Searching for God # 30

 Innocence is America’s mystical cloud of unknowing. We are forgiven simply by virtue of not knowing what we do. To wrap ourselves round in the Good—that is the American dream, leaving place for the evil nightmare only in the ‘other’, where it can be diagnosed, treated, prevented, and sermonized about.

This Hillman quote from The Soul’s Code, begs parsing and exegesis.

On andrewjtaggart.com, in a piece entitled, The Cloud of Unknowing: A

Summary for Mystics, May 18, 2021, we read:

The ‘cloud of unknowing refers to the state of being that is not of the sensible or the mental nor is it unified was God. Zen calls this samadhi, a largely thought-free state in which all is gathered into one. Most new meditators, catching a brief glimpse of this state, will report that it is ‘neutral’ or ‘calm’ or that ‘they feel nothing.’…In time, this cloud of unknowing is experienced as being peaceful, restful, and almost full. (Almost full because it is not yet in union with the divine.)

To get this existential inquiry underway, the Cloud author also suggest, quite reasonably, that we set aside all ideas about creation, all worldly actions, and, as he often repeats, all the bodily senses. In fact, even the intellect cannot attain to the heights of union with the divine (God is ‘beyond the reach of all created intellectual faculties’) (The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works,  trans. A.C. Spearing, p. 23). Quite simply we are ‘to forget’ everything temporal so as to remember only God in himself….

In short, the genuine seeker (after God) is to long so deeply and so steadily for the Real that she can learn to ‘forget’  for a time all that is unreal. The ‘cloud of unknowing’ is, as it were, the unreal between God and all that is to be forgotten.

Such seekers are regarded as ‘mystics’ and Britannica.com defines mysticism this way:

The traditional conception of mysticism

From late antiquity through the Middle Ages, Christians used prayer to contemplate both God’s omnipresence in the world and God in his essence. The soul’s ecstasy, or rapture, in contemplation of God was termed a spiritual marriage’ by St. Bernard of Clairvaux the greatest mystical authority of the 12^th century. In the 13^th century the term unio mystica (Latin: mystical union) came into use as a synonym. During the same period the range of objects of contemplation was increased to include he Passion of Christ, visions of saints, and tours of

heaven and hell. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries the enthusiasms of quaking, shaking and other infusions of the Holy Spirit were also called mystical.

From westernmystics.wordpress.com, we read:

 Walter ‘Walt’ Whitman was an American mystic poet, essayist, and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works…..In his prose work, Democratic Vistas, Whitman describes the kind of experiences he enjoys:

‘There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that arises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars shining eternal. This is the thought of identity—your for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth’s dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the center) creeds, convictions, fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look’d upon, it expands over the whole earth, an spreads to the roof of heaven.

Hillman saws limits to transcendentalism, based on an heightened concentration on the I, the ego, the individual self, as access to universal truth and the potential that one could mistake one’s own subjectivity for a deeper truth. Furthermore, the ‘forgiveness’ that results from ‘not knowing’ in the secular domain as ignorance, lack of knowledge, in the cognitive, intellectual and epistemological domain, and stretched out to an ethical and moral dimension of denial and the open option of never being either culpable, or responsible is different from its use in mystical, religious, spiritual domain. This elision of re different from its use in mystical, religious, spiritual, religious, spiritual, mystical meaning and intent of the ‘cloud of unknowing’ with the literal, empirical, cognitive and intellectual represents one of the major difficulties in both pursuing a God, from within a secular culture and in dialoguing with others about such a pilgrimage.

Of course, there are theologies that refuse to separate the two and posit that whatever happens in the secular domain has implications and references in the spiritual domain, and similarly vice versa. In contemporary western culture that is swimming (perhaps risking drowning) in the oceans of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) such a concept of a ‘cloud of unknowing’ is virtually absent, and if not absent, at least ridiculed. The innocence that the secular culture prefers is akin to the minor hockey player who, upon taking a penalty, immediately points to the ‘other guy’ who actually committed the foul. Another application that emerges frequently in secular culture is the dismissive, “I did not know I was committing a foul!” And so, knowledge and intent have been written into many secular laws to ‘cover’ such incidences.

Innocence in the society, especially one draped in legal robes and consciousness, as well as empiricism and positivism, is almost universally considered from a question of culpability, as compared with the cloud of a blank mind and psyche, in order to better be open to the ‘other’ kind of reality, associated with, imbued with, and saturated with a vision of the supernatural or the divine. Transcendental innocence is akin to awe, surprise, wonder, even bewilderment, perhaps confusion and emptiness. For a culture either unwilling or unable (or both) to discern the difference between the two context and meanings of precisely the same words is an indictment of the teachings of the church. It is also a kind of default of those engaged in religious curricula, and the humanities, to push back against the tectonic shift of not only the vocabulary but also the culture away perceiving, identifying and even defining reality as literal, empirical from anything mystical….only to cling to its vestiges of ‘innocence’ within the secular meaning.

To wrap ourselves round in the Good—that is the American dream, leaving place for the evil nightmare only in the ‘other’, where it can be diagnosed, treated, prevented, and sermonized about.

This sentence, another way of levelling a scathing indictment of his own nation’s psyche, posits the separation of Good (within America and within Americans,) and Evil, in ‘the other’ to be essentially reformed at the hands and interventions of Americans is a different way of expressing, ‘The Ugly American.’ This novel by William J Lederer and Eugene Burdick, published in1958, gave a fictionalized narrative of Americans working in Southeast Asia. The boorishness and parochialism of Americans in geopolitics, diplomacy and military conflict has been summarized when the title is evoked.

We have read about the church’s separation of man from nature, a divide we are still attempting to bridge. We have heard of the separation of good and evil, in the Christian’s life….Man is evil as demonstrated by the Original Sin, whereas God is Good. And the question of the enmeshment of good and evil, in our lives, in our news, in our academies, legislatures, courts (always inherent in the other) “where it can be diagnosed, treated, prevented, and sermonized about”.

So ubiquitous and deeply rooted is this ‘agency-interventionist’ archetype, that it essentially defines the American psyche, the American economy, the American foreign policy and the canyon of separation of the American Christianity from its roots, ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’ a notion. This tenacious rendering of the significance and the relevance of the Sermon on the Mount coming as it does from a Russian writer, thereby permits and sustains its own disavowal, dismissal and distrust by America. Russia is after all, another of those ‘others’ in whom evil resides and rules.

A similar divide between science and imagination continues, in and through the linking of Hillman’s writing with anything purporting to be a ‘search for God’..Hillman’s archetypal psychology, reinforcing an imaginative, metaphoric perception and rendering of human ‘in extremis’ moments under a perceived, imagined influence of mythic voices, does not comply with clinical psychology’s academic pursuit of diagnoses, and pharmaceutical and therapeutic interventions, on top of triage assignments to either or both legal or medical fraternities…for reformation. Nor does his archetypal psychology ‘fit’ with the religious fraternity, with its traditions, dogmas, ethics, morals and rejection of the dark side of human existence.

Hillman tutors his readers on his discernment of the nuanced differences between ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’; the former always reaches up to the light, the latter down toward the darkness. A religious pilgrimage needs a nativity crib that welcomes both. Religion in both theory and praxis welcomes the human psyche’s meanderings from light to dark, from moments of ecstasy to moments of dire distress and trouble, without the instant and counterintuitive intervention or the lawyers, the police, the doctors or the ethics police (the clergy). The Divine, God, is neither an advocate for nor an incarnation of ‘a specific’ externally defined, institutionally mediated, debated and taught ethics, morality or ideology. The Divine, God, is also neither immune to, nor dismissive of any of the angst, ‘missing the mark’ instances that come into each and every human life. Furthermore, the Divine, God, is so identified with the deepest of our ‘in extremis’ moments, as exemplified in the “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Rather than interpret that line as God’s hatred of sin, perhaps we might reconsider it to be an identification of the Divine with the moments in each of our lives when ‘total abandonment, complete isolation, utter alienation’ were actually embodied and uttered from a Cross.

That abandonment, isolation, alienation, each and all of them on steroids in our worst and most depraved moments are universal, crossing ethnicities, religions, ideologies, time frames, and all academic classifications and classes. Indeed, it is feasible to posit that, without the ‘annus horribilis’ (as the Queen defined 1992) in our lives, we would be deprived of the very grist and grit and stabilizing that ‘understanding and caring for the soul affords.

We are all embodied innocence, and in that embodiment, we, consciously, unconsciously or unwittingly attempt to break out of the ‘sack of ignorance’ that seems nearly to suffocate us, at various moments in our lives. Innocence, purity, simplicity, superficiality, reductionisms, quick solutions and judgements serve, like band-aids, or aspirin for our minor setbacks. We learn that something which before we did not see, is now starting to show a sprig of a different insight, and, depending on the convergence of our experiences, a similar pattern develops, repeats, deepens and repeats. Whether we call those ‘aha’ moments, epiphanies, turning points, tragedies, or demoralizing devastations, we know we have hit a wall.

Everyone of us has a narrative of one or more such moments. And impact of such moments can rarely be contained in a psychological, or an intellectual, or a social, or a political or an economic or an ethical, or a religious/spiritual box. Those moments transcend all categories, all attempts to wrestle the fullness of their meaning and purpose, perhaps for years or decades.

What Divine, what God, would be alien to, or separating from, or abandoning men women and children in such moments? Indeed, the divine presence is not only most needed at such moments, and also much sought.  Why do we all say, at such moments, ‘My God! What am I going to do?’ and/or ‘My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?’

If, as many of us Christians have been taught, we consider such moments as the indisputable proof of man’s evil, we are, in the extreme moment of potentially relating to and needing and recognizing our vulnerability and our need for support. For a so-called religious and spiritual purpose and moment, we are placing ourselves in double-jeopardy….isolated, alone, and also disdained, as we embody sin, by God.

From the perspective of this scribe, that proposition is preposterous. The hatred of sin, and the forgiveness ostensibly ensuing from Calvary, through faith (today translated as ‘cognitive belief in, historically translated as metanoia, a turning around. “This did not mean (after Laertes conversation with Socrates) that he had accepted a new doctrinal truth, on the contrary he had discovered that, like Socrates himself, he knew that the value system by which he had lived was without foundation; as a result, in order to go forward authentically, his new self must be based on doubt (aporia) rather than certainty. (Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p. 62)

The innocence we speak and write of is embodied by degrees in the baby, the youth, the orphan, as well as the wanderer, warrior, altruist and magician….shedding layers of its impact throughout the passages, returns and revisits. The metanoia, also in various degrees accompanies those pivotal moments, often triggered by deep and profound pain and anxiety. For a sustaining faith (based in doubt, uncertainty and humility) one’s biography includes both the ‘case history of secular accomplishments’ and the ‘soul’ history of the rising and falling tides of the emotions with the vicissitudes of experience.

And it is this linking of  ‘soul’ with darkness that begs inclusion in our religious, spiritual pilgrimage…..not for ethical or moral or decalogue-based compliance but for the realization of the embrace and welcome of the divine from which we cannot be separated. And, as for salvation, that is a topic for another day…..

To be continued……