Transcendent Power

The transformation—caterpillar to butterfly—happening inside the dark of the cocoon calls to our sense of wonder, inviting us to join with our destiny in moving toward the great mystery. In similar manner, spiritual transformations also surpass the vision of human eyes, stretch the boundaries of language, and test the edge of faith. Perhaps we gain reassurance about life after life as we witness the metamorphoses of butterflies; since ancient times they’ve symbolized the soul. Transformational growth of the soul happens in this world as we advance in our experiencing the awe and bewilderment of transcendence. 

A primary place for spiritual transformation comes in a kind of death and rebirth of language. In Mystical Languages of Unsaying, Michael Sells asserts: “The transcendent must be beyond names, ineffable” (p. 2). One response to this challenge, modeled by many mystics, is the practice of silence, surrendering speech in the acknowledgment of a far superior knowing. The book of Job teaches the hard lessons of this pathway.

In addition to silence, engaging aporia (“irresolvable internal contradiction”) can bring us into the experience of awe, almost as if a rebirth of language into another power. This endeavor best proceeds through “himma” (intense spiritual resolve) toward the God who is both immanent (e.g., Psalm 139, “in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me”) and transcendent (beyond our thinking and imagining; e.g., Eph 3:20). 

Sells calls such discourse “the mystical languages of unsaying” and says it “begins with the aporia—the unresolvable dilemma—of transcendence” (p. 2). He explicates texts from Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn ‘Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart.

“At the high end of the scale of performative intensity are passages …in which the mystical discourse turns back relentlessly upon its own propositions and generates distinctive paradoxes that include within themselves a large number of radical transformations, particularly in the area of temporal and spatial relationships” (p. 3).

Sells shows how the “unsayings” provide a kind of experience in the field of transformation; they don’t just talk about it—we have opportunity to feel it.

“apophatic language attempts to evoke in the reader an event that is—in its movement beyond structures of self and other, subject and object—structurally analogous to the event of mystical union” (p. 10)“At the heart of that unsaying is a radical dialectic of transcendence and immanence. That which is utterly ‘beyond’ is revealed or reveals itself as most intimately ‘within’: within the ‘just act,’ however humble (Eckhart), within the basic acts of perception (Ibn ‘Arabi), within the act of interpreting torah or fulfilling the mitzvot (Moses de Leon), or within the act of love (Marguerite Porete). When the transcendent realizes itself as the immanent, the subject of the act is neither divine nor human, neither self nor other… The moment in which the boundaries between divine and human, self and other, melt away is commonly called mystical union.” (p. 7)

Even proximity to this mystical discourse takes my breath away, and I don’t seem to be able to stay there for very long. So I’m glad that additional spaces for spiritual transformation come through the arts and through play with language such as storytelling (e.g., tales involving metamorphosis such as Psyche, Beauty and Beast) and parables. John Dominic Crossan says

“When comedy ensures that language, rendered strange by literature, is seen most openly and acknowledged most freely as structured play, the narrow gate to transcendence has been opened” (p. 49, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges).

The “arts” extend beyond visual art. In “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag includes in the arts “the activities of the painter, the musician, the poet, the dancer” as stages for “the formal dramas besetting consciousness, each individual work of art being a more or less astute paradigm for regulating or reconciling these contradictions.” Like the paradoxes attended in Sells’ unsayings, Sontag situates contradictions in the “project of spirituality”: “plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at resolving the painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.” (Her essay is included at the beginning of Styles of Radical Will, cited from p. 3-4.) 

Persons who know me will not be surprised when I add horsemanship to the arts listed by Sontag, especially because it participates in the spiritual project that involves the resolving of contradiction.  For me, the breath-taking-away event happens again and again when I experience the sweetest engagement with the massive power of the horse in the moment we meet on the most subtle level. For example, when we best transition from the trot to canter, it isn’t communicated through physical cues or even through verbal command but instead as if  in an imagination or wish or spirit.

This paradox of power in which the light rather than the heavy brings forth the transcendent is also (and probably more frequently) evidenced in its negative form when force is attempted and things turn ugly. Greatness (e.g., “Make America …”) is often viewed in terms of Power; tragically when the transcendent goes missing, results are ugly.  Jesus said, “The greatest among you will be your servant” (Matt 23:11). We teeter at a crucial time when being great depends on transforming the enactment of power and greatness into this transcendent level.

It’s not easy, and yet it is. It’s like reaching for the beauty and art of riding and how it comes in when letting go more than by using force. Similarly, approaching the mystics doesn’t happen by force. For example, it just doesn’t work if I force myself to read Michael Sells or Chittick, Corbin, etc. Instead, it moves by gradual immersion and absorption; and somewhat surprisingly, for me, “getting it” works when accompanied by easier reading, particularly mysteries (e.g., Ellis Peters) and novels (e.g., Iris Murdoch) whose narratives probe the paradoxical nature of truth, love, and power. 

This discussion opened with the butterfly as symbol for transformation. We might also do well to consider the plight of the butterfly as warning for the endangerment of spiritual transformation. The monarch butterfly merits special attention as it is under consideration to qualify as an endangered species; the eastern monarch has declined 90% in two decades. In a similar way, I believe the quality of tending the human soul has diminished severely; the transformational butterfly of our being has been sorely neglected. Signs are everywhere, but who sees? Who cares?

In his introduction to the biography of Iris Murdoch, Peter J. Conradi focuses the forces that shook apart the foundation that (in my view) had supported a faith-field where spiritual transformation made enough sense to live by. Condradi set Murdoch’s “work in the context of the cultural/intellectual life of the mid-twentieth century, of the generation who struggled to come to terms philosophically and emotionally and artistically with Stalin and Hitler, with existentialism, and with the slow collapse of organized religion” (p. xxv, Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch; see also, Diane Butler Bass' work). Today, especially in the U.S.A., I believe we’re still struggling to come to terms with all this as well as with the Vietnam War and subsequent exercises of power. If we cannot transform and transcend, we appear condemned to living with lies. As with any time of crisis, spiritual transformation is vitally needed in order to invoke the transcendent.