pass through: the Law (sharīʿah), the Spiritual Path (ṭarīqah), and the Truth (ḥaqīqah), each of which has three gates. The three gates of the Law are repentance, obedience, and reverence; those of the Path are sincerity, the purification from faults, and the realization of virtue; and the three gates of the Truth (also translated as the Reality) are concentration, contemplation, and gnosis (spiritual knowledge). That is to say, human beings should approach God through the means He accepts, the means He has given them.” Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (p. 83). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.
It may be presumptuous to hope for the ninth gate, but it is a fascinating possibility: gnosis! The term and concept refuse to be nailed down and, in that way, require a light touch, open to surprise and insight. In general, gnosis involves “intuitive apprehension of spiritual truths.” The doorway seems to demand appreciation for the mind, the body, and still more.
A special treasure of retirement comes in the space to immerse in varied readings with less disruption from other external demands. It also provides space for playing the readings into experience, including solitude and meditation. Probably these are prerequisites for entering the doorway of gnosis. Feeling the expanse of time for slow reading and the bodily awareness sharpened in solitude, I’m trying again to find my way into the density of Frithjof Schuon’s Gnosis: Divine Wisdom. Perhaps the best, maybe the only way to approach gnosis is as a “bhakta.” In his glossary to this edition, James S. Cutsinger says a bhakta is a “person whose relationship with God is based primarily on adoration and love” (p.182). Schuon affirms the necessity of letting go the dominance of literacy and single-mindedness:
“It is easy to understand the slight respect shown by bhaktas, or by some of them, for ‘word for word’ exactness in belief or worship… there exists a de facto supremacy of the magic of the soul over the correctness of the symbol and that account must be taken of this supremacy if one wishes to grasp every aspect of the eternal interchange between man and God” (p. 15).
This “eternal interchange” is what I take the gateway of gnosis to offer. It’s what takes my breath away with opportunity to let it return, more golden in wonder. The throne of intellect is smashed so that, by grace, admission to God’s Intellect may be accessed.
“… sacred Scriptures remain the necessary and unchanging basis, the source of inspiration and the criterion of all gnosis. Direct and supra-mental intellection is in reality a ‘remembering’ and not an ‘acquisition’: intelligence in this realm does not take cognizance of something located in principle outside itself, but all possible knowledge is on the contrary contained in the luminous substance of the Intellect—which is identified with the Logos by ‘filiation of essence’—so that the ‘remembering’ is nothing other than an actualization, thanks to an occasional external cause or an internal inspiration, of an eternal potentiality of the intellective substance. Discernment exists only in relation to the relative even if this relative lies beyond creation and at the very level of Being, and this explains why the Intellect coincides in its innermost nature with the very Being of things; and this is why gnosis underscores the profound continuity between the diverse forms of consciousness of the absolute. And why this consciousness, some will ask? Because the truth alone makes free; or, better still, because there is no ‘why’ with regard to the truth, which is our intelligence, our freedom, and our very being; if it is not, we are not.” (p. 16)
Wandering in the house of gnosis, I’m humbled, well aware I’m not getting it clearly. And yet, the scent I pick up tracks the Way, best I can tell. I sense the significance of going back out to the trees, to tending the raspberry patch that’s just beginning to yield ripe berries, and to return to the arena with our horse where our mutual training readies the discernment by “filiation of essence.”
Also, in another way, readiness for Schuon probably follows from feeling reassurance through reading Susan Wittig Albert’s memoir, Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place. Albert paints the hill country near Austin, Texas, land to which I owe early wandering from the literalist one-right-way. Her tribute to time spent tending plant life as a medium for growing the soul reassures me about the faint sense of importance I have around loving our woods and gardens. Is the sweat, the time, and money we dedicate to this labor well spent? Although I know the answer is “Yes!” and that the beauty of images found by the camera resonates powerfully, the kind of certainty still wavers before institutional “truth.”
Perhaps I’d find further support in Philip Sherrard’s Human Image World Image: The Death And Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology. Duane Johnson’s review of the book says:
“His [Sherrard’s] plea is simply that we need to restore the ancient and more unabashedly 'metaphysical' outlook if we are to stand any chance of averting the political, social, and moral disasters waiting for us by virtue of our having collectively embraced an unalloyed scientific 'world image’.”
While I’ll probably check out Sherrard, I suspect the certainty I’m longing to trust comes not in the word-world but in another texture more like light, known by warmth and inner vision, more like the sense that the air has turned a golden color and some beauty is calling, longing to be loved. This kind of knowing senses and feels the higher power found by tending the inner garden, the one yearned for by Antonio Machado: “llamo un claro dia con un perfume de jasmin el viento”—the wind one brilliant day called to my soul with the aroma of jasmine…
