Searching for God # 71

Speaking and thinking about the potency of adjacency, it must not go unnoticed that, for centuries, writers of literature, plays, novels, poems, short stories, etc. have been using a similar approach, with a different name. Their name, contained in a frequented theme, is ‘appearance versus reality’….For as long as there has been fiction, there have been writers attempting to probe the depths between what appears on the surface of the senses, the behaviour,  with what might be going on underneath that surface. Indeed, much of the energy of a narrative emerges from, and also evokes and provokes questions about the mystery behind the scene.

 And that mystery has multiple layers:

   Does this actor know what that actor knows?

   Does the audience know something that or those characters do not know (dramatic irony)?

   Does this actor’s letter hide something from others?

   Does this soliloquy disclose an interior thought, feeling or even a plan of action which, so far, has been secreted from everyone?

   Is that actor even conscious of what his own motives are?

   Is there a play within a play, to which the audience is being treated, behind the backs of one or more characters?

   Is there a piece of the plot that has been omitted deliberately by the author, and if so for what purpose?

Humans are inveterate detectives, attempting to discern whatever evokes a quizzical look, a deep frown, or even a pair of closed eyes while the head is held for reflection time. As a corollary, humans are also, to greater or lessor degrees, actors on a stage, flipping both consciously and unconsciously between ‘playing with an audience’ or ‘shooting straight. Just today, I on encountering a house painter who had been struggling with a gimpy knee, I wondered, ‘Is your knee acting up or feeling better?’ “Yes!” came his comic retort. And when I asked, ‘Are you being sarcastic or not!” he again retorted, “Yes!”

And each of us is daily, hourly, and even minute by minute engaged in a process of ascertaining whether a piece of speech can be understood literally, as if it were a bonafide, provable, agreed-upon fact, or something else. Denmark schools have even gone to the extent of introducing critical perception and interpretation, in speech and in writing, to elementary school students, who need to be prepared for a world drowning in propaganda, another  world for dissembling, lying, misrepresenting the truth.

It may seem to be cliché to ask, to whom it is most easy and most likely that one will lie? Myself! If we are unable to discern if and when we are telling the truth, our truth, to ourselves, how much more likely is it that we are engaged in a process of shift-shaping with others, albeit much of that is unconscious.

Given the deepening cloud of lies, prevarications, dissembling, distracting and outright ‘bullshit’ that is coming out of the White House, as well as the Kremlin, a new attitude and energy are emerging in an attempt to expose such lies. Self-congratulatory exaggeration has always been inherent in the political statements of many politicians. Today’s cable news, (here think MS NOW) is literally fixated on detailed exposure of the lies and deliberate deceptions that spew out of the mouth of the ‘glorious leader’ in the Oval Office. And as the scholars will tell us, the purpose of such a cataract of lies is not to get us to believe them, but to get us to the point where we do not know what is truth any longer. Citizen mind-bending, is the goal of all propaganda.

What does all this have to do with searching for God, you ask?

If we all struggle to come to grips with the reality around and about us, imagine the difficulty in coming to terms with the ineffable, ephemeral, infinite force of energy that is divinity.

Here are some brief notes from an essay by Richard A. Rosengarten, entitled, “The Christian Who Was A Church of One,’ from divinity.uchicage.edu, dated, February 17, 2022:

…Blake’s adopted Christian mantle is not that of the evangelist but the prophet. His is a poetic universe where apocalypse always beckons, precisely because the conventional world---what Blake spat out as ‘the Ratio’- works very hard to convince us that our present state of civilization is axiomatically preferable to our natural state….Blake saw a close relation between the words ‘revelation’ and ‘revolution.’ To be serious about Christianity meant, for Blake, that you were suspicious of any and all authority. Those authorities not incidentally included the Church, or what Blake termed, with decided disparagement, ‘religion.’ He meant by that term not just the Church of England (o of Rome) but those—he had the Deists on is frontal lobe—who were quite certain that what they called ‘the religion of nature’ or ‘the religion of reason’ was the desirable and reassuring entity. Blake did not stop with religion. He was no shrinking violet: he castigated not just bishops and popes but John Locke’s epistemology and Sir Isaac Newton’s physics as full-fledged participants in ‘the Ratio,’ and included for good measure the aesthetics of the most decorated and decorous English painter of his era, Sir Joshua Reynolds, as well as the mystical visions of Emanuel Swedenborg. Blake wanted to stir things up because he thought the Christian revelation was meant to stir things us. The first step in doing so (after the Bible from stem to stern) was to liberate Imagination from the shackles of Reason. For Blake, this could make us fully human again, and  thus much more approximately the creatures of God that we truly are. Another figure who vexed Blake even as he garnered greater sympathy was John Milton; in one of his best formulations, Blake lamented that Milton was of the Devil’s party but did not know it. What Blake meant was that in Paradise Lost Milton fully distinguished life in the Garden of Eden from life in the world after Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit. Blake thought this folly, unworthy of both God and of God’s creatures that Christian fall was not some ‘fortunate’ event but a necessary part of the divine plan and the wellspring for the  ongoing worldly cycle of creation, sin, and resurrection. Blake saw that cycle everywhere: in history certainly…but also in human beings, in flowers and fruits and vegetables, in night turning into day and day turning into night. Imagination, Blake thought, was far more likely that human reason to make us alive to the ongoing testimony of creation, sin and resurrection.

Here is an example of the poetic imagination at work on the search for God among the creatures whom God has created…using Milton as a foil, as well as Newton, and giving to the process of seeking God the legitimate imprimatur of the human imagination. Today, a similar impetus, guiding light, might serve well in a historic period in which not only reason, but literal, empirical ‘scientific’ facts have become the replacement for religion, for faith, and for a search for God. Hillman notes that we have idolized money, as did Joshua Leibmann before him…today one wonders if it is the ‘totem of all things literal’ that, while including money, has elevated an epistemology of empiricism and positivism into a virtual idol-ology….not ideology.

We have made of our world a landscape of scarred, rusty, defective, and deliberately deposited iron-steel-beams and bridges of materialism into a morgue of our sensibilities. Because it can generate more income than a human, an algorithm is more ‘valuable’ than a human, millions of whom are being dismissed as either replaceable by AI or too costly for government or corporate balance sheets.

While Tolstoy railed against the abuse of power by military and law enforcement officials in his home country of Russia, today, Blakes injunction to oppose authority must be directed to the tech moguls, autonomic behemoths so transfixed with the prospect of mountains of wealth and the political ‘papier maché political cut-outs of legitimate politicians, most of whom have forgotten their ability to perceive and to articulate ‘facts’ and ‘truths.’ And, it is not incidental to include in that ‘round-up’ of complicit sycophants, those ecclesial hierarchical officials whose primary job is to sustain, maintain and uphold the reputation of the church in order to facilitate the flow of cash from those same corporate monsters.

To sacralize both money and literal, empirical, facts, without question and also without investigating both the motives and the impact of such blatant sacralizing, is essentially to remove both the human imagination and the human being, creatures of God,  from the equation of the anima mundi.

There is a cliché among military leadership that one cannot bring democracy to a place on the bayonet of a rifle….it takes butter and bread…..metaphorically. A parallel epithet might be that you can’t bring Christianity to anyone or any place on the cheque-book of a tech or corporate mogul. Photo-ops of a pseudo-leader carrying a Bible to a church front door in order to appear to have a faith is like telling thousands of duped people in the pews of mega-churches that God wants you to be ‘rich’….it is the same non-theology, attempting to pass as Christian faith.

And, to my surprise and disappointment, few, if any, of the respected church clergy, at whatever level of experience and authority, have come out to defy, to decry and to dessicrate such phoney examples. The prophetic voice of the Christian church, that of a Mandela, or a Tutu, or a Bonhoeffer seems either utterly missing or utterly silenced out of fear of WHAT?....reprisals, recriminations, retributions, or even jail?

If ever there were a time when Christian imagination and courage, faith and discipleship were in desperate need among the world’s leaders, what we watch is who is warming up to whom, over Ukraine, over Greenland, over Taiwan, over Gaza, over Sudan, ……etc. Moralizing about specific lies told by trump and his thugs is, or seems to this scribe, blind to the big picture….that humans are being displaced, shot, dismissed, devalued and devaluated by men who have lost their conscience, their inner life and their soul….and they are doing it with impunity.

The voices of Tolstoy, Blake, Hillman, (and if they were alive, Tutu, Bonhoeffer, and Mandela) and others are pleading, on behalf of every human being, and on God’s behalf, for us to waken to the threat. Not only is that threat existential, but also apocalyptic. And this time, apocalyptic must not be read as exaggeration, as many prefer.

Inferring from the ‘facts’ on the ground’ in the bully pulpits, on the high seas, in the various war-zones, and in climate projections links the search for truth with the search for God, and, perhaps as never before, the struggle for survival.