To Claim Certainty from Beauty

The invitation offered through these autumn leaves connects with continued reading in Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: The Development of Humankind’s Spiritual Consciousness. Underhill builds our capacity to challenge the way our access to the divine has been blocked by the misrepresentation of mysticism as duplicitous magic. Do we forfeit our treasure by distrusting the mystic? Why should we accept the lie that God’s presence is limited only to the extreme ascetic? Why allow ourselves to cut ourselves off from God’s Love by filling our hearts with shallow stuff? For example, Underhill says, 

“In the symbolic form there is no mental deception: the self is aware that it is being shown truth ‘under an image.’ . . .  In such a vision as this, we see the mystic’s passion for the Absolute, his intuition of Its presence in his soul, combining with material supplied by a poetic imagination, and expressing itself in an allegorical form. It is really a visualized poem, inspired by a direct contact with truth (pp. 285-286).

Yes, in order to share the mystic treasure, we have to be able to work symbolically, but that is our human birthright. We’re much given to using words, to taking pictures, to doing art in many forms. We just have to go a bit further because it is easy to get caught on the surface, easier to resist paradox, easiest to prefer quick solutions rather than plumbing multiple translations/representations until the resonance of truth calls us home. But it’s in this mystic-like work and play that seeks truth where we find joy and peace. They’re calling from just a dimension further into the beauty, the love, the justice that our fingertips are almost touching and that our hearts are being touched by almost every day. This is the mystic pathway. 

Imaginary vision of this kind is probably far more common than is generally supposed: and can exist without any disturbance of that balance of faculties which is usually recognized as “sane.” “If,” says Pratt, “there be any truth in Freud’s insistence upon the symbolic nature of normal dreams, it is the less surprising that the dream imagination of the Christian mystic should work up visions of a symbolic sort. . . . Our modern tendency to consider visions quite extraordinary and pathological is probably mistaken.” [Underhill, p. 288, quoting from Pratt’s The Religious Consciousness, p. 404]

The pathway depends on choosing Reality instead of “reality.” The trail is marked by appreciation for beauty when the fakes are discarded, by the taste of joy when thrill seeking’s abandoned, when true love gets valued above the cheap substitutes. It’s seeing beyond the surface as Underwood explains “the whole philosophy of vision”:

It is an accommodation of the supra-sensible to our human disabilities, a symbolic reconstruction of reality on levels accessible to sense. This symbolic reconstruction is seen as a profoundly significant, vivid, and dramatic dream: and since this dream conveys transcendental truth, and initiates the visionary into the atmosphere of the Eternal, it may well claim precedence over that prosaic and perpetual vision which we call the “real world.” . . . In these words she [Mechthild of Hackborn] understood how Love had subjected to herself the Omnipotent Majesty of God, had inebriated His Unsearchable Wisdom, had drawn forth all His most sweet goodness; and, by wholly conquering His divine justice and changing it into gentleness and mercy, had moved the Lord of all Majesty. (pp. 287-8). 

Now we see dimly

 

early morning, September 30

This morning fog in concert with dawn light and deciduous woodland serve as reminder of how/when/why we see dimly, summoning lines from the chapter on Love: “For now we see in a mirror dimly” (1Cor 13:12). And, as the word selection points out, sight into the divine remains a puzzle: we see enigmatically. Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers elaborates on the passage from Corinthians: 

“Through a glass, darkly.--Better, through a mirror in a dark saying. The illustration here is from a mirror when the image appears far behind the mirror itself. If we remember the imperfect metal surfaces which formed the mirrors of those days, we can imagine how imperfect and enigmatical (the Greek word is "in an enigma") would the image appear; so that the Apostle says, "Like that image which you see when you look at an object in a mirror far off, with blurred and undefined outline, such is our knowledge here and now; but then (i.e., when this dispensation is at an end) we shall see as you see a man when you stand before him face to face.”

And yet even in the dim and puzzling view, how powerfully may we be touched, moved by Beauty.

The foggy puzzle also pushes us to humility, to acknowledge our limitation, and like Job (as representative of all mystics) to confess: “indeed, God is great—beyond our knowledge” (Job 36:26). To see as mystics see, we sacrifice the presumption that our minds capture Reality and surrender to the gift of Beauty, imprecise as it may appear, insecure as we may feel.  

view through window screen, Sept 29

Evelyn Underhill elaborates so articulately:

 “They [mystics] have never been deceived by phenomena, nor by the careful logic of the industrious intellect. One after another, with extraordinary unanimity, they have rejected that appeal to the unreal world of appearance which is the standard of sensible men: affirming that there is another way, another secret, by which the conscious self may reach the actuality which it seeks. More complete in their grasp of experience than the votaries of intellect or of sense, they accept as central for life those spiritual messages which are mediated by religion, by beauty, and by pain. . .

We must perceive in it, as some mystics have done, “the beating of the Heart of God”; and agree with Heracleitus that “there is but one wisdom, to understand the knowledge by which all things are steered through the All.” Union with reality—apprehension of it—will upon this hypothesis be union with life at its most intense point: in its most dynamic aspect. . .

The Indian mystics declare substantially the same truth when they say that the illusion of finitude is only to be escaped by relapsing into the substantial and universal life, abolishing individuality. So too, by a deliberate self-abandonment to that which Plato calls the “saving madness” of ecstasy, did the initiates of Dionysus “draw near to God.” So their Christian cousins assert that “self-surrender” is the only way: that they must die to live, must lose to find: that knowing implies being: that the method and secret which they have always practiced consists merely in a meek and loving union—the synthesis of passion and self-sacrifice—with that divine and unseparated life, that larger consciousness in which the soul is grounded, and which they hold to be an aspect of the life of God. In their hours of contemplation, they deliberately empty themselves of the false images of the intellect, neglect the cinematograph of sense. Then only are they capable of transcending the merely intellectual levels of consciousness, and perceiving that Reality which “hath no image.” (Mysticism: The Development of Humankind’s Spiritual Consciousness, pp. 23, 30, 31-32)

To move closer to the Divine, we must search out a view of beauty like that of a dew-dampened web, like the love that links us in relationships with all others, all of nature, all humankind, and beyond.

Underhill again:

“Pilgrimage to the place of the wise,” said Jalalu ‘ddin, “is to find escape from the flame of separation.” It is the mystics’ secret in a nutshell. “When I stand empty in God’s will and empty of God’s will and of all His works and of God Himself,” cries Eckhart with his usual violence of language, “then am I above all creatures and am neither God nor creature, but I am what I was and evermore shall be.” He attains, that is to say, by this escape from a narrow selfhood, not to identity with God—that were only conceivable upon a basis of pantheism—but to an identity with his own substantial life, and through it with the life of a real and living universe; in symbolic language, with “the thought of the Divine Mind” whereby union with that Mind in the essence or ground of the soul becomes possible. The first great message of Vitalistic philosophy is then seen to be—Cease to identify your intellect and your self: a primary lesson which none who purpose the study of mysticism may neglect. Become at least aware of, if you cannot “know,” the larger, truer self: that root and depth of spirit, as St. François de Sales calls it, from which intellect and feeling grow as fingers from the palm of the hand—that free creative self which constitutes your true life, as distinguished from the scrap of consciousness which is its servant (Mysticism, p. 32).

An Early Autumn Sunday: Flowers & Fruits

“Unfallen, intelligible spiritual matter is primordial soul, a proclivity for seeing and contemplation, a potentiality for vision that awaits a sight. Therefore we may even call it ‘darkness,’ for sight is light. It is the darkness of deep potency, not a darkness of privation or lack—a virgin, primal, creative darkness, without memory, desire, or understanding. Filled with sight, however, impressed with her true object, this soul is love—‘the love that is an eye filled with its vision, a seeing that bears its image with it.’ Thus soul—human nature—in its true state is the living, qualitative medium of God’s vision of himself.”   

The Voice of the Eagle (John Scotus Eriugena’s Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John, Translated with Introduction and Reflections by Christopher Bamford), pp. 257-258.

Quince

Raspberry

 

The Transcendent Immanent

Sunday morning. 

Waking to a lovely soft rain, christening newly-opened autumn blooms and ripening berries, all proclaiming “God is Great!”

This wonder-filling mystery exceeds human words but reflection on the Word shimmers forth,

 

 

like this passage from Christopher Bamford’s Voice of the Eagle:

“We dare affirm (because it is the truth) that the Creator of the universe himself, in his beautiful and good yearning toward the universe, is through excessing yearning of his Goodness transported outside of himself in his providential activities toward all things that have being, and is touched by the sweet spell of Goodness, Love, and Yearning, and so is drawn from his transcendent throne above all things to dwell within the heart of all things through a substantial and ecstatic power whereby he yet stays within himself…"  

"Therefore, on the one hand they call him the object of Love and Yearning as being beautiful and good and, on the other, they call him Yearning and Love as being a motive power leading all things to himself, who is the only ultimate beautiful and good—Yea, as being his own self-revelation and the bounteous emanation of his own transcendent unity, a motion of yearning, simple, self-moved, self-acting, preexistent in the Good, and overflowing from the Good into creation, and once again returning to the Good.” 

(Christopher Bamford, Voice of the Eagle, pp. 176-177, attributed to Dionysius and in elaboration of commentary on John Scotus Eriugena’s Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John)

 
 
 

Nature’s Path of Beauty

      The Iris Season this year displayed an abundance beyond any we’ve seen in our sixteen years amid these gardens. The fragile blooms lasted long due to unusually gentle breezes instead of occasional strong winds and to a generous space of soft sunlight without heavy rain. Yet after this pleasant interlude, their well-being called for rains and then they came. This life-sustaining gift we welcomed even knowing the blooming side of beauty sooner slips back inside.

      Is it not the very transience that compels us into Presence—shearing us from attachments to a precious side of beauty, a momentary joy, or another attachment? Too easily a manifestation may be frozen into an idol that swears time can be stayed. The false self lies. 

In Raids on the Unspeakable, Thomas Merton contrasts two views of Prometheus leading us to consider our choices of how to live: A) the presumption of the false self that builds up sand-castle idols as if the lies could approach the all-surpassing God or B) ) the surrender before the image of God that’s sowed in one’s heart.

I wonder if contemplating Beauty guides one in becoming able to apprehend beyond the surface, and if this love of the divine form also then aids in discernment of the ugly, of the presumptions, the lies. Might a person thus tell, perhaps by visceral reaction to a countenance that tries to hide lies? Remember the emperor's new clothing made naked to sight untarnished. Truth is evident to clean vision like that of a child, giving discernment not yet compromised by toxic exposures to power, greed, and other distortions that spoil our divine inheritance. 

The Unity that calls to seekers flows in the holy gifts: As when Love comes through into intimate life, like wonderment at the birth of a child, like when Beauty awes us through transcendent lines lifting off iris petals on rays of light, in pearls of raindrop—these moments of being taken into the divine quality. Presence of the One, always here, now. 

The liminal edge shimmers in the prism in the raindrop on the lip of the perfect iris. The numinous shines in the mirror of the heart’s eye reflecting the true self. This grace, this great Compassion feeds the manna of certainty beyond words, known beyond the reach of reason, felt in awe in the wonder of the Presence. It’s sensed in he shimmering passage, the edge of luminosity on the precipice of nothing…

Related readings: 

William Chittick. Self-Disclosure of God . For example, p. 332- on imagination and barzakh.

James Finley. Merton’s Palace of Nowhere. “To use the imagery of Saint John of the Cross, there is a path to walk with ‘no light except the one that burns in your heart’” (p. 12).

Richard Rohr. For example on the Love that removes separation between one person and another as well as from “any other creature.” He continues: “This is something that we can embrace originally at a primal and then deeper levels of consciousness. Children already enjoy this unity at a pre-rational level, and mystics later enjoy it consciously at a trans-rational and universal level.” [ https://cac.org/we-turn-around-one-thing-2021-05-23/ ]

This Snowflake Spring

Gift of Spring: This capacity to trust in life's renewal. Spring brings reassurance, perhaps most powerfully, through the defining integrity of the ephemeral. Like when our being thrills with the beauty shown in the litter of spent blooms, when we realize the rebirth that’s carried in pollen dust, carried home in spring’s spiraling winds, the spring-cast seeding soon enough to be washed into our mother earth. Throughout this, this full cycle, we all are held—if we but believe it—by our eternal home, the One.

This unique transcendent snowflake ever kissing, dissolving, transforming on the porous covering of heartbeat.

The “eternal-now” flows in this and every manifestation. It’s especially poignant in light’s fleeting snapshot: this Beauty. Each instance names the Name, variously called by all incarnations of  Presence: Nature, Peace, Joy…the one Love, of Whom we all belong.

It’s in this, in each instance, in the unique transcendent spring-snowflake ever kissing, dissolving, transforming on the porous covering of heartbeat.

The ever-changing appearance of form, the almost illusion of any separation from the Creator, in the resonant “Be!” the Real that’s present in every particle of breath, in every sign throughout creation. This.

This: The curious inhabiting of transient place, limitless space, ambivalent time, inarticulable knowing, the indwelling simultaneously moving here/there.

Gleaning from recent readings: 

In his chapter on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, James Olney hints at opportunity in the potentially disconcerting ephemerality of spring with its push toward the Source that gives the ultimate order:

“…experience per se, at least so far as humans are concerned, until given formal ordering and completion in the art work, until given the satisfaction of a new life in structural design, is void of meaning; and that design or pattern is the thing which, relating part to part and part to whole and implying an end in the beginning and middle, demonstrates significance in otherwise meaningless experience. But pattern is not discovered by us—mere details and parts, after all, of the whole design of life—-within experience. Instead we, insofar as we are artists, create the pattern and impose it on experience. Art formalizes experience; form implies an end and an intention, and so a meaning…” (Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography, p. 270) 

Richard Rohr in Hope Against Darkness offers a text of Spring, pointing to its wild exuberance:

“The word enthusiasm (en-theos in Greek) means ‘filled with God.’ I’m not encouraging mindless enthusiasm, but the enthusiasm that is based on intelligence and wisdom and that great gift of hope. Hope is a participation in the very life of God. This hope has nothing to do with circumstances or things going well. It can even thrive in adversity and trial. True faith, which always includes hope and love—is a predisposition to yes.” p. 52

 

From the concluding lines of al-Baqarah, a foundation for unity, for hope even in the disintegrating swirl of diverse blossoms that appear so fragile, that seem to be fading, losing the effervescence: 

“The Messenger believes in what was sent down to him from his Lord, as do the believers. Each believes in God, His angels, His Books, and His messengers. ‘We make no distinction between any of His messengers.’ And they say, ‘We hear and obey. Thy forgiveness, our Lord! And unto Thee is the journey’s end.’ God tasks no soul beyond its capacity. . .” (The Study Qur’an, Trans. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E.B. Lumbard, and Mohammed Rustom;  2: 235-236; pp. 124-125) 

Thisness. Just Now.

Photo taken Sunday, February 7, 2021

In the next to last page of her next to last chapter in The Body of God: An Ecological Theology, Sallie McFague eloquently synthesizes her work:

“In conclusion, let us briefly recall how each of these forms of the incarnation radicalizes divine immanence and transcendence. We suggested earlier that when we contemplate the wonders of evolutionary history in both its smallest and its greatest dimensions, through a microscope or a telescope, what we grasp is a concrete experience of awesomeness that comes as close as may be humanly possible to experiencing immanental transcendence or transcendent immanence Suddenly to see some aspect of creation naked, as it were, in its elemental beauty, its thereness and suchness, stripped of all conventional categories and names and uses, is an experience of transcendence and immanence inextricably joined. This possibility is before us in each and every piece and part of creation: it is the wonder at the world that young children have and that poets and artists retain It is to experience the ordinary as extraordinary. This is experiencing the world as God’s body, the ordinariness of all bodies contained within and empowered by the divine.” (p. 194)

McFague then opens her final chapter with lines from e.e. cummings including:

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any—lifted from the no

of all nothing—human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

 

Path-Maker Breaking Stones

"We make the road by walking," photo, January 9, 2021

The primary offering of a mystical text, in my experience, comes in the uniquely personal breaking open of the divine, often only as an elusive whiff at the edge of the articulate, a breeze that dares one to go beyond frozen thought patterns, to venture past traditions that violate the sanctity of freedom. And almost paradoxically, this freedom conjoins with unity, as Rabindranath Tagore told in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech: “We must discover the most profound unity, the spiritual unity between the different races…… He who sees all beings as himself, who realises all beings as himself, knows Truth.” This focuses the heart of Gitanjali, the force that Coleman Barks seeks to liberate and preserve.

        The beckoning pathway forms in glimpsing, in tasting the mystery that remains mysterious while also flavoring the everyday with a texture of life beyond. With this expectation, I looked forward to Fons Vitae’s publication of Coleman Barks’ “translation/version” of Tagore’s Gitanjali (Song Offerings). Having often found support in “making the road by walking” through Barks’ versions of Jalaluddin Rumi (which he fashioned from English translations by Arberry, Nicholson, and others), how would Barks enhance the vitality in Tagore’s own English translation from his native Bengali in the work which led to Tagore’s Nobel Prize award?

        In addition to the 103 songs comprising Gitanjali, Barks includes four additional poems from Tagore’s work, The Crescent Moon, and Barks also gives us a dozen pages of his own commentary and notes. I’d like an additional hundred pages of Barks’ commentary, and still I find that the concentrated material contributes by showing the involvement of W.B. Yates, Ezra Pound, and others as well as pointing to connections with Ghandi and Kabir.

        Barks begins, “Rabindranath Tagore is one of the great universal mystics.” Again, to me, the role of the mystic and thus of mystical text features access to the holy, so that the individual breathes the unique essence that purifies, inspires, and vitalizes, so that he or she moves forward on the pathway “made by walking” (e.g., Antonio Machado, in Campos de Castilla, Proverbios y Cantares, #29) and bridges “these daft twin brothers, life and death” (from Tagore’s #58, p. 76). Barks’ version, just cited, shows the light touch, which serves as a little wake-up invitation, in part through the addition of “daft” to Tagore’s English translation which reads: “the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world…” (p. 149 in Visva-Bharati/UBS Publication of Gitanjali). Barks also features, in the next line, “the storm” in a way that moves me differently from Tagore’s “tempest.” 

        It’s not that one translation/version is better than the other but that a force may be invoked to join the dance, to broker the mystical encounter. In Gitanjali, Tagore offers a departure from conventional religion. For example, number 11 opens:

“Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!

Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with all doors shut?

Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

   He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground

and where the path-maker is breaking stones…” 

     (p. 23 in Visva-Bharati/UBS)

Barks’ version goes:

“Give up this fumbling with beads, this chanting 

     in the dark, shut temple.

… A mason

     is breaking and laying stone for a path.”

      In number 102, Tagore, with beautiful respect for the individual’s responsibility and authority for path-making, tells of people who demand “Tell me all your meanings” and he responds, “‘Ah, who knows what they mean!’ They smile and go away in utter scorn./ And you sit there smiling.” (p. 253 in Visva-Bharati/UBS)

Barks’ version of the middle part of #102 offers, “A secret part of you flows out of me.” 

For me, the chance for a bit more of this secret is the offering from the publication of What Wants to Come Through Me Now.