Draft…not for release…

 

Lovers: Light/Dark, Open/Closed & Daily reminders of life cycles

Those who might say they know me are unlikely to call me “impetuous,” but surprisingly (especially to me) on several occasions I have jumped in (or out of, over, around, somehow following the invitation: “take-a your chance”). So when my blog-composer-tool puts up “Publish now?…Are you sure?” or whatever it says, I’ll tap it “ok” half-knowing this is a draft that expects revision, maybe deletion. 

     But haven’t we learned to use the term “deleted” paradoxically? oxymoronically? It’s a bit inhibiting to think that every word said (to say nothing of actions done) has been stored somewhere, and possibly in some dim corner of the subconscious already where the fear of such return haunts us. [Note: foreshadowing here. Watch for subsequent “descent/return motif.]  Am I not even warned in the Bible that each fleeting thought might persist to Judgment Day. Perhaps it’s best just not to go there—as if there’s choice. Anyway, this post is published “Draft”… 

And with all that disclaimer, I still see the ghostly figure Kierkegaard approaching with the cartoon bubble overhead: “Despair.” 

Now then, like comfort for a child let’s do story time.

A Tale Told By…   A friend invited me to put my spin in re-telling a love story that in one version begins:  

He came into her life first, and she fell hard. They’d meet on rooftops, where he kissed her like time had stopped and held her like she was everything. She felt safe, even though deep down, he never promised anything. She had been with many before, always the one to leave tired of love that never lasted. But with him, it felt different. Her soul craved the closeness, even if her heart already knew the truth.

So here goes: Once upon a time…   Oops. Hold on. 

     First, a note on my process of composing story. We’ll have to go way back, about 35 years, to when I first experienced narrative discourse enacted by Gioia Timpanelli, who had just been introduced at the Great Mother Conference by Robert Bly as “the greatest storyteller in the country.” Through the next decade or so I’m listening to Gioia, transcribing audiotapes of her tellings, and beginning to try it myself. I was most taken by what I call “asides” in which a different voice or persona comes in, interrupting the narrative flow. I found the asides functioned like a brief commentary that was revealed to the storyteller in the moment of performance as something that was needed for me (and, of course, at times for someone else) in order to get to the Story. The aside somehow mediated the archetypal/personal (similar to the transcendent/immanent, the Self/self), and this allowed access for individual assimilations which might happen or not and could vary according to the readiness of a person for self-development, consciousness, and/or individuation. 

     Whew! That’s a condensation of too much, but it’s been elaborated in previous blogs (especially between Jan 2011 and 2016). In short, this model was the inspiration for my design and implementation of the Good Stories course that culminated my academic career and that often found expression in this blog. Storytelling done in this manner ventures toward an adaptation of Scheherazade’s healing the King through the Thousand and One Nights.

     So, if I’m to re-tell the story noted above, I approach it like a fairy tale 

using guidance from Goia’s model and from theorists such as Marie-Louise von Franz (e.g. The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Boston: Shambhala, 1970).  I might consider the woman in the story as She-Who-Loves. Perhaps this “name” derives from looking for an equal half to the Guiding mantra: “he who knows himself knows his Lord.” The best-case for the would-be lover to liaise with She-Who-Loves looks to be the Archetypal Beloved. Possibly in this rendition, the character progression of Mr. Right might first adapt from the Genesis paradise account in which Adam and the serpent are entwined. 

     This brings the Beauty and Beast stories to mind, especially Psyche and Eros which is drawn from Lucius Apuleius (cf Erich Neumann’s Amor and Psyche), and further developed through C.S. Lewis (Till We Have Faces) as well as other wonderful variations. In addition to these (although I haven’t developed my own blend of it) I’d at least want to source the Majnun/Layla tale for enrichment. Especially of interest in that material are the “madness” of Majnun and the lovers’ capacity to live with longing rather than demanding gratification.

     She-Who-Loves enters with Mr. Right. Depending on the age and development of the audience, he appears as the high-school hunk (or naughty boy); but for a more advanced audience, he may be sophisticated and materialistic. Still more “advanced,” the apparent “beloved” could well be a spiritual teacher, a caring mentor, a best-friend’s spouse… The options are abundant. 

     Their meetings on roof tops suggest a heavenly setting for their romance. Yes? We might draw on personal experience and have love strike at a conference where personal/social ideals are the focus. Wouldn’t an adventure involving natural horsemanship be lovely! Another attractive setting would feature the gathering of friends who search for the spiritual pathway, the better environment, the healing of political, religious, or whatever divides us. 

     I don’t mean to be cynical. That’s just the way love goes as far as I can tell. Making/telling the story offers a wonderful opportunity to turn off the Blame/Shame game because those censors kill life. Let the story go through the theatre curtain and play for a time. 

     For advancing plot, I’m drawn into the descent/return motif where character develops through dark forces more than rosy light. Perhaps we’ll even begin with the Wedding itself! What about opening with a lush lovely wedding and then She Who Loves wakes from her dream. 

    The telling might include a recitation of lines from “The marriage of true minds” or from some contemporary song or ancient psalm. It’s a love-story and surely a most significant Face of God is Love with the Creation, one two three: one, creation of human; two, separation of man/woman; and three, the pairing held in Mystery. Yes, when the young woman takes a lover, the deep self overflows—or as the myths tell it: Cupid’s arrow quickens the pulse and the cautionary brain falls into trance…

     What then?  Yes, soon enough the inevitable broken heart falls from the mountain top—from heaven? Ecstasy seldom strays far from its other side—despair. Kierkegaard says despair IS. It’s unavoidable, especially if a person is to gain consciousness. And yet, not total tragedy. For (according to SK) only despair allows the advent of Grace. Perhaps Kierkegaard doesn’t say it that way (I’m only midway through a first reading of the combined Fear and Trembling/Sickness unto Death), so I recommend checking it out.

     Obviously, I’m caught in this Orpheus theme (Persephone, if you wish) which plots 

1) an opening (Kenosis or self-emptying), 

2) then descent (e.g., through the vent to the Underworld that took Psyche), 

3) x, 

4) return.  

1 The beginning, AKA Genesis 1, (anticipate the serpent). Once there were two lovers. The wedding was grand. Just fill in your fantasy. Options: a) Elopement if you prefer. b) Second or third marriage with previous children attending. c) What else comes to mind…

It seems to me marriage (of true minds and with capacity to LOVE) takes several rehearsals or attempts. So I’m tempted to begin this story with characters capable of engaging more substantial dragons (like the death of God or living with simplicity and truth-telling…and death…hmm, did I already say that?).

2 The middle of the story features plot and related character development and thus involves internal/external monsters, I’d draw on my favorite myths. For example, The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell. 

     For another direction within the descent/return motif, as already noted, I love the variants of Psyche and Eros. 

      In the Weddynge option, Ragnell offers a chance to play into magical transformation, trying to bridge the once-upon-a-time with the contemporary as we reach toward relationships that enact fealty, chivalry, beauty, sacrifice, and sovereignty. Yet, while Weddyng attracts, perhaps the story is too susceptible to perpetuating the worship of superficial beauty and of power-over. 

     Although not immediately evident, the significant character development in the Ragnell story has to take place in the male/masculine, portrayed by Gawaine. While often perceived as “pure” due to the Grail connections and as a most accomplished knight as developed in the Arthurian corpus, Gawaine still needs transformation into the radical performance of loyalty and love that includes (gasp) woman! As revealed 2000 years ago, we must remove the pain-giving impurity from our own eyes. Abundant material to build this part of the story is available in Robert Bly’s writings (e.g., Iron John, Maiden King co-authored with Marion Woodman) and many others, including especially those giving attention to how the man needs to develop the feminine. 

     As well as developing the “heroic,” maturity and spiritual progression in men and women depends on suffering, dealing with despair, and building capacity for co-participation in the revelation of continuous mystery. What are possibilities for sustaining community in space/time beyond but known in “now.” [I think this is the theme of my next blog.} How do we find and maintain the “realm of God” that’s already happening and not just in the hope for an after-life. We have vocabulary for this that would benefit from story, for example “re-deem” as imagine anew by recovering an inheritance and “atonement” which can be storied through the telling of marriage and community reaching into “at-one-ment.”

3 x

     X stands for the Unknown (and likely feels like hell or at least a dark dungeon).  X also signifies multiple possibilities, and this is necessary to fit the Individual whose essential attribute is the Unique. But our Life Design, best I can tell, forces a dialectic in which the absolutely personal gets played by the transcendent (as close to the capital T as we can get). So we each have to compose that part individually which means “live it” (for suggestions, read Kierkegaard, my current choice; Iris Murdoch—an old favorite; death-of-God theologians, eg Altizer); and the one/s that provide that telling resonance for your journey. So I recommend you make your own sense of “why X.” It’s life, as I find it and suppose I wouldn’t have it otherwise. 

4 return

The ending? The story draft I’m working from left off with this line: “He moved on but she still didn't , remained with her trauma” [no period]. 

     While not exactly “happily ever after,” neither is life and often not narrative either. I’m expecting any day now to receive a book order: Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Tantalizing title, yes? The blurb advertises:

Although readers of detective fiction ordinarily expect to learn the mystery's solution at the end, there is another kind of detective story—the history of which encompasses writers as diverse as Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, and Stephen King—that ends with a question rather than an answer. The detective not only fails to solve the crime, but also confronts insoluble mysteries of interpretation and identity. As the contributors to Detecting Texts contend, such stories belong to a distinct genre, the "metaphysical detective story," in which the detective hero's inability to interpret the mystery inevitably casts doubt on the reader's similar attempt to make sense of the text and the world.

Can hardly wait. Because, yes, life remains a mystery. What is love anyway? To say nothing of God—which may be the same question after all. 

So we might want a closing other than the word “trauma,” and I’m leaning toward “…” the open-ended ellipsis. My middle/muddle-of-last-night’s “meditation” went thus:

Perhaps the story resolution resides in no resolution, in surrender of illusion. The image of paradise imprisons. Ecstasy kills reality. Idols of materialism, power, superiority…separate us from God and from each other, now as then. All the great qualities—truth, justice, peace, love…— have demons stuck to them. God won’t be bought or sold to, neither owned nor lost. And here be Stopping Place. 

   My wandering mind brings up SK where he hesitated to publish material that he felt was getting preachy (“edifying discourse” vs “dialectical lyric”}. See Walter Lowrie’s Introduction in the combined volume mentioned above. 

This meditation closed with the suggestion for following the ellipsis with a phrase and another ellipsis: … our work/play never-done… 

   

Quality of light. Near dusk…dawn…

 

Tracking the Holy

May 4, ~6AM

 Notes from May 4 ~2AM: This post I write incomplete—realizing all is.  Maybe in resignation about a draft that began a week ago and is still refusing to come to closure. It began this way:

A friend asks, “What do you do on Sunday?”

What a wonderful question! For Sundays come first and often forefront, anticipating the sacred. And yet, what if each moment of all days should be respected and searched for the Holy? Consider the spirit of “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2) and the model of Jesus who penetrates past the surface of religion, challenging the no-work command in order to do healing as if that is the true way to keep the Sabbath holy (Luke 6). Then an inquiry into Sunday might offer guidance for every day. 

Notes, 9AM, May 4: But I should have realized (given previous forays into sacred ground) that going there enters a realm out of control. Wandering and getting lost has more chance than not. And so, the maze has led into a shift in my reading that swirled into Orpheus (Walter A. Strauss, Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature). Very interesting but more (and more serious) wandering… a force to simply accept (surrender to) the “gift” of fragments.

poppies

Anyway, all this muddle has me wondering about directions. When Lauren visited in January, she commented about how much her dad got confused when driving (or walking). Even for places we’d been six or eight times in the past few days, I’d turn the wrong way. 

And this brings back memories from much longer ago, from when I worked as a chain-carrier for my surveyor dad (and a few times for his father, Lee). I remember Dad’s exasperation in redirecting me north after I’d taken out east or southwest. But he’d only told me “Go north” and hadn’t pointed the way. The kind of inner compass that just knows cardinal directions must’ve been left out of my birthright. 

And yet the absence of that kind of direction-knowing might be a guidance itself. It only took about 50 years for me to find, to accept, and to appreciate the treasure of a different sort of resonance. Persons may be given a capacity with a needle that hones in, not on magnetic north, but instead on giving guidance toward the sacred. Yet to read this directional guide seems to require dedicated development and consistent re-calibration.

     And so, my draft about “What do you do on Sunday?” was like a zephyr going after the Holy. You know, “Keep the Sabbath holy!” I know. I know. Sunday isn’t the Sabbath. And yet, it is. Rule 1: The “holy" moves out beyond literalism. 

Ah, Zephyr-land! Uncle Perry lived there: Zephyr, Texas, pop. 750 when we visited in the 50s, down to 198 over the next 20-30 years (according to Google). Uncle Perry: not an easy fit with the “real world.” Is anyone really? Maybe we’re just fashioned for another realm, and all this trying to fit in, to make it, to succeed!!!—foolishness. There’s a Sunday-thought for us, and it’s nothing new. Rule #2. Align to the true self, the unique, and yet paradoxically One.

The draft then meandered off into the theme of “resonance” but we’ll save that for next time…

one Sunday

Entering Mystery

Why? For example, why am I writing? Why read? Reading for escape and pleasure, sure—why but theology! I’m just completing a collection of essays that … and as I draft this line, my screensaver answers:

Excuse the interruption (although it is the answer in cryptic form, appropriately).

     To resume, I just finished reading Thinking Through the Death of God, edited by Lissa McCullough and Brian Schroeder. The excellent volume is subtitled A Critical Companion to Thomas J.J. Altizer, and it consists of essays by 12 leading theologians, followed by a response from Altizer. My engagement with Altizer has been noted in the three previous blogs; and his provocative soul-searching continues to nourish the journey and to tease the way providing critical bits of understanding along with lots of intriguing not-yet-getting-it. Most, if not all, of the contributors acknowledge that reading Altizer can be difficult, and yet each proves the ultimate value of the effort. Altizer himself, three pages from the end, confirms

“… this is not a challenge to an elite few; it is rather a challenge to us all, and just as each of us has been hurled into a condition of ultimate emptiness, each of us must find a way through that emptiness…” (p. 227)

A helpful comment on this challenge comes in David Jasper’s chapter, “In the Wasteland: Apocalypse, Theology, and the Poets.”

The Self-Embodiment of God has been described by Altizer as a gratuitous gift, the result of a long and deep struggle, and it is perhaps for this reason that its reader—though this is also true of most of his writing—must transcend the author himself, enacting a genuine communion that is nothing short of a liturgical experience. This may well explain why a critical reading of Altizer’s work is so difficult, perhaps ultimately impossible: certainly it evokes a religious reading that, at best, is participatory or even celebratory, rather like his own readings of poets such as Blake or Dante. To read is to speak, which becomes a self-embodiment realized in a silence that is the heart of prayer and celebration. . . in the form of a meditation…

Altizer’s writing…as a poetics that yearns in its very language for a ‘total presence,’ which is, in fact, nothing other than true prayer—a voice of silence experienced as such an intensity that it is everything and nothing. Such total presence in Altizer’s theology is a suspension that explains his profound acknowledgement of Dante’s vision of Purgatory, the place (which is no place) where opposites meet and the possibility is held out for redemption and purification. (p. 185, 187)

     As Jasper articulates, I read (and write) as a means to reach toward the sacred, that is, to pray. Let’s return to his lines: “To read is to speak, which becomes a self-embodiment realized in a silence that is the heart of prayer and celebration. . . in the form of a meditation…” We might substitute “to write is to listen” in place of the first phrase: To write is to listen, which becomes a self-embodiment realized in a silence that is the heart of prayer and celebration. . . in the form of a meditation. When I write, usually as a meditation with material from reading, and when this infuses with the gift of images, the photos provided by “total presence” (as much as I am capable) of beauty in nature, when these “gratuitous gifts” flow in, around and through—well, it’s prayer. And in the silence, grace brings peace, reconciliation of opposites, insight into mysteries, manna for the journey.

A recent, if not ever-present, question/concern for a “solitary dreamer” (a phrase used in Alphonso Lingis’ chapter on “Kenosis” that I accept as apt for me) relates to whether the [solitary] journey must engage community and, if so (as often asserted by writers I admire), how and how much? This band of searchers that crowd my study and demand my time, these theologians, poets, story tellers, and a few walking/talking/loving close friends—Isn’t that the church of today? Consider Lingis on the visionary:

The visionary language makes us see what the visionary has seen. But for us to see what the visionary has seen is for a visionary to awaken in us. It is indeed a visionary in us that alone makes contact with the visions in visionary literature and receives from the visions the writers have received. Thomas Altizer affirms that it is through knowing a primal vision of one’s own time and world that one can open one’s own vision to the infinitely deeper vision of our great visionaries. (p. 205)

     The final word belongs to Altizer. In his concluding page, he returns to a frequent and central theme: the crucified/resurrected body of Christ. As I’m reading this conclusion, my mind echoes, “the body of Christ” as “the church,” the gathering of two or more who compose the profane/sacred mystery incarnate.

If we do not yet know a resurrected body, or do not do so either fully or decisively, we can know a crucified body, and can know the full actuality of that body, and most clearly know it in the ultimate suffering of the body of humanity, a suffering that can be known as a renewal of the Crucifixion. But if it is a renewal of the Crucifixion it is a renewal of the passion of God, a passion inseparable from an apocalyptic transfiguration, a transfiguration only possible through the death of God, or only possible through an absolute self-emptying or self-sacrifice of the Godhead, a sacrifice that is the sacrifice of the Crucifixion, and a crucifixion that is itself the consequence of an absolute genesis or an absolute beginning. But if the Crucifixion is the most ultimate realization of the body itself, it is so only as an absolute breaking of the body, a breaking that is renewed in the Eucharist, and comprehensively embodied in the most ultimate suffering of the body of humanity, then body as body is absolutely real, and finally real only as the body of Christ. This is certainly not the ‘spiritual body’ of Christ, not a mystical body that is an other-worldly body, it is the very reversal of every possible other-worldly body, indeed, a reversal ending every other-worldly body, a reversal that is the totality of incarnation, and only thereby the totality of resurrection itself.

     And as I complete Thinking Through the Death of God, re-reading Altizer’s final lines, this image appears on the screen: 

Wonder-ing

Sunday, April 13, ~4AM

I’m wondering when and how I got nudged (catapulted?) into a recent focus (near-obsession?) around a theme that I’d as soon not be caught in and yet seem unable (unwilling?) to get myself out of. Although the phrase may be more confusing than clarifying, the gravitational source for this orbit (wobble? whirlpool?) seems to be around “the death of God.” Yikes! Some exploration of that phrase is forthcoming, so have patience but also abandon all hope for a satisfactory clarification.

While I recall a sense of being struck at some point when reading (probably on the essential and unequivocal crux of Christianity that must be known in the cross/crucifixion), I’m not finding a specific place or even the text that threw me into this “flow” and therefore splash about supposing that maybe this location/focus/muddle might be more like a crest of a wave that developed over the past year or so than that it happened in an isolated passage. And (staying with the water metaphor), my motion feels more as treading than like swimming with a purposeful, well-defined target in sight. Maybe a dimly-detected direction developed rather gradually as I was being drawn to read some seven books by Stanley Hauerwas, three by Don Cupitt, and five by Rowan Williams.

Whatev-ah, to borrow the summary term effectively voiced by younger friends. Perhaps that tone works because some things in life just refuse focus. Like that shape-shifting form that Odysseus wrestled, these moments (decades?) are not meant to be confined to one stable meaning or center. Still, a bit of review across the terrain/sea might add insight or at least ease frustration.

Moon Setting, April 13, ~6AM

Likely the most compelling writer over the past year has emerged as Thomas J.J. Altizer (1927-2018). In his “theological memoir,” Altizer offers one interpretation of the key phrase:

Why is it not possible to understand the death of God as occurring in the Crucifixion itself? Is the sacrifice of Christ not finally the sacrifice of God? Is this why the cross is the most offensive symbol in the history of religions, one wholly unique to Christianity, and yet profoundly resisted by Christianity itself, as can be seen not only in Christian theological thinking but in Christian art and iconography… Even Dante could not envision the Crucifixion, and when this first fully occurs in Western poetry in Paradise Lost, it occurs only through a revolutionary vision of both God and Christ, one in which an uncrossable chasm separates the absolute sovereignty of the Father from the humiliation, suffering, and death of the Son. This is a chasm that only deepens in the further evolution of a uniquely modern Christian vision. And when the death of God is first called forth in Western vision and thinking, in Blake and Hegel, it is inseparable from a pure vision or a pure thinking of the Crucifixion. Is not the very ultimacy of this offense a decisive sign of the presence of an ultimate faith? Is a truly profound offense possible apart from the depths of faith? Is not an ultimate offense only and wholly within? pp. 106-7 in Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir by Thomas J. J. Altizer, 2006 

Altizer’s synthesis of his own work is stated: “my deepest theological goal eventually became one of discovering a coincidentia oppositorum between [Satan and Christ]. Elaborating on this, Mark Taylor comments in his foreword to Living the Death of God:

It is important to understand that the ‘coincidence’ of opposites is not the ‘union’ of opposites. When opposites coincide, they are not reconciled but juxtaposed to create a tension, which is simultaneously the most profound suffering and its overcoming. As Altizer’s thinking matures, he comes to understand this passion in terms of the death of God. Far from an abstract philosophical concept or literary trope, the death of God is, for Altizer, an actual historical event first enacted in the person of Jesus and then actualized in the course of history, which culminates in the ‘absolute abyss or total darkness’ of modernity… p. xiv

A search for meaning in this “abstract philosophical concept or literary trope” requires considerable willingness to enter the expanses of paradox, parabola, mystery, and suchlike. While wading/sinking into the depths of “the death of God,” I’ve also found it helpful to move back and forth into “fiction,” particularly the novels of Walker Percy, and across into theology, especially the work of Altizer. Helpful also is interpretation of Altizer’s work offered by his colleagues: Lissa McCullough (e.g., her chapter “Theology as the Thinking of Passion Itself” in Thinking through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer; and Robert Detweiler, Breaking the Fall.

Altizer affirms the importance, the vital necessity, of the role of literature and art in our moving forward.

I found that it was literary scholars who were most deeply unveiling this [‘that ultimate crisis which had become our destiny, a crisis shattering modernity itself, and therefore dissolving modernity’s comprehensive negation of theology’], discovering in our most profound literature a religious or ultimate vision that is simply inexplicable through our given theological categories… p. 24, Living the Death of God.

Sun Rising, April 13, ~7AM

As noted above, reading Walker Percy’s novels provide a very helpful weaving from the theological into the fabric of life. For example, in Second Coming, the protagonist searches for God traumatic experiences of suffering, physical/mental/emotional illness, death, and suicide.  In particular, he struggles in knowing the names of “death” (pp. 272-3) and in confronting the ways people seem to be “living death” (p. 324). 

Altizer’s work also contributes to finding peace and presence of the divine even in the times when we feel abandoned:

…the very disappearance of God, or the pure invisibility of God, could make possible a total presence of God. [Monet , Water Lilies… only seen with pond  totality… we can only see these paintings by actually seeing the pure emptiness of God, for only that emptiness makes possible a seeing of the invisibility of God.

    Nor is there even an echo of a mysterium tremendum . Now every mysterium tremendum is absolutely silent and invisible, and only thaat invisibility and silence makes possible such a pure mysterium fascinans , a mysterium fascinans which here undergoes an epiphany as totality itself … an epiphany of the sacred, and perhaps most so because it is not an epiphany of God. Is this a genuine  coincidentia oppositorum of the sacred and the profane, and one in which both the sacred as sacred and the profane as profane are dissolved, or in which each fully passes into the other… Thereby we actually see a pure moment of incarnation, and a moment which here and now is all in all, so that now Earth itself is actually paradise, and paradise in this absolutely joyous moment

(pp. 80, 81, Living the Death of God.)

Morning, April 13

        I think this has something to do with my attraction to photography of Nature and the editing that moves toward the invisible. For now, let’s close with a sense of opening:

While ultimately faith is a gift of grace, humanly it is an ultimate struggle, and the absence of struggle can be understood as an absence of faith, but the struggle itself can only be a truly individual struggle. Hence this is a struggle transcending any possible guidelines or rules, and wholly inseparable from one’s unique condition and situation.  (p. 155, Living the Death of God.)

April, full of Spring!

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).