Promised Land

                             Musing paths taken… Ones left behind … Wondering beyond… 
 

Sometimes alone, surveying the woods, a sense of things distills, and a hard chill penetrates—the social/political world appears to have gone so cold. Are people much less caring now? Is this freezing coming off a world of fear? Or of an icy emptiness that’s warning an avalanche of hate? Perhaps in the pain of life’s losses, folks who might once have been more tolerant of differences now lash out like an ice storm or like a sudden crevice made when hearts break. And eyes lose sight when hit by bitter sleeting wind—when dreams are disappearing and hope dimming.

Once, in a time remembered, the look-ahead viewed down into a promised land that glowed golden with scientific progress, with warm expectations of happy grandchildren, sure of sufficient material wealth to make it to the end. But now, it’s more a mirage that evaporates to nothing. Over the edge, prospects shimmer as a barren desert that’s threatened by financial insecurity, shattered homes, selfish lies, and environmental disasters. 
Such conditions are sometimes related to “postmodernism.” But attempting to make sense of that term often feels yet more mind-numbing, like wandering further in a fog. Rather surprisingly, I’ve found this postmodern heaviness to be eased by reading works that talk about “the death of God.” Hold on. Take a breath.

The phrase does not have to mean that there is no God. 
Instead, it may offer the shock that’s needed to break a frozen conception. Maybe our view of “God” got stuck, leaving behind a faith that’s no longer of the living God. A living God gives vibrancy and renewal. A living God nourishes capacities required in order to pass through the traumatic experiences of life. Stories of God’s people remind us again and again of individuals and groups who lost faith when their religion turned into idols, particularly when caught in the love of status, materialism, and/or power. 
Mark C. Taylor gives a condensation of the complex called “death of God.” His summary packs in too much to take in at once; but when read without expecting to “get it,” the overview may be helpful. Taylor writes regarding “Death of God theology,” God

“does not simply disappear; rather, a particular notion of God—more specifically, neo-orthodoxy’s wholly other God—dies in an act of self-emptying that issues in a realized eschatology that totally transforms the present. Borrowing Nietzsche’s description of the ‘moral God,’ who is the negation of the religious vision of Jesus, Altizer argues that the distant God of neo-orthodoxy is the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes!’. . . The death of the transcendent neoorthodox God is, therefore, the negation of the negation of life, which allows the true God of Jesus (rather than Christ) to be born anew.” 

[pp. 200-201 in Mark C. Taylor’s After God; Taylor quotes Nietzsche, “The Anti-Christ,’ from The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Kauffman, p. 585. He references Thomas Altizer’s Gospel of Christian Atheism as well as his History as Apocalypse and others. For elaboration on “realized eschatology,” see Altizer’s Contemporary Jesus, p. 61 particularly.]

Postmodernism can also be better comprehended when considered in the flow from classical (pre-modern) into modern and on to postmodern and by making comparisons and contrasts among them. Don Cupitt’s Creation Out of Nothing (1990) has helpful material.

We have three visions of the world to compare, classical, modern and postmodern. They are related as thesis, antithesis and synthesis. In the classical vision the world was God’s work of art, produced by God’s almighty Word. In the modern vision the world was constructed as a machine operating in accordance with general mathematical rules, a machine of whose workings we might gain complete understanding and control. In the postmodern vision the world is represented as our expression, our fiction, our communally-produced and ever-changing work of art. We need a new kind of religion for this new world, an objectless, abstract practice of life as expressive religious art (p. 195).

The contrast involves leaving the distant All-Powerful God Who gives laws that humans follow as prescriptions for getting to Heaven, shifting to a God (of the modern time) who guides His people to making a better world, and adjusting further on to the postmodern loss of control with its overwhelming ambiguity, paradox, multiplicity, and uncertainty. Cupitt elaborates on these world changes concerning religion and related across fundamentalism and mysticism. 

“Unable now to look either to the past for legitimation or to the future for justification, we are forced to find and affirm the meaning of our life in the here and now. 
… it must be insisted at once that this does not imply any mystical regaining of Presence in the present moment. On the contrary, there is no mastery of the presence of the present moment. We always arrive a little too late, just as self-consciousness always gets there too late. And there can be no going back on the realization that self-expression is death to the speaker, whether the speaker be the Self or God. I am my life, I am my communicative expression; but as I go out into language I lose my self-identity and become nothing but the many different things that people make of me. Like God, we are nothing unless we give ourselves. Our destiny is to give ourselves by going out into communication, but in so giving ourselves we lose control of ourselves. That self-giving is religion, is love, is God and is death.“ (Creation Out of Nothing, pp 147-8)

In his book written a few years later, Cupitt develops further the possibilities of religion moving into and beyond postmodernism:

“Will the religion of Being be a religion of personal salvation? The old religions promised to the individual person an eternal life and a perfected selfhood. The religion of Being cannot promise that much. It promises only two things—aesthetic joy and happiness in death. (p. 140, The Religion of Being, 1998.)

“Under the new order, things are rather different. Our lives are not pre-planned, and there is no hidden puppeteer pulling wires and managing the plot. Faith in Being feels subjectively very like an artistic vocation, or an addiction to writing. Creativity has become an habitual way of life. All day, every day, a bit of you is listening, waiting for it to come. But how does . . . ‘it’ … ‘come’? It comes when the words that have been whirring in our heads all day, and the various forces struggling for expression within us, suddenly click together. Just for a moment, it all ‘comes right’, Being comes forth and there is a moment of creativity. That’s it. That’s what we live for—the moment when Meaning and Being meet, and something new is born. Our own personal struggle for wholeness in expression has met with Being’s own forthcoming into expression. We are briefly one with Being, and we know what it is to be a son of God and an agent of Creation.” (p. 151, The Religion of Being, 1998.)

As we participate in creativity, Cupitt describes our expression as “fictionalism,” as the making and joining in the play of good stories.

“Now, in religion, I have no new dogma. I am teaching play, I am teaching fictionalism and holy-common religious humanism, and I am saying that the move to these ideas is therapeutic. We come at them on the rebound from the failure of the old quest for transcendence, for reality and for dogmatic truth. The quest, its failure, the rebound and the return into immanence and play have all to be constantly renewed: that is fictionalism. And the return from them into hold-common religious humanism—that is Incarnation.
(p. 141, What Is a Story?)

 

oh shall we believe in life beyond…

Recent readings press into the elusive space/time of faith: beginning-less, end-less…whence?

Gregory of Nyssa summarizes the life of Moses, ascending into his vision of the promised land, as if the release from entering with the troublesome crowd was relief, not loss; as if, already there, beyond.

[Moses] still thirsts for that with which he constantly filled himself to capacity, and he asks to attain as if he had never partaken, beseeching God to appear to him, not according to his capacity to partake, but according to God’s true being.

   Such an experience seems to me to belong to the soul which loves what is beautiful. Hope always draws the soul from the beauty which is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is constantly perceived. . .

   [God] would not have shown himself to his servant if the sight were such as to bring the desire of the beholder to an end, since the true sight of God consists in this, that the one who looks up to God never ceases in that desire. For he says: You cannot see my face, for man cannot see me and live. 

   Scripture does not indicate that this causes the death of those who look, for how would the face of life ever be the cause of death to those who approach it? On the contrary, the Divine is by its nature life-giving… (pp. 114-115, Gregory of Nyssa : The Life of Moses. Trans. Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson)

Included in Morton Kelsey’s Afterlife: The Other Side of Dying is considerable attention to contemporary loss of faith and to the New Testament’s affirmations. He includes a chart showing over 600 “References to Eternal Life, Resurrection, and the Kingdom of God or of Heaven in the New Testament” (p. 160). He quotes John Stanford: “All of this describes the kingdom as a present spiritual reality, but the kingdom as a spiritual reality also has an eschatological character” (p. 162; 274-289).

Finding solace, or even capacity to cope with advancing age and its partner the increasing awareness of death, tends to run into “negative theology” or whatever other language tries not to slide too precipitously off the slippery slope of God—or into.  Perhaps helpful is Don Cupitt’s Mysticism after Modernity:

Negative theology denies that God exists in the everyday sense, but only in order to prepare the way for an affirmation that God nevertheless does exist in some ineffable, inconceivable, higher, and purer sense. God’s Being is so pure that he cannot be thought of as a being, among others. (p. 97)

Particularly relevant to the beyond, David Jasper (noted in the previous blog) quotes Thomas Altizer’s Total Presence: The Language of Jesus :

Genuine solitude is a voyage into the interior, but it is a voyage which culminates in a loss of our interior, a loss reversing every manifest or established center of our interior so as to make possible the advent of a wholly new but totally immediate world…But the real end or reversal of an individual interior makes possible the actual advent of a universal presence, a presence transcending all interior and individual identity, and presenting itself beyond our interior, and beyond every possible interior, as a total and immediate presence. [quoted in The Sacred Desert, p. 182] 

The Treasure of Not-Knowing

Dawn, December 30, 2024

Wintering

 as finishing in-

  to the end of

    the year—

     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).

 

Golden and Poignant

 The golden aura of turning leaves…the poignancy of those falling.

Perhaps you, too, know the compelling power of passion. It covers the universe spanning from blissful ecstasy to deepest suffering. Rowan Williams in Passions of the Soul very helpfully journeys through this complex, reviewing religious writers who demonize desire as well as those who paint the angelic, heaven-directed gaze. 
His contemplation on the Beatitudes is particularly moving. The “goodness of desire” risks corruption into avarice/lust: 

“To love someone else simply as someone who ‘plugs a gap’, whose role is to complete you, is to treat them as less than human, to make their identity serve ours, instead of wondering at their difference, their mystery; and so it never allows your relationship with that mysterious otherness to lead you deeper into the ultimate mystery which is God. ‘Lust’ is something to do with that inhuman or dehumanizing desire that reduces the independent reality around you to mere functionality, a set of characteristics that will slot into the pre-existing space in your heart” (p. 59).  

On Matt 5:8, “how blissful the pure in heart for they shall see God” (David Bentley Hart’s translation), Williams says, “Our purity of heart is discovering again and again, in this or that relationship, in this or that situation, what it is that which opens out on to a deeper level of longing; instead of stopping or freezing our growth, fixing it at the level of temporary gratification” (p. 61).
Rowan Williams earlier magnificent work focuses with its title the cost of those who seek God: The Wound of Knowledge. The knowing of God may be glimpsed in the stunning sunrise but no less and perhaps more in the darkness of loss, the personal experiences through to the social crises that shadow the cross. 

God is here. Transcendent. Immanent. Williams’ closing paragraph:

“Christianity begins in contradictions, in the painful effort to live with the baffling plurality and diversity of God’s manifested life—law and gospel, judgement and grace, the crucified Son crying to the Father. Christian experience does not simply move from one level to the next and stay there, but is drawn again and again to the central and fruitful darkness of the cross. But in this constant movement outwards in affirmation and inwards to emptiness, there is life and growth.” p. 190

 

Reassurance for the Glimpse

“…catching a glimpse of the Divine Nature out of the corner of the mind’s eye…”

   Austin Farrer gives comforting excursions into the territory of the unknown, offering reassurance for feeling lost in the ocean Unknowable. To imagine the eternal through the golden passage in autumnal woodlands is more than wishful thinking.

“…catching a glimpse of the Divine Nature out of the corner of the mind’s eye. We are really saying: since Divine Nature is the standard of what one might expect being simple to be, how does it arise that what our senses meet on every hand is not God, but finite things? And the argument goes on to answer: it is because the finite things have been ordained by God” (p. 45, Reflective Faith).

     Today’s meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation addresses this relationship to the Living Presence in nature and in mutual relationship with people:

“… In my life, listening is a prime spiritual practice. Throughout the day, I seek to listen. I find that I sometimes hear the words but do not bring my full attention to listening. A friend is speaking to me; am I listening with a quiet mind? I see the beauty of the roses in my garden. Am I listening internally, taking a moment to notice the effect that the beauty of the roses has on me? I hear an undocumented immigrant in my community describe how her family lives in fear. Am I listening with a responsive heart? I read a story in the newspaper about heroin addiction in our state. Am I listening? I study a passage in Scripture. Am I paying attention to the details in the passage? Am I providing the time and attention to notice what the text might be stirring up in me?... (drawn especially from Nahum Ward-Lev, The Liberating Path of the Hebrew Prophets ].

Revelation

Sunrise today

    Have you ever felt the infidelity of “I know exactly how you feel”? The attempted comfort uttered by yourself to a dear friend or by someone to you, almost always spoken with good intention, nevertheless betrays the unique essence of profound, inarticulable experience. The holy inhabits silence. “No two sufferings are the same” emphasizes Stanley Hauerwas, in Naming the Silences: God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering (p. 3). Truth approximates instead in “the concrete particular”, 

and “knowledge, in the case of God, requires a lifelong transformation of the self” (p.10 & p.113 in Hauerwas' Theologian’s Memoir, Hannah’s Child).

Often the dawn revelation attempts to unveil the truth: Never the same place. The second hand ticks: a new creation alongside dying. Even side by side in the same instant, no two people share complete identity. Any photo taken, any image of reality cannot replicate another. In the silence, inarticulate, a person may approach the Divine. 

And yet, endowed with speech, especially in story, the transforming self may be shared. And through image/imagination.

Sunrise one week ago

Morning Message

 

Sunrise today reflects the night reading in Moses Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed [Translated by Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip I. Lieberman].

"All the spheres are living bodies with souls and minds that conceive God and know the sources of their being, the incorporeal minds that emanate from God and mediate between Him and every body in the world.” 

...“the spheres are alive, rational, and conscious… The Philosophers call them living beings that obey their Lord, praise and glorify Him—and what praise and glory it is! As it says, The heavens recount the glory of God [, the firmament tells of His handiwork] (Psalms 19:2). How far from the truth are those who read this as poetic personification!”  p. 194 II.4 and II.5