Searching for God ...introduction

Searching for God

The Jesuit Karl Rahner has developed a more transcendental theology, which sees God as the supreme mystery and Jesus as the decisive manifestation of what humanity can become. Bernard Lonergan also emphasized the importance of transcendence and of thought as opposed to experience. The unaided intellect cannot reach the vision it seeks; it is continually coming up against barriers to understanding that demand that we change our attitudes. In all cultures, human beings have been driven by the same imperatives: to be intelligent, responsible, reasonable, loving and, if necessary, to change. The very nature of humanity, therefore, demands that we transcend ourselves and our current perceptions, and this principle indicates the presence of what has been called the divine in the very nature of serious human inquiry. (Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p. 385)

The tension among theologs between experience and thought, as pathways to transcendence has been and continues to be protracted and the burden of the discussion has been picked up by theologians of various stripes. More recently, too, the image of the convergence of the unconscious with the divine has slipped into the public discussion, perhaps and presumably in the apprehension that, first, nothing escapes the purview of a divine anything, and second, that what exceeds our conscious, sensate, literal, empirical perceptions and attitudes is both more difficult to access and more mysterious if for no other reason than its previously being enshrouded in clouds of unknowing. Indeed, the very state of unknowing, along with the Greek notion of kenosis, (emptying) has been linked in various ways to a human search for non-empirical, non-literal, non-scientific answers to both our highest aspirations and imaginings as well as our deepest and most threatening fears and anxieties. For most, God is neither fully accessible by thought or by experience. (Isn’t thought also part of our experience? so why the separation, except that thought is subjective, ethereal, effemeral, while experience is considered as physical, literal, and sensate.)

The question of some kind of change has at least two foundational roots: first the Christian archetypal fall into sin that renders the rest of us needing to climb back to ‘respectability’ and ‘acceptability’ to God, as it has been articulated; second, the social and psychological flow of pain, anxiety, loss, and suffering that characterizes the human life story, individually and collectively, from the beginning. These two perceived, experienced and theorized impulses, irrespective of the degree of ‘hold’ each may have on a single psyche, continue, like some sort of radioactive rock, emit ripples of self-doubt, self-criticism, self-sabotage and even self-denial.

Caught in the midst of a flow of time, (no time for speculation on whether it is real or imaginary here), we have a perceptive bi-focal lens on both the past and the future, and oscillate between those, while attempting to remain focused on the present moment. And the ‘river’ of time includes our DNA, our family and cultural history and tradition, the moments of crisis and alienation of the black sheep within our family circle, as well as some fantasy of what we dream of, both in our unconscious (e.g. sleep) and in our day-dreaming and imagination. The aggregate or gestalt of such fantasies could be embraced by a word and notion such as hope.

As some well-known Christian clerics have often said, ‘We are in the business of hope!’ And it is not only each individual, at least among Christians, who, with and/or without a skiff, or a paddle, or a life-saving vest, or a kayak or canoe, is plunged into this proverbial river, so too is the institutional church, as well as all other institutions and organizations in a culture. And within the process of our navigating still waters, eddies, white water rapids, and even life-defying cataracts we are inevitably reaching out to mentors, to books, to parents, coaches, clerics and to whatever even gossamer spider webs of silk, ideas, principles, beliefs, convictions, and, often like moths to a bulb, rushing to whatever offers ‘light’ and ‘promise’ and ‘relief’ and ‘surrender’ and hope.

Any mysterious, foggy and even clouded search for some kind of clarity amidst the fright, or the darkness will inevitably evoke simultaneously, a sense of inadequacy as well as an emotional/psychic adrenalin surge for something to cling to, however ethereal, ephemeral and even imaginary. Such a moment has both psychic as well as spiritual implications, components if you like, that, try as we might, seem inextricably interwoven into a vision that each person’s imagination generates.

Whether we consider ourselves prisoners of both the original sin complex, and/or the perpetrators of our own self-sabotage, in such moments of extremis, our vulnerability invades whatever self-confidence we have attained, acquired and evolved. Those of us who champion human ‘will’ and ‘will power’ will attempt through various heroic, personal, both strategic and tactical acts to ‘climb out of our swamp.’ Those of us who envision some ‘other’ force or energy, will turn our psychic gaze both inward and upward….looking both for some kind of image that helps us see our moment clearly as well as some image of a future freed from this darkness. It is not that other darknesses will never crop up; we know they will. It is how we move through this one, layered onto previous moments of extremis, as patterns for future impending, if unknown and unseen future moments, that matters in this moment.

Traditionally, the Christian church has offered a path of repentance, forgiveness, redemption, atonement and a new life ‘in Christ’ as such a path. Anatomizing evil, in a personal life, and then propagating the collection of such sins as a way of offering leadership, mentorship and spiritual guidance for parishioners, has deep roots into the theological reflections of men like Augustine, for whom original sin was carried over to every succeeding person in the act of sexuality. Immediately, one of the most intrinsic, essential, biological and psychological needs, appetites and aspirations is linked, like iron, perhaps forever, with the Fall of Man, original sin. And, for many, that link is completely resistant to molting. No acetylene torch exists to break that dogmatic link. And it is part of the heritage of the Christian West forever. Injected with the radioactivity of ‘forbidden-ness’ sex hereafter is both more invested with expectations and fears and anxieties than it warrants. Thank you Augustine! And all those who have succumbed to his ‘dogmatic,’ self-sabotaging, denial of any God worthy of the name.

Another aspect of this ‘heritage’ link to the past, is that the church itself, reveres the past and frames the present and future with that fixation on the ‘rear-view mirror’ as it were. Releasing the potential cleaving to the holy writ, and the dogmatic theology of past ungodly and inhuman and inhumane notions, however, is essential for both each individual as well as the church itself. Having married its dogma, its rituals and its praxis to the past, the church has impaled itself with at least a degree of either blindness or avoidance of a comparable concentration on the future.

Jurgen Moltmann, courageously, faithfully, and somewhat iconoclastically, from a Christian perspective, offers a different perspective.

James Butler, on christianmissionsociety.org, writes:

(Jurgen) Moltmann’s key claim (in his book The Theology of Hope) is that we must have a theology of eschatology; a theology that pulls us out of the mechanistic closed universe of modern thinking, and to realise that the kind of hope Jesus promises is not one in continuity with the way the world is but radical change. He is critical of what he calls ‘a theology of the eternal present,’ where God becomes linked to the revelation of God in place. Moltmann argues that God’s presence, for Israel and in the life, death and revelation of Jesus is about promise. The point of God’s presence is always in relation to the promise of the future that is yet to come to pass. This means that Christian theology must have the future in sight, it must be about the future that God promises to bring about, rather than about bringing the present into line with God’s eternity. In this way it unsettles followers of God to ‘strike out in hope towards the promised new future.’ (p. 89)

Transcendence (defined by Cambridge.org) is experience that goes past normal limits, or the ability to achieve this…e.g.. She felt a blissful sense of transcendence and freedom from pain and fear.

In Armstrong’s, A History of God, p. 41) we read:

The apparition of Yahweh on Mount Sinai had emphasized the immense gulf that had suddenly yawned between man and the divine world. Now the seraphs were crying: Yahweh is other! Other! Other!. Isaiah had experienced that sense of the numinous which has periodically descended upon men and women and filled them with fascination and dread. In his classic book, The Idea of the Holy, Rudolph Otto described this fearful experience of transcendent reality as mysterium terrible et fascinans: it is terrible because it comes from a profound shock that severs us from the consolations of normality and fascinans because, paradoxically,  it exerts an irresistible attraction. There is nothing rational about this overpowering experience, which Otto compares to that of music or the erotic: the emotions it engenders cannot adequately be expressed in words or concepts. (Armstrong, A History of God, p. 41)

What does it mean to ‘transcend’ ourselves, to imitate God, to enter into what Otto calls mysterium terrible et fascinans…and how does Moltmann’s theology of hope keep the Christian focus on this promise of this mysterium? Or does it?

We live in what Moltmann calls a time of mechanistic thought, a time which Hillman characterizes as ‘literal, empirical, statistical, diagnostic, scientific.’ Hillman urges the re-introduction of the imagination, in his search for caring of the human soul. Now, there is a word that has effectively been appropriated by religion, including the Christian religion.  It is Hillman’s intuitive, and perhaps unique perspective of soul that might serve as an antidote to the religious ‘soul needing to be saved’ of Christian theology. There is an instant, and seemingly indelible link between the word soul and the word transcendence, along with an implicit perception of “God in heaven,’ the implied direction of all transcendence, as well as hope and eschatology. The Book of Revelation offers a poetic, and mythic image of a heavenly afterlife, reinforcing the image of ‘up’ and ‘above’ and reaching for the holy.

Here is Hillman, borrowing from the Dalai Lama on the difference between ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ from his archetypal psychological perspective:

(In a letter to Peter Goullart) the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet writes:

The relation of height to spirituality is not merely metaphorical. It is physical reality.  The most spiritual people on this planet live in the highest places. So do the most flowers….I call the high and light aspects of my being spirit and the dark and heavy aspect soul.

Soul is at home in the deep shaded valleys. Heavy torpid flowers saturated wit black grow there. The rivers flow like warm syrup. They empty into huge oceans of soul.

Spirit is a land of high, white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers. Life is sparse and sounds travel great distances.

There is soul music, soul food, soul dancing and soul love….

No spirit broods over lofty desolation, for desolation is of the depths as is brooding. At these heights spirit leaves soul far behind.

People need to climb to the mountain top not simply because it is there but because the soulful divinity needs to be mated with the spirit (From A Blue Fire, James Hillman, introduced and edited by Thomas Moore, p.15-116)

To be continued…..