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| Dawn, December 30, 2024 |
Dreaming last night of a friend and mentor (particularly in dream interpretation) who passed over a number of years ago. In the dream, Tom was giving me a new assignment, not surprisingly one that relates to a well-trodden sojourn in the Unknown. Wondering into the trajectory of this theme, I look back over my record of books read this year and into blogs posted. Tracings show immediately in last January’s explorations related to the book of Job, evident also in an early blog post that references Samuel Terrien’s Job: Poet of Existence.
Terrien proceeds to take us through the entire text of Job, just enough commentary along with amplifications from scripture as well as contemporary literature, so that the Deus Absconditus, the ineffable, the mystery surpassing human grasp, eases somewhat through the mist, unsurprisingly by the grace of love.
The theme continues in Kathleen Raine'sThe Inner Journey of the Poet : “There has been no greater loss to modern Western civilization than the loss of access to the sense of the numinous, the holy” (p. 142). The track then moves through a number of books by Stanley Hauerwas (e.g., Naming the Silences: God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering) and further into Rowan Williams (e.g., Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross), David Jasper (The Sacred Body), and Thomas Altizer Self-Embodiment of God).
In these final days of December, I’m in the closing chapters of Jasper’s The Sacred Desert. Jasper explores many ways of expressing the mystery, none capable of capturing it, but just the approach, like a mirage, shimmers as nearness to God, the Beyond All. As we yearn for the Unknowable, the Inarticulate, thought and words are destined to fail, and yet we may, by grace, enlighten by the incarnation. Here are a couple of passages from Sacred Desert (pp. 148, 149).
At the same time this journey is itself quies or ‘rest,’ an absolutely empty anatta that is nirvana. This is seen in the perfect horizontal line of the desert horizon, the purity of utter immanence, unbroken and unending: while the death, as the Kingdom realized, is found only in the stillness of one place—the Desert Fathers knew well the value of staying still in their cells. At the same time the stillness is still moving—always the journey. . . It is a perfect coincidence of opposites—the transcendent utterly immanent, and the immanent perfectly transcendent. Totality is then present as absolute nothingness, even beyond the possibility of self-negation. …
In these moments the task of the theologian is radically transfigured, for it has abandoned the language of theology as it has always been understood in Christianity, and finds itself in the deep experience of the poet, and beyond that in a vision in which, we might say the invisible proceeds up into the visible; a necessary death which transforms consciousness in the loss of identity and self. In Altizer’s words: ‘True darkness can then be known as the fruit of compassion, and the actual death of an individual center of consciousness can then be celebrated as the self-annihilating presence of the universal Christ. Now the way ‘up’ will be the way ‘down’… (Jasper quotes Altizer from The Descent Into Hell, p. 241).
