Searching for God # 134

 It is a very challenging proposition to eliminate any boundary or barrier, separation or alienation, between humanity and the beauty of the world. To actually begin from the perspective of a full appreciation of the ‘romantic’ poets’ being at one with the universe, with nature, and with all of humanity in the fullness of its beauty, at first seems more of a poetic vision than one that ‘conforms’ to a faith, especially a Christian faith. Blake’s ‘separation’ in Eden, of masculinity and femininity from androgyny, God’s androgyny, is such a radical departure from the commission of evil, sin, and the ‘sentencing’ reading of being punished by being sent out into the world, and for women to ‘suffer in childbirth, that it continues to haunt, inspire, puzzle, and even to confuse this scribe. 

Easily falling into a ‘divided mind’ conundrum, I struggle with the Sunday-school version of The Fall and the depth and range of its penetration, both into my own psyche, and into the collective consciousness and unconsciousness of the Western world. Having intuitively resisted much of the moralizing of Paul’s writings, and after decades stumbling upon the Jesus Seminar and especially Robert Funk’s Honest to Jesus, in which one is introduced to a considerably researched Jesus of Nazareth, depicted very differently from the ‘Christianity’ that emerged in decades and even centuries following the death and Resurrection. And also to discover Blake and Tolstoy, themselves centuries apart, it is as if a new horizon has opened itself before my eyes, and especially before my imagination, it is as if ‘scales’ of conventional Christian conformity are falling from my metaphoric ‘eyes.’ 

And then there is that other ‘Sunday-school lesson, based on the biblical text: 

Truly I say to you, unless you change and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18: 3)  

The Sunday-school version focused on repentance for sin, conversion and submitting to God’s will in place of one’s own (obviously evil) will. 

Seventy-five-plus years on, the text has a radically different meaning, interpretation and relationship to my searching for God. And the difference is significant.  Ironically, I borrow from Paul, in Corinthians 13:11: 

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.....well sort of....as a child, I was raised to a world defined by ‘good and evil’ (and we are all evil) and that separation, fed and nourished by rationalism, empiricism, literalism has taken decades to wear itself out essentially. No longer can the world be described and defined exclusively in rational and empirical terms; that template reduces each of us, and also all of nature, to a kind of rigid logic, reason, and the co-operating literalism and empiricism and it eliminates or denies, or defies, or dismisses the poetic imagination. Growing up in schools, jobs, careers, one learns very quickly that one is engaged, both consciously and unconsciously, in a kind of Aristotelian world of ‘naming’ and defining, and then of discerning cause-and-effect of the various variables available to the senses and thereby to the brain. 

From iep.utm.edu, (The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) we read: 

As the father of western logic, Aristotle was the first to develop a formal system for reasoning. He observed that the deductive validity of any argument can be determined by its structure rather than its content, for example, in the syllogism: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrate is mortal....Aristotelian logic dominated until the rise of modern propositional logic and predicate logic 2000 years later.....In his metaphysics, he claims that there must be a separate and unchanging being that is the source of all other beings. 

It is the issue and subject of metaphysics, the study of fundamental nature of reality, existence and what it means for something to be, a word that comes from Greek ‘meta’ meaning ‘after’ or ‘beyond’ and ‘physika’ meaning physics that is the focus here. The tension between the empirical and literal perceived and assessed in and through the senses, processed in and through reason and logic on the one hand, and the imaginative, ephemeral, ethereal, the poetic perceptions and discernments on the other hand finds the twentieth and twenty-first centuries leaning heavily into the former, including within the sphere of faith and religion. The rationally nourished mind seeks to consider these two ‘perceptions’ and the attitudes and discernments as separate, isolated and virtually incompatible. However bumbling and stumbling the poetic imagination might be, attempts to reckon with the interdependence of the poetic imagination and mind-set with the sensate, rational, empirical and literal ....that is the impossible sphere of both psychology and faith/religion.  

The imagination careens through banks of images in day-dreams, night-dreams, fantasies, legends and myths that both light up and perhaps even darken the path for each of us and enhance the further evolution of new and different images. Also, to include Paradise, God, and images of life different from the one dominated by Aristotle’s logic in those imaginary images, will attract some and exclude others whose personal perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and actions are believed unequivocally to be founded on logic, empiricism and scientific proof.  Words and concepts like ‘transcendence,’ ‘flow,’ ‘zone’ and ‘epiphany,’ ‘aha,’ and even moments of ‘inexplicable wonder’ and the experiences they attempt to describe will invariably, if almost imperceptibly, bridge those two ‘perceptions’ of the universe and the ‘speaker, or author’s relationship to it. 

Hillman’s phrase, ‘rage to live’ or others’ preference ‘love of life’ or others, communing with nature’ or borrowing from Walt Whitman’s  ‘The poet is the universe,’ where we read: 

Somehow I seem to get identity with each and  

every thing around me, in its condition,  

Location and times -- 

What is it in me that meets them all whenever  

and wherever? 

Forms, colors, densities, odors-- 

What is it in me that corresponds with them? 

There is that in me, 

Something that swings on more than the earth I  

Swing on, 

 I do not know what it is, 

(Th all-basis, the nerve, the great sympathetic 

--the plenum* within humanity, humanity’s 

Foundations and hold-together, giving stamp to 

Everything—is necessarily invisible,) 

But I know it is in me.                                          

*plenum: a separate compartment or space, like the area above a drop ceiling or below a raised floor..in physics, a space completely filled with matter, as opposed to a vacuum (from AI)   

In order to attempt to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ the change, let’s start with a couple of lines from Rumi: 

Heaven is when the veils of separation between you and almighty are removed. And you are placed in direct witnessing of him. 

The most beautiful eyes are those that seek beauty. 

The nexus of an ecclesial institution incarnating what it believes to be ‘the kingdom of God’ while attempting to build and establish its own foundational credentials and theology, and remain open, flexible, and creative, not only from the perspective of offering weekly liturgies, study sessions, as well as the organizational structure to sustain its operation, is not merely paradoxical. It is a contradiction in both terms and intent. In an agricultural, and then industrial and then technological culture, with an evolving intellectual ethos that increasingly transitions from institutional authority to personal literacy and personal interpretation, the original ‘control’ goals and objectives of the institution have given way to a wide range of theological ‘views,’ interpretations, and concomitant relationships. 

On of the themes of this historic evolution is that the image of God as separate, distant, along with the image of heaven, as an eternal and special abode for the ‘saved,’ has gradually given way to a more ‘unified’ with a non-personalized, God, as depicted in Tolstoy’s, The Kingdom of God is Within You. Parallel to this evolution has been the original very high ecclesial priority of judging apostasy, heresy, and/or ‘setting examples’ for others who might ‘stray’ from the orthodox faith, leading to a significantly more empathic, compassionate, and indeed highly nuanced, complex and even psychological understanding of human behaviour and motivation. Some have argued that this trend has tended to evaporate the notion of ‘sin’ as central to the Christian faith. The detaching of evil from the eternal punishment of Hell, in a cosmology enriched by centuries of new scientific research, has transformed how we consider human evil and whether or not it is simply a matter of human choice and will. Much has been already said and written in this space about the privatization of sin. Tolstoy, and others, are focused on the ‘evils’ endemic to the structure, system, ethos and anima mundi of the culture. Without exonerating or excusing all individuals from dark and sinister attitudes, perceptions, actions/words and beliefs, the cultural ethos in the West is so plagued by an over-weighting of the power of money, political power, social status, corporate greed and insouciance of the system to the very notion of the ‘public interest’ or the public good. And, resisting Tolstoy’s insistence on the ‘’communistic’ ideology as essential to his theology, (athough the Roman Catholic church dismissed his writing for that political ideology), there is nevertheless a theological basis for the ‘kingdom vision’ of brotherhood, equality, respect, dignity and the theological discernment to ‘confront evil with force’, evil being those forces that impede, prevent, obstruct, derail and actually dismiss and deny the universal relevance and significance of those aspirational ideals to which Tolstoy is so passionately and spiritually and theologically committed. 

Over the last century plus, there has emerged a new nexus about the nuanced, complex and nevertheless essential relationship between the conscious (literal, empirical) perception of one form of reality and the unconscious (mythic, poetic, fantasy, imaginative) perception, apprehension and acknowledgement of another equally cogent, if not coherent, reality. 

The discernment of the human unconscious, starting with Freud, leading to Jung, followed by Hilman, has, for many, (including this scribe) offered insight into the question of human attitudes, perceptions, beliefs and behaviour. 

Is this next sentence a credible depiction of the evolution of which Tolstoy writes: 

...The shift from a dogmatic sentence of universal personal sin as the cornerstone of Christian theology, as the primary defining characteristic of humanity, (see Paul’s Romans 3:23) to a focus on the shared, universal, and potentially more ‘infectious’ ‘ethos’ of a more shared, collectively envisioned and engineered, impactful set of forces or systems, including laws and regulations and conventions that distort, repress, oppress and manipulate normal natural human energies, visions, ambitions and expectations....? 

Tolstoy is quite explicit about this: 

While Christ’s teaching is not only a doctrine which gives rules which a man must follow, it unfolds a new meaning in life, and defines a whole world of human activity quite different from all that has preceded it and appropriate to the period on which man is entering. The life of humanity change and advances, like the life of the individual, by stages, and every stage of life has a theory appropriate to it, which is inevitably absorbed by men. Those who do not absorb it consciously, absorb it unconsciously.....That is just what is happening now to humanity at this time of transition through which we are passing, from the pagan conception of life to the Christian.....We think today that the requirements of the Christian doctrine—of universal brotherhood, suppression of national distinctions, abolition of private property, and the strange injunction of non-resistance to evil by force—demand the impossible....The time will come ---it is already coming—when the Christian principles of equality and fraternity, community of property, resistance of evil by force, will appear just as natural and simple as the principles of family or social life seem to us now. (P.110-113) 

A little further on, Tolstoy adds: 

Whether he be master or slave, the man of today cannot help constantly feeling the –painful opposition between his conscience and actual life, and the miseries resulting from it. (p.116) 

While Tolstoy references the Christian faith, there is no reason to suppose that the brotherhood of humanity, the equality, fraternity, respect, dignity of each and even human being is not congruent with all the major world faiths. Christians, have a special obligation to disown any ‘special’ or ‘superior’ or ‘holy’ or ‘sanctimonious’ view, perception and attitude of this one faith. And that may well prove to be a ‘step-too-far' for many. A similar step of dis-owning of superiority, power over others, and especially the abuse of such power by those charged with, holding, being elected or appointed to positions of authority and responsibility may also continue to prove to be a step-too-far for many. 

In his renowned masterpiece, The Little Prince, (Le Petit Prince) Saint Exupery expressed an insight that gives both meaning and resonance to a universal human wat of perceiving: 

We see only with the heart; the essential things are not seen by the eye. 

And for many of us, the ‘heart’ is both witnessing horrible and devious, malicious and lethal actions, words, attitudes coming from many very loud, mostly male voices every day. And while the news reports display the numbers of dead, dispossessed, homeless, flood-and/or-fire-ravaged, war-torn, starving, diseased, oppressed, unjustly incarcerated, deported, dismissed and devalued, the heart of millions of humans, whether formally or even informally characterized as Christian, cries out in shame, anger, disbelief, hopelessness, and also a firm conviction that our shared and universal capacity to hurt, harm, destroy, kill, maim, ignore, dismiss, betray with false accusations, deny and drop bombs and missiles to eviscerate humans, their towns and cities, their children and their hospitals and schools.....and from where most of us ordinary mortals sit, most of this depravity is conducted with impunity, disregard for norms, laws, rights, and decency, and the carnage not only continues but seems to grow. 

The axiom that America is thirteen times bigger than Canada, as articulated by the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, is neither a legitimate yard-stick nor even a measurement worthy of acknowledgement and elevation, in a ruthless, despotic, manipulative and irresponsible act of ‘governance’ in an obviously faux attempt to negotiate a trade agreement...when the real purpose is to bring Canada to her knees making a political, economic and cultural take-over more feasible. 

The abuse of power today knows no effective, commensurate ‘antibodies’ to counter the disease of political malfeasance, manipulation, lies, and shame in which we are desperately searching for the universal right to live in safety, security and freedom from such forces. Today we are all Gazans, Ukrainians, migrants, homeless, victims of preventable disease, preventable environmental disaster, hungry, hopeless, confused, angry and to a degree never before witnessed in decades, impotent and dismissed by those in power around the world.....Of course, there are exceptions, but the larger picture nevertheless holds. 

If Tolstoy is relevant, and if Saint Exupery’s words and insight holds, both positing the ‘kingdom of God is within you’ (and me) and we are all exhorted as congruent with and responsible to and for our religious faith and theology, to confront evil with force, then confronting the malignant forces that surround each of us on the planet is a legitimate, inescapable and honourable purpose for each of us.