Iacocca and bishop #4

 Iacocca: While we were apart prior to this next meeting, I have been doing some considerable reflection. Not one to shy away from the most challenging hurdles, nor one who knows the answer to many important questions, I am nevertheless very curious, and while that may be considered one of my personality traits, it is also integral to my relationship with God. That may sound both ironic and surprising coming from someone who has spent his career in the corporate world, after completing a degree in mechanical engineering. In my pursuit of how to participate fully in these somewhat engaging, if also highly loquacious, conversations, I did some reading. And following my preliminary discovery, I thought that perhaps we could both explore the ideas, concepts and perceptions together. In a comprehensive piece of work by the religious writer, Karen Armstrong, specifically her book entitled, The Case for God, and in the chapter entitled, Unknowing, I discovered a quote from Einstein quoted from, “Albert Einstein, ‘Strange is our Situation Here on Earth,’ in Jaroslav Pelikan, ed. Modern Religious Thought, (Boston 1990,) p. 225, and found on page 268 of Armstrong’s book:

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger..is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.”

We are all trying, however haltingly and experimentally, tentatively and resolutely, to bring about some kind of appreciation of our weaknesses and our perceptions of our place in a vast universe, not merely by adopting disciplines and rituals, liturgies and donations, but even more importantly by finding the attitudes and perspective that encompass and celebrate our human-ness and our limited grasp of both eternity and holiness and any deity worthy of the name. It is in the sense of fullness that Einstein’s words depict that I find both comfort and allegiance. I wonder why such an expansive, comprehensive, challenging and inspiring perspective seems absent from the experience of many, including me, in our relationship with the church. And while the premise of “emotion” is fraught with disdain in many quarters, especially among many male colleagues, I would argue that the ‘mystical,’ categorized as an emotion, is foreign to most men, at least of my acquaintance. Further, I would suggest that such a default position is rare and even more rarely acknowledged, whether by estrangement, alienation, fear, assumed and presumed superiority or inferiority, or by the minimal acquaintance they might have had through their limited reading, not to mention the dearth of such words, attitudes and perspective inside the church itself. Is there something so threatening, so dangerous and so off-putting to suggest that the church would do well to consider not only such depictions of the religious “attitude and relationship” by bringing such challenges into both the pulpit and the education programs within its purview?

 I have noted that, in his acceptance address for the 1921 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Einstein also uttered these words: “A human being…experiences himself..as something separated from the rest---a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness…Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature.

Here is another word-depiction of the paradox of being a human….experiencing ourself as a “kind of optical delusion of (our) consciousness”….If, as it seems, Einstein might mean that we are limited by the ‘delusion’ of our own consciousness, that could mean that our consciousness embraces only or exclusively, the empirical, the senses, and the demonstrably evident and that such a consciousness while not necessarily excluding the unconsciousness, to which Jung and Freud gave voice and support to and for. Encircled and engaged and often even obsessed with and by what we consider our “duties,” and our “responsibilities” and the demands and exigencies of each hour and each day, in the perception that those ‘to-do’ lists both justify and define our existence, leaves us both in fact and in concept, denied access and openness and vulnerability to those experiences which takes us ‘out of ourselves,’ into another state of mind and heart and emotion and sensation and wonderment and awe, what in contemporary vernacular might be called the “aha” moment. Such moments as the birth of a child, the majesty and mystery of both a sunrise and a sunset, the intricate and complex beauty of a flower, and the cocked head of a furry pet, fully grasping whatever we might be thinking and/or feeling. A friend once told me about a moment when, as part of his training, he attended an autopsy; resisting at first because he had never crossed that threshold previously, he was ‘coached’ by his supervisor to attend, ‘and give himself permission to leave at any moment he felt that need’. Not only did he attend, but moved physically, emotionally and intellectually further into the experience as it progressed. Assigned the task of writing a theological reflection on his experience, he wrote almost entirely about how both the complexity and the inter-connectedness of the human being over-awed him with both wonder and humility. For him, this ‘moment’ will remain one of his most memorable and impactful moments in his life. And, for him, it seems to have ‘brought’ him closer to the ineffable, the inexplicable and what we would call God. Have you had such an experience, in your pilgrimage prior to, during or following your path to the Christian ministry?

Bishop: Talk of mysticism, and the optical delusion of consciousness, while compelling and engaging, connecting and exciting, is not what I have found to be the central current of conversations within the church. The ‘aha’ moment, from my limited experience over the last three or four decades, in Christian churches, has become that moment, captured by Paul in the New Testament, that while on the road to Damascus, he saw a great light and was ‘converted’ to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ, after having lived a life of intense criticism and disdain for the faith. There have been a plethora of paths, strategies, tactics, including sermons, hymns, retreats, classes, prayer sessions, Bible study sessions, in which the primary object of the exercise was to ‘enlist, or at least to enrich’ the notion that God in and through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ saved each of us from our sin through forgiveness made available through the grace of God. Incarnating such a faith “premise”, embodying such a “belief” has taken ‘centre-stage’ amid the competing strategies to attract and to retain adherents, hopefully members, and thereby the cash that keeps the bills paid. Celebrating inspiring art, as, for example, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or even the architecture of our many cathedrals, or the elevated talent and skill and musicality of the more inspiring vocal solos, all of these being ‘part of the ethos’, nevertheless receive must time or attention. Conversion to a formal belief that requires both public acknowledgement and personal commitment has become the ‘bottom line’ of our business, to put the matter into corporate/business terms. Monks, nuns and ‘the religious’, I suppose, are considered to have both the time and the inclination to reflect upon the things of the mystery, the awesome in the daily lives of their people. The rest of the church seems pre-occupied with those secular concerns of most contemporary organizations. And, a reasonable and substantial case can be made that, in that regard, the church has lost much of the potency of the religious and spiritual potential of our calling. There are specific experiments, like Cursillo, which you may have heard of, that have some minimal comparison with what we are calling the mystical, that, perhaps we could explore in another conversation. In the meantime, however, the irony of having this conversation with a corporate tycoon is becoming so engaging, challenging and even awesome, from my perspective that I cannot fail to thank you for participating. It is the kind of conversation that has not been available in my term as bishop, and I have considerable doubt that it will be something to which I can look forward to as an expectation during my episcopate.

Until next time….