Searching for God #11

 There is no such thing as God because God is neither a ‘what’ or a ‘thing’ but a pure ‘Who’. He is the Thou before whom our inmost ‘I’ springs into awareness. He is the I am before whom with our most personal and inalienable voice we echo ‘I am’. (Thomas Merton*)

*Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was an American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist, and scholar of comparative religion.

In the Merton quote above, there are echoes of words used by Martin Buber in his work “I-Thou”.

I-Thou, theological doctrine of the full, direct, mutual relation between beings, as conceived by Martin Buber….the basic and purest form of this relation is that between man and God (the Eternal Thou), which is the model for and makes possible I-Thou relations between human beings. The relation between man and God, however, is always an I-Thou one, whereas that between man and man is very frequently an I-It one, in which the other being is treated as an object of thought or action…..Buber’s manifold activities were inspired by his philosophy of encounter- of man’s meeting with other beings. An early mystical period culminated in Daniel (1913) five dialogues on orientation and realization, man’s two basic stances toward the world. Orientation takes the world as a static state of affairs governed by comprehensible laws, It is a receptive, analytical, or systematizing attitude. Realization, on the other hand, is a creative, participative attitude that realizes the possibilities in things, experiencing through one’s own full reality of the world. It operates within an open horizon of possibilities. (From Britannica.com)

What does it mean to ‘see’ someone else? And how have we collectively fallen into a sociological categorization of ‘class, gender, type, ethnicity. Adding to that model, we also categorize others by psychological diagnoses: dyslexia, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder. And in that process we seem to be both condoning and justifying these classifications, while perhaps, if we read Hillman thoroughly, missing the other’s ‘soul’…Types of any sort obscure uniqueness. James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, p. 124)

There is some evidence that suggests Hillman criticized Buber for being too philosophical, and abstract. Indeed, these sentences might have been significant for Hillman:

Daniel (1913) five dialogues on orientation and realization, man’s two basic stances toward the world. Orientation takes the world as a static state of affairs governed by comprehensible laws, It is a receptive, analytical, or systematizing attitude. Realization, on the other hand, is a creative, participative attitude that realizes the possibilities in things, experiencing through one’s own full reality of the world. It operates within an open horizon of possibilities.(From Britannica.com)

Orientation and realization: orientation is like a still photo, receptive, analytical, systematizing while realization is like an interactive exchange open to possibilities.

Reading Hillman, nevertheless, provides an oscillating pattern between ‘still’ photos of orientation to the anima mundi, (as if it were in therapy) and a realization of the human ‘acorn’ that dynamic ‘essence’ of the other. This acorn, or soul or psyche, is one of the more abstract, and yet mystical and poetic notions I have encountered. In a culture steeped in the literal, empirical (and may I add, functional, and performative) mind-set and appropriation of reality, attempting to ‘see’ not only the skill of another, but the more deeper, more instinctive, and more personal ‘acorn’ as the ‘how’ of the other’s displaying a talent is extremely challenging.

‘Most people cannot ‘say’ what the person before them is like, but being unable to ‘say’ does not imply that one is unable to see,’ writes the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. So many words are available once we close the psychology book and open a novel, a travel diary, even a cookbook. Or a movie, in which we can watch adjectives and adverbs alive and well composed into images moving across the screen. ‘O for a Life of Sensations rather than of thoughts,’ wrote Keats. To see the acorn requires an eye for the image, and eve for the show, and the language to say what we see. Failures in  our loves, friendships, and families often come down to failures of imaginative perspective. When we are not looking with the eye of the heart, love is indeed blind, for then we are failing to see the other person as bearer of an acorn of imaginative truth. A feeling may be there but not the sight; and, as the vision clouds, so do sympathy and interest. We feel only annoyed, and we resort to diagnostic and typological concepts. But your husband is not ‘mother-bound’; he whines and expects and is often paralyzed. Your wife is not ‘animus-ridden’; she is peremptory, argues logically, and can’t let go. How they are is who they are, and not what they are said to be by types and classes. (Hillman, The Soul’s Code, pps. 124-125)

And let’s not forget that whatever might be that invisible visible is not merely positive, light and another reinforcement of the preferred cultural perception of the talented, and the pleasurable and the applause-worthy. It will also include a dark side.

“And what is the first question we ask about the inward state of being of any person we meet? ‘How are you?’ You are how you are, just as you are, in the saddle-back of the present moment, on parade. Your being, maybe all Being, is precisely ‘how’ it appears to be, the how of just-so Sein*, declaring who and what and where each event is. How it is says what it is. This is how it is; its gestures, style, colorings, motions, speech, expression—in short, the actual complications of the image—tell exactly how it is….For all this insistence of the phenomenal I do not mean there are no reserves, no shadows; I do not mean that an event is but a persona, the front it puts up, mere showcasing. Reserves and shadows are not invisible. They show in the reticence, in circumlocutions and euphemisms, in shaded, averted eyes, in slips, in hesitancies of gestures, second thoughts avoidances. There is nothing plain about a face, or simply about a surface. The supposedly concealed is also on view and subject to keen sight, making up part of what any event afford to a good looker. The image that a mentor spots in a pupil or apprentice is neither all front nor what’s hidden behind, neither a false self nor a true one; there is no real you other than the reality of you in your image. The mentor perceives the folds of complexity, those convex-concave, topsy-turvy curves of implication that are the truth of all imagination, allowing us to define an image as the complete how or a presentation. Here I am right before your eyes. Do you read me? (The Soul’s Code, p122-123)

(*Sein The German infinitive of the verb ‘to be’.)

If this invisible visible is there in the ‘how’ another behaves and may be, most likely is, hidden from the person him or herself, as well as from most, if not all within his/her circle, and if Hillman’s suggestion of the imagination of perception as the lens through which to even prospect for or even ‘imagine’ its presence, is this psychological and poetic notion not a potential arrow in the quiver of anyone searching for God. That is not to say, or imply, that the acorn is a special connection to God, (any God); only that it’s invisible visibility is analogous to whatever we might say or think or imagine about God (any God).

More from Hillman:

Sometimes this invisible visible is referred to as the spirit of a place, the quality of a thing, the soul of a person, the mood of a scene, the style of an art. We like to take hold of it by accounting for it as context, as formal structure, or as an unclosed gestalt that draws us into it. Neither the concepts nor the eye that looks be means of them has been trained enough in imagination, in the perceptive art of reading images. We are not able to see how any one is when we try to see by means of types, categories, classes diagnostics. Types of any sort obscure uniquenesses. The eye of the heart sees ‘eaches’ and is affected by eachness, to borrow a term from William James. The heart’s affections pick out particulars. (TSC, p. 124)

Is that ‘eachness’ the same as, or evocative of, that inmost I, that most personal and most inalienable voice’ to which Merton referred above? Or, perhaps is the awakened ‘soul’ within each of us that part of us that deeply and often desperately seeks to be ‘seen’?

The concept of phenomenology, an expression of lived experience, from the first person point of view seems basic to everything we express about our experience. The notion of concepts, types, classifications, categories, and diagnoses, on the other hand, all  qualify as intellectual, cognitive, and attributed lenses through which we speak and write about our experiences, especially about our experiences of God.

Miracles, for instance, and birth, even death, the universe, the underworld, are images both containing mystery and unknowing, as well as, remember Jung, both awe and wonder, on the one hand and fear and trembling on the other. Included in our attempts to ‘describe and understand’ (as if they were the definition of each other) extend to the limits in both ‘directions’….the question of the ways in which opposites relate is one that has occupied minds and hearts and imaginations for centuries. And that relationship is no more cogent and compelling between man and God, and man and the universe, than it is between man and himself.

Just as yin and yang are considered two opposing and yet complementary forces, into such a frame we could include male and female, conscious and unconscious, as well as visible and invisible. And if the search for God, among other things, is also about the search for truth, then how will we know that we might have had a glimpse of truth. And, is truth still in the mystery of the unknown, (where God is and will always be!) and does our relationship to that ‘mystery’ say as much about our religion and faith as anything else about us. If we start from the ‘Fall’ and the implicit ‘evil’ within, from which we must be redeemed, forgiven and for which we must atone, (and there are many Christian churches that operate from this premise, and call it scriptural, supported by the Holy Word of God), we have a pre-ordained prescription and path for our faith journey, especially, with faith having been ‘privatized’ (as Gregory Baum reminds us). And if, on the other hand, we start from a comfortable perspective of awe, wonder, amazement, and a diligent pilgrimage toward God, in search of all the truths to which we have hitherto been blind, then we have a very different path and in and for our faith and religion.

Is it possible, given that all of the many words that have been committed to ink about God by humans, including these in this space, must be recognized as speculative, imaginative and part of an intimate, yet integrous, search, that the concept of ‘imaginative perception’ as depicted by Hillman (see above), could be instrumental in both our own investigation of our ‘identity’ (visible and invisible)?

We are each much more than our profession, or our marital or political rank or role; we are also much more than any of the specific, and even well-intentioned, categories, classes and types to which we have been assigned by others. And those others, even with the best of intentions have also ‘missed’ something ‘deeply personal’ and ‘deeply mysterious’ in and about us, that, from the perspective of this scribe, is not and will not be unknown to any God.

Resisting the depersonalizing and disconnecting ‘objectifying’ of each of us by all of us, including resisting the colonializing of a ‘faith dogma, a faith denomination, an ethnicity, and a cultural identity, which can only partially describe each of us, reminds me of the spiritual biography of Sister Mary Jo Leddy, the title of which is ‘We say to the Darkness, We Beg to Differ!

That begging to differ is not merely to a kind of moral law or code, nor a religious empire’s expectations, nor a reductionism of identity as ‘function’, or ‘role’ or ‘demographic’ or diagnosis.

Is it just possible and within the realm of a vibrant imagination that we, each of us, are as unknown to ourselves and to each other, as well as, as amazing and complex and nuanced and subtle as the intimate ‘how’s’ in and by which we live, are either or both unknown or disregarded by our most intimate circles.

And if in our religions and in our search for God we are willing to embrace, without hubris, and without competition with others, and with the humility that the soul feeds on, the psyche/soul as something personal, intimate, known to and embraced and loved by God, then our ‘numbers’ in a conversion and revival ritual will be insignificant and irrelevant.

To be continued………