Searching for God # 44

What might showing up ‘for’ or ‘to’ or ‘with’ God mean? The search for God, the core focus of these pieces, is one filled with both anticipation and trial and error….as are most, if not all of our human exploits, adventures and escapades. Is it Moltmann’s hope in what is beyond probable that drives us? Is it a search for some connection, relation to the beyond reason and imagination or even ‘imagined fantasy’ that drives many of us? Whether called the search for The Good, as Plato termed it, or whether it has a more personal, intuitive, beyond-cognitive and beyond the literal, empirical ‘experience’ that for some reason, again inexplicable, draws us forth, no one is certain. Nevertheless, the search continues as if fueled by its own energy.

Religion was not something tacked on to the human condition, an optional extra imposed on people by unscrupulous priests. The desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic. (Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p. 9)

During the tenth century, the Brahmin priests developed the Brahmodya competition, which would become a model of authentic religious discourse. The contestants began by going on a retreat in the forest, where they performed spiritual exercises, such as fasting and breath control, that concentrated their minds and induced a different type of consciousness. Then the contest would begin. Its goal was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahmin, in the process pushing language as far as it could go, until it finally broke down and people became vividly aware of the ineffable, the other. The challenger asked an enigmatic question, and his opponent had to reply in a way that was apt but equally inscrutable. The winner was the contestant who reduced his opponents to silence—and in that moment of silence, when language revealed its inadequacy, the Brahmin was present; it became manifest only in the stunning realization of the impotence of speech.

The ultimate reality was not personalized god, therefore, but a transcendent mystery that could never be plumbed. The Chinese called it the Dao, the fundamental “Way” of the cosmos. Because it comprised the whole of reality, the Dao had no qualities, no form; it could be experienced but never seen; it was not a god; it predated heaven and earth, and was beyond divinity. (Armstrong, op. cit. p. 13)

Gallons of ink have been spilled, arranged in alphabetic signs, attempting to describe, picture, envision, imagine God….and the biblical stories from both Old and New Testaments have been among those attempts. Armstrong even titles her first chapter, ‘Homo religiosus’ as if to announce her purpose and the root of her intent to make the case ‘for’ God.

Those who prefer a ‘positive’ approach, attempting to delineate what, who God is, have chosen what is known as a cataphatic. An example is, ‘God is love’ or God is omnipotent, or wise or good. Using anthropomorphic attributions to God, describing God as a divine person with a personality and qualities such as love, mercy, justice, wrath is a cataphatic approach. Another approach to the divine, apophatic, approaches the divine by negating or denying what God is not. It recognizes that God is beyond human concepts, language and understanding.

From a website entitled religionsdepths.com, by Dan Tilreath, we read,

Kataphatic theology is indispensable. Without it, no religion or spirituality would be possible. We all need specific symbols-whether verbal or otherwise- to resonate with us if we’re to begin our journey toward the divine. Otherwise we’d have effectively no sense of where we’re going on that journey….

But there’s an all-important difference between a symbol and what it symbolizes. It’s the difference between saying the words, ‘Mount Everest’ and actually climbing Mount Everest, or in this case, the difference between saying the word ‘God’ or ‘Aphrodite’ and actually experiencing the divine. And that point where kataphatic theology falls flat is the point where negativity or apophatic theology comes in.

Apophatic theology uses human language and concepts to make us aware of hos far beyond human language and concepts the divine is. It does this by systematically negating those words and concepts-hence why apophatic theology is sometimes called ‘negative theology.’

(A)famous Christian mystic, Saint John of the Cross, writes, ‘to reach union with the wisdom of God a person must advance by unknowing rather than by knowing.’ The knowledge of, and devotion to, particular symbols of the divine is necessary to get us to a certain point, but past that point, those symbols become more of a hindrance than a help. If one stops at them rather than moving on beyond them to experience the divine itself-if one mistakes those symbolic relative truths for literal absolute truths-then one is worshipping an idol rather than the divine. Apophatic theology exists to prevent us from falling into that trap….

And from Cambridge.org, we read:

Human beings have always affirmed something of God, either as a result of speculation about the divine or as an affirmation of revelation about God-the Hebrew scriptures contain records claiming to be God’s self-revelation, and followers of other religious traditions have both claimed similar revelations and celebrated the divine in hymnic aretologies, that is lists of divine virtues. But this affirmation of the divine has always been hedged about by a sense of the mysteriousness of the divine, leading to the negating of any affirmations about God, thereby bearing testimony to the inadequacy of any human conception of God. So a Hebrew prophet exclaims in God’s name, ‘To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him?’ says the Holy One’ (Isaiah 40:25) and even the revelation of God’s name to Moses- ‘I am that I am’ (Exodus 3:14)- is an affirmation about God inviting or even requiring an apophatic interpretation. Similarly, within the Greek philosophical tradition, we find Plato asserting in Timaeus that ‘to discover the Father and Maker of the universe would be some task, and it would be impossible to declare what one had found to everyone,’ and in The Republic that the idea of the Good, for Plato the highest reality, is ‘beyond being.’

Is the search for God equal to, or identical with the search for the moral, ethical absolute that lies at the centre of much of religious debate?

Is the search for God equal to or identical with the search for the inner, unconscious in the human psyche, that uncovers truths different from what we call obvious motivations?

Is the search for God about a search for a community of men and women and children who believe some of the same ‘things’ and wish to search for God together?

Is the search for God analogous to the search for harmony with nature and the universe, as described in poetic detail by men like Wordsworth?

Is the search for God in any way analogous to the fable of the turtle born far from the ocean, and after many hurdles, hardships, risks and pain, finally reaches that ocean?

Is the search for God what we are all ‘left with’ when no other answer, proposition, theory, or even scene or sound or memory have all dissipated or disappeared, and Moltmann’s concept of hope remains?

That church ‘in the East’ from Rilke’s poem, was for me, not a building or a denomination, or a set of dogmatic dissertations or creeds, but a vision of what, like the turtle seeking the sea, to which I somehow seemed to be ‘being directed’….It was not a dream, nor a specific picture, nor a segment of a counselling or therapy session; it was not a direct urging of a colleague. On reflection, years decades later, I recall a scene in the hall of an urban high school in which I was walking and talking with a student when I heard, from across the hall, over the din of the commotion of between-class movements, these words from the iconic and unique and eccentric, art teacher, the victim of a house fire that destroyed his family and left him scarred for life, “There goes Atkins dishing out soul food!?

I had no idea what he meant, then, and I can only speculate all these four-plus decades later. The student and I were presumably talking about some piece of literature, a poem or novel, and whatever it was that I was saying was certainly not some intellectual literary theory, nor some nugget of psychological research, nor some historical vignette about the author. None of those academic, intellectual nuggets were ever at ‘top-of-mind’ for me. It was more likely some way to ‘connect’ the student with the character(s) in the piece, as well as for me to relate to the situation, then and with the literature. ‘Connection’ between characters in fiction, as well as between humans, and also between a human and ‘God’ has blinked like an unconscious (sometimes conscious) guide throughout my meandering life.

And, after that brief list of hypothetical questions above, perhaps for me, the question of where is God in any and all of the various situations we each encounter…or, and then this is the most challenging and riveting one, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’

The question is founded on the premise that ‘not being forsaken’ is the promise and the ‘beyond-reality’ certainty, about something holding, sustaining, supporting, or even guiding a timid, tempestuous, curious, eccentric and solitary over-weight young boy in a small town in rural Ontario. Of all the many ‘forbiddens’ that the church and clergy detailed, none specifically resonated, even at a very early age. What did resonate, however, was a deeply inescapable urgent sense that pain and judgement and alienation and separation and isolation were often imposed on people often, if not always, without any justification. I have ‘protested’ such injustice, silently, privately and discretely from a very early age.

That drunken former NHL hockey player, whom my mother disdained, although he had graduated from dentistry school, was never permitted to ‘tell his story’ and I wondered, for decades what it might have been. The land-surveyor who left his marriage and moved out of town with a local nurse, and, course, caused a gossip field-day….made me wonder (to myself) what was behind that decision. Similarly, the medical doctor known for his medical brilliance, reputed to have, again, consumed too much alcohol at his cottage and swam naked to the bar at a nearby summer hotel….what was it that prompted such a dramatic moment? And then there was the at least half-dozen all men who, when I was an adolescent, each took their own lives, all of them gentle, reasonable, kind and well-reputed members of the community….what was going on in those lives that remained secret and silent and accompanied them into the unknown?

The purveyance of a born-again theology of fundamental evangelism that separated the ‘saved’ from the ‘unsaved’ (and condemned to Hell) that was floating through the community, having issued from the church where my parents were members, did nothing to help to understand, or certainly not to empathize with the more troublesome evidence that was emerging before our eyes, for all those seeking to find some meaning, purpose, or explanation.

Separation, alienation, isolation, and ‘a hierarchy’ of the value and respect for different people, starting with what seemed to be a kind of royal status of doctors, lawyers, and clergy. And immediately following them, were the business elites, whose successful operation of their enterprise evoked considerable public acclaim and respect…the Pepsi bottler, the local transport company that became known across the province, the construction companies, land surveyors, and then there were the first wave of university students returning home for summer break, hailed as ‘student heroes’ throughout the town, most, if not all of them, first-time entrants in their families.

Among the ‘saved’ there was an air of attempted purity and perfection, stretching as far as imitating the clothing of the local clergy, presumably as a sign of ‘loyalty’ to the new evangelist. I interpreted this picture as sycophancy in the extreme, especially as a foil to my father’s observation of four new ‘converts’ as ‘the four just men’ all of them, including my father, members of the church session.

I was never, at least in my mind, trying to ‘fix, or to ‘heal’ any of these issues, merely interested in and attempting to understand. And the question of a God, in the midst of this local cauldron of human tragedies, along side human ‘trophy’ successes, seemed to have some deep roots which begged pursuit.

And, when, as a mid-forties-educator driven to work too many hours each day, for what seemed like public acknowledgement, acclaim and applause, I knew something very incompatible with a healthy balanced life was my responsibility to ‘investigate’….and, naively perhaps, I thought perhaps studying and reflecting and entering a community of others who might also be seeking God, I enrolled in theology.

And the search and the story continues……