Over lunch one day an elderly cleric, an erudite and cultured man, confided in me that he was uncomfortable with eating for the act of ingestion reminded him that he was an animal. I admit I can be a wee world-weary before my morning coffee, but I have no desire to off my mortal coil and fly into the aether, to be other than member of the species, and I declare that cognizant of the serene imperturbability that must reside in being the celestial equivalent of a well written computer program. I am a rational animal, and I deem it hubris to crave negate myself in the hope of becoming another species or some mere distillation of this species. Thus, the problematic aspect, to my mind, is that spirituality, with its talk of transcendence, is too often not taken as a process of synthesizing human powers, a step by step integration, but a preclusive fixation upon one power, and the step by step negation of all others. It becomes thus, not a process of man becoming fully actualized, fully man, but of man seeking to negate man so the human can become an angel, a disembodied mind, psyche, soul.
Why have we this rush to wings? Is it an attempt to abrogate the power of death by nullifying in the present everything about the human considered mortal? Or is it simply a matter of delusion founded in inattention to our nature and our language? As to the abrogation of death, all religion is, on some level, an attempt to nullify the sting of death. I was once shown a painting worthy of oratory or chapel. On a large silvered oval were set four discs of gold, in each disc stood a masked male figure, each in a different prayer position. Below the discs on the silver surface was writ out the Latin for “Let me not die”. The artist [i] noted that such was the essence of every prayer. The observation is valid. The depths of every prayer turn on those words, that poignant cry for “life everlasting”. Man wants, hopes, prays his “I” to endure. [ii] Without here wading further into the depths of psychology and consecratory attempts to countermand death, there are three more readily available perspectives concerning the presumptive equivocality of spirituality worthy of consideration: the term itself, the nature of the human construct, and the parameters of religious and other iconic images.
The term:
The very term is deceptive. It harbours an implicit fractioning of reality. The spiritual is understood as something opposed to the material, the worldly, the bodily, as something super-natural, contra-concrete, a type of anti-matter. This viewpoint leads to thinking about reality as actually divisible into the seen and unseen. Such distinctions are, however, merely logical, rational compartmentalizations, concepts. Body and soul are not two items at war one with the other; they are merely mental notations that speak of man in two differing ways—quantitatively and qualitatively. Further, these divisions excite an inclination to evaluate the basic qualitative powerfulness as superior to its quantitative, material, concrete manifestations. In this tendency rests the fatal flaw pursuing religions and their moral codings.
The nature of the human construct:
We find ourselves ambiguous. By construct we are a unity, by function divisive. I know myself always as “I” regardless the relentless flow of changes in time and personal evolution. However, regarding my world, I know this and that, I feel this or that, I want for this or that. This panoply of feelings, wants, desires, information and ideations manifests as a tension within “I”, forcing “I” to decide for this or that. The decision, the free choice, must always say “no” whensoever it says “yes”, as it must say “yes” whensoever it says “no”. It is freely an automatic placing of a value , a priority, a ranking on this and that , and the ultimate this under consideration is always “This I” to the lesser, often the imperiled, “That other”. This internal wobbling within the “I” religion names the ground of sin, and “original sin” the inclination to prioritize the immediacy of self over the greater harmonics and economics of nature. Social philosophy understands it either from the external perspective as the individuality of one butting against the individuality of others, warring ceaselessly against them until a peace, a compromise, a social contract is achieved, or alternately from the internal perspective, as the inherent sociality of man affronted by a misanthropic, disoriented individualism questing for property, power, sex or some variant thereof.
Grounding this unity in diversity is man’s own biology. Man is a self-contained community, a well-engineered biosphere of countless bacteria, organisms, and organs. The intuition of this biological unity feeds into the psyche just as the unity underlying the self reflects back and supports this “sociality” of body. Body and psyche not so much define each other as are aspects one of the other, functions one of the other, symbiotic manifestation one of the other. We receive our self as self-united, a microcosm, a proto-society-within-person, an integrated being, and when we do not, when we experience self as dis-oriented, dis-rupted, dis-eased, we seek out the counsel of physician or psychologist.
Because the faculty of reason operates so effectively as an instrument for navigating the world, for filtering, interpreting, and organizing the incessant influx of information from within and without, we tend to blithely and blindly receive it as the ultimate aspect of our nature, the giver of vison and direction, and thus, the instrument capable of rising above the effusiveness of the world and the vicissitudes of life. Reason, however, is not the whole of us or even the epitome of our being, merely a management strategy. It may move with great speed, but it moves one step at a time. It produces one parcel of information at a time. Its interest is immediate. It works by creating a focus. It makes up its items, its concepts, by marking contrasts within being: light and dark, subject and object, this and that, mine and yours, nature and man. Its methodology of identification is differentiation. It is divisive: this is x and it is not not-x. Reality may be a uni-verse, but our movement within it is effected by breaking it into pieces, into parcels each with its own focus and technical language. When fields of view are overlapped, focus is blurred, we see a macedoine of gallimaufries, become befuddled and retreat into superficialities, or more drastically, are rendered catatonically inactive. Heads spin when economics and environmental concern collide. Mix social aspirations with religion, or politics with diplomacy, suspicions flourish, and recalcitrant prejudices emerge at every turn. Attempting to grasp the fuller picture is seemingly a task we would avoid. Reason’s goal is a passing focus, not foci, and thus, our multi-versatility does not translate into a capacity for either multi-tasking or comprehensive comprehension.
Coupling this presumptuous imperium of reason there is in spirituality a tendency to conjure visions of some type of self-mastery. Man is undeniably a mixture of powers and potentials. Well-being and the ultimate good reside in being to any of these neither slave nor master—especially if mastery, as usually it is, is understood as a suppression, blind subjugation, or sublimation. It needs be well noted the dismissal of suppression, sublimation, or subjugation does not imply man is abandoned of himself to a slavery. All the aspects of man are present as the definiens of man. Just as on orchestra is diminished without percussion or brass, without strings or woodwinds, so too a man is diminished in the attempt to feloniously squash a part of what he is. Man is called to learn the proper orchestration of his sundry parts. Man is fully man only in the harmonization of his varied aspects. True spirituality involves neither leaving nor denying this world and man’s worldly nature, and certainly not denouncing this world or human nature. It is about knowing when and how to place the accent, direct the beat, pace and tempo. It is harmony of self and self in world—our reality–and not a subtraction, an imagined, Plato-inspired abstraction of life. Ascetic practices, discipline, focus, and discernment have a role in learning how to lead this orchestra that is man, but an obsession to endlessly practice and rehearse bits of self without ever performing the tasks of the whole of self is an escape from reality, from sanity, from health, from the possibility of fulfillment, good, and well-being.
This idea of mastery over self has mislead some thinkers in spiritual theology to posit, not the icon of, but an actual preternatural state on humanity, a time wherein human nature was graciously supplemented with benefits lost when sin entered the world. Others have concentrated their gaze upon the awe, the wonder, the sense of giftedness at the heart of self-fulfilment, and externalized the font of this animation in a super-natural power or Being augmenting the human endeavour toward wholeness. The idea of a predecessor and golden age to history wherein man had aspects to his nature since lost is but a weakened obverse of the icon of a super-nature or supernatural aid. Both are indicative of the potency, vibrancy and wondrousness resident at the very foundations of the self’s thrust to find its original, innocent, naïve unity transcended in the wisdom of self emerged from the full and fruitful experience of this world with its pleasures and pains, life understood and well lived. If that potency resident within is understood as rooted in grace or nature matters not; the acknowledgement and appreciation of its presence does. The issue at this point is reverence not the icon.
In summation, it needs well to be marked, spirituality is not a call to reduce oneself, but to integrate oneself, to learn the manner in which all faculties can be made to function in efficacious unity. There is no call and no need to suppress the ill-named “lower instincts”, the sensual and emotional aspects of life. Suffocated these merely try to escape by hiding in subtle form, in contra-natural and carbonous depths where they emit a rotting toxicity that effects the whole person. Neither can these animating aspects of our humanness be sublimated in a vain hope that their power can be harnessed and redirected toward some other goal. A gyve about such power will have variable hold at best. Their attenuating leads not to an excess of power for use in some imaged effort, but to rebellion and contentious subversion challenging every avenue of the aspired deflection. The presumption of mastery provides not transcendence but deformity. Spirituality indicates a rising to one’s full potential, striving for one’s highest good, to becoming wholly oneself, to becoming holy. In Christian thought, the Holy is defined as the One who is ever giving of self: to Son, to Spirit, to world. Spirituality is not a journey of self-mastery, it is a process of self-management, a management, which by the sociality of our nature, thrives toward its ultimate good and welfare by rooting soundly its orientation outward to the other, to the world which for the Christian is always the world of God’s incarnation, favour and grace.
To this I am compelled to add a caveat. I am not dismissing the contemplative life, denying there exist vocations to such a life, or that such vocations are without value to the individual and to the species. There have been and will be always individuals summoned from the depths within or the heights above to hone and excel certain aspects of our constitution, and I take such vocations and the efforts to fulfill them as Nature’s way of ensuring sundry aspects of our constitution continue on in strength and good health. Thus, there has been and will be always individuals called to pour their all into developing one skill or craft to perfection, and therein causing others to fall to the background. The critical issue in excelling in some field, be it athletics, arts, academia, or other, is to excel in the chosen arena without denigrating or disparaging others. There is a tendency among academics to look down their noses at those engaged in other fields. Athletes are often likewise guilty of looking askance at those engaged in arts and academia. Religious folk, despite the nature of holiness to which they aspire, are not immune to spiritual condensation, although they do try consecrate that as “mercy”. The enisling of an individual in a certain field toward excellence in that field emanates a certain xenophobia. It is an unfortunate tendency of concentration in a medium that needs ever to be corrected.
Religious and other iconic images:
We are conceptualizing beings. We—to some degree—depict a goal, a termination of action, at the minimum, a directionality. We envision a here and there, a now and next. Generously, but accurately put, we are visionaries. The vision is the guiding star, the trusted horizon toward which one travels. In terms of Christianity and its spiritual journey, the guiding light must be an authentic idea of God and of man. The situation is less straight forward than one might imagine. We are heirs to a multitude of ideas about God, man, and the journey of life.
The religious iconography presented in spiritual theology is no less biramous than the ideas discussed above, and as such, has lent itself more to moral obfuscation than clarity. The intended reference is always primal power understood both individualistically and universally, both as individual animation (soul), and cosmic animator (God). Pure power is by its very potency dangerous. As primal it can be directed radically, from the root of being, for good or ill. Spirituality is about a foundational force that is both our animation and our person-al manifestation. It has an inescapable worldliness, an inherent morality, a prioritizing of values, specifically the value of actions. A man is that which he directs, channels, and hones his basic-most power to be to be. Religion speaks of spirituality as the journey to holiness. In secular terms it is the trek to wholeness, to becoming a whole person, to creating a personality of truly illuminative expanse. Nevertheless, religious and other inspirational images cannot escape the reality of the world and its language. They, thus, must piecemeal present icons for the internal mechanisms of man, his cosmic aspirations, and the sundry conflicts in freedom that confront him. Good and evil, heart and mind, self and other and ultimate Other all stand individuated entities in religious iconography despite their inherent unity (community) in reality. They tend to be placed not apposed one to another but opposed, and therein, valued and ranked in counterbalance one to another.
The great religions of this world arose as forums to assist in the navigation of life, in the self-integration into fullness of nature and transcendence to ultimate well-being. Each provides a system of evaluation that looks both to man’s worldliness and his vocation to holiness. Each equips the devotee through rituals and teachings with disciplines for centring and focusing self, and for interacting with others and the world shared. The economics of their self-understanding is that by utilizing their en-cultured and encoded visions of the meaning of self and world, by following their methodologies of worship and prayer, everyman may hope to find unity within and without, with this world and its ultimate foundation.
Religion invariably depicts the divarications of feelings and values, self and other in mythologies of higher and lower worlds, loci of the ultimate good and the base-most evil, opposing realms of angels and demons replete with the attendant abundances and privations of life. In the fundamental occidental disposition, the absolute of possibility is seen as the plenum of actuality—a heaven, a world of the divine Being wherein all being is made perfect, fully actualized, potentials all realized, glorified (literally: given “weight”, their total substantiality). Man’s greatest goal and his highest good is to here find his rest, his peace, his concord, his full sociality, a holy communion with God, the world and the humanity he made, a communion of saints. In the fundamental oriental disposition, the ideal is a cessation of all items of experience, possibility, ideation, a discontinuance of the entire the process of actualization—a nirvana, a passing beyond all being and its incessant becomings (literally: an ecstasy, an “out-of being”, an idea the West, with its emphasis on the individual, is predisposed to envision as “out-of-my-being-into-Being”). [iii]
In occidental thought, above all mythological images and icons resides the supreme image: God. God becomes the Name placed over the void, the cloud of the unknown, the horizon never captured, the platform ever receding from man’s grasp, cognitions, and imaginations. The definition of God becomes whatsoever variably rouses fear and trembling, awe and wonder, inspiration, ultimate meaningfulness. This does not confine God any more than the text of the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary encloses the English language. The word “god” is, if one looks closely, a preverbid, more verb than either noun or adjective, notational of an action more than actor or quality thereof, pointing toward not an absolute, not an exhaustion of meaning, but a surplus of possibilities, and as such, an unboundable field of possible usages. From one aspect, God becomes the Name applied to something about reality everyman intuits—creative power. Primitively, such power is espied in volcano and storm, in the eternal return of seasons and crops, in the cycles of birth and death, in ancestor and familial genie, and robed in the icons of Vulcan and Zeus, Dionysius and Apollo, Persephone and Demeter, Isis and Osiris, et al. From another perspective, man experiences this prime power internally in the tensions twixt passions and reason. Here the divine nature, the whole of meaning, the holy name, in whom man seeks his ultimate welfare and rest, bifurcates, and presents either as some form of love or unrelenting law, iconized in the contrariety of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, Moirai and Nous, Eros and Logos, Yahweh and Satan. From this position, God becomes personal, acting either to bless, comfort, support, or to confront, accuse, judge. The question in spirituality is to which among these masks, to Whom among these dramatis personae of primal power, does man look if he would progress toward his fullness.
In the modern western world, the religious visions of God are tempered by two succedaneous movements: secularism and a faith in science. Since the fifteenth century a secularism has been incessantly unfurling. Modern philosophical systems attempted to address man’s ultimate concerns by navigating away from the images of religion, enunciating a new vision, and engineering their analyses on the basis that in some far corner of our being all are quizzed by the notion that somewhere there might be a coincidence of opposites, that there might be to all the divarications of life a resolution, replete in wisdom and peace. Despite the efforts of Locke, Berkeley, and assorted others, philosophy’s “reasonable religion” and logical morality proved an uninspiring summit to summons man’s consent and worship [obedience]. Wearied of the esoteric systematics of “reason”, some pined for a triumph of “common sense” and brotherliness amongst men. They were, however, repeatedly faced with the fact that the pathway of the sensible apparently has multiple meanings, making the “sensible” neither common nor convincing, as ever the waves in which revolutions occur give evidence. Kant, the great synthesizer of the modern philosophical systems, expostulated reason in its purity had neither interest nor faculty for addressing man’s ultimate concern. Such language and “logic” belonged to those “term-less”, non-conceptual, qualitative imaginings of value and aesthetic, the unprovable judgments of good and beauty. The Romantic movements that followed after him made manifest the blissful embrace of nature’s wonder does not move all men in like manner or direction. The waning dream of this movement did, however, nurture another vista that, in the investigations of James, Freud, and Jung, deleted notions of soul and psyche from philosophical and supernatural realms, and confined them into a science of human development.
The present age muchly has lost the icon of God as Person or as Love, although its conservative corners, clinging for surety in a fast moving world, still hold to a God who is Order and Law. The au current laic quest for “scientific” truth has moved most beyond the artistry of wrapping the meaning of life in the transcending ideals of good, truth and beauty. This attitude is, however, not authentically scientific. It is merely disinclined toward the enunciations of the mythological visions and religious icons that formed Western culture. The popularly held distillation of the scientific mind gazes toward the idea of evolution as holding the ultimate resolution of the problematics of good and evil, mine and yours, right and wrong. The endeavours toward spiritual growth are overrun with vague notions that humanity will eventually evolve to a maturity of self and society. The theory of evolution becomes therein an item of faith, a new icon of the creative power, a substitute for those more ancient movers of reality–God and grace. Evolution, however, insures its movement by spreading out widely and in hope, in a creative thrust. Its hope is for a transcending moment although it knows not every seed will flower, not every being succeed or excel. This presents not a new insight. In the ancient myths even the heavens and its residents were represented as having levels, ranks, triumphs and failures. In the game of variants and probabilities named the theory of evolution, the wide spread, the pervasiveness of the surface, of superficiality, and the indiscriminate focus of the common incite many into a pococurante ennui. Therein philosophy’s work to scan the whole of understanding is idly dismissed as an esoteric exercise, and spirituality’s task of orchestrating life skirted as something best left to anchorites. There is a failure to see the via media, the ecotone twixt constellated brilliance and troglodyte plodding. Lassitude and laziness feed upon each other, and progress becomes the preserve of the few. Preachers surrender into treating their charges like children, entrepreneurs advocate laissez faire, and they both know there are few, if any, who will raise hue and cry. To look toward a focus for transcendence in a faith in evolution seems vacuous. At best, in terms of spirituality, evolutionary theory propels Deism to the forecourt, at worst it raises the spectre of a Herrenvolk, and at the minimal, reduces the icon of the Holy to a principle of energy. While the reduction or definition of the divine as energy or principle of energy does not conflict with the descriptors set out in natural or philosophical theology, there is here a nuance of importance, a subtlety that makes the principle a mathematical expression as opposed to the more philosophical poetics of principle and energy as veils of a Potency ever receding from human grasp. The latter can be responded to on a personal level, can be iconized “personally”, while the former remains an aspect of an equation, the great “E”, be that Einstein’s or Darwin’s. Evolution may displace the divine in theory, but its offering is neither inspiration nor passion. No man has fallen in love or offered his life for sake of a theory.
Nevertheless, despite the varied fields, old and new, of inspirational icons offered, if one would engage in a serious journey toward the harmonizing of human faculties, one needs adopt a singular vision and commit to it as regulatory, as graph upon which the journey’s varied qualitative, defining, and potent turns and challenges can be imagined and mapped. For a positive outcome, for a positivity of self and life, for a real-istic concept of self, this self-embraced regulation [a rule (of faith), i.e., a “religion”] must be positively based within the self. There must be a root of trust. Until one is equipped to move forward in trust, one will not move. This implies that one must begin with healing within those elements of the psyche/soul that inhibit one’s sense of trust, of self-worth, of capacity to freely move toward another. Unresolved negativity, as that which flows from the failure of healthful parental bonding, will cripple and discolour the guiding vision of trust in self and the ultimate self toward which one moves, be that Self understood as the psyche in transcendence, as the ultimate divine Self, or as soul reflecting the holy One. Trust in a founding and foundational “good” is both the indispensable anchor and exigent faculty of mobility for the journey toward harmonizing oneself. Without it hope is ever still born, and all efforts are rendered tone-deaf.
One must embrace a singular divine principle, animating icon, image, goal, God. This does not dismiss every icon of the divine from the field, but it does relativize them to a supreme characteristic. In the Western traditions, the primal power is creative, a Giving, and as it is turned toward by a person, it is personalized, wrapped in the best vesture the devotee in quest of self and the meaningfulness of life can offer, and characterized as the consummation of that highest power of self to which person can aspire: self-giving, love. That God is known either as Love or Law matters decisively, for it answers in whose image shall I be made, shall I—in freedom, in grace, in hope—be? God, taken literally or figuratively, presents to us a truth about our reality, the ultimate truth of our reality—its inexhaustible, its ever transcending, ever present-exceeding creativity, its positive thrust toward life and for life, the questing for man’s highest good and therein his freedom into it.
In writing on John, [iv] I noted how the God of Love tends to become, in the practice of that gospel’s spirituality, hidden behind a foreboding atmosphere of incense and iconostasis. In considering the Enlightenment in the series on Occidental Ideas, [v] I observed light both illuminates and casts shadows, makes things visible and shields others in umbra. This is the unavoidable consequence of standing before both love and light. Love knows only the beloved and its loving. Light knows only light and its illuminated. Shadow and unworthiness are the burden of man’s finitude, the limited abilities to know and love, to comprehend, understand, and to receive love. Love and Light expose not only finitude, but that tendency to concretize the self in its finitude, to limit the self to its own littleness of world. Religion will always need consecrate times and spaces to confront man with the undiluted magnitude of Love and Light, with the incomprehensible and all-exceeding majesty of the Holy. Such cannot, however, be the solitary symbol of the Holy, for the Holy is not the Holy without being also the present, the intimate, the embracing, the gracious, the loving and warmth of illumination, the vigour and strength for the path ahead. Religion must always balance the almighty power of the transcendent, the eternally ideal, and the finitude it reveals with the transformative power of the immanent and actual, and the galvanizing power of potentiality and futurity. Icon and incense have place, as do fear and trembling, but only in company with loving-most embrace, acceptance, care, healing, and the supply of hand, heart and hope. As with the finding of balance of body and its component parts, the Holy needs be balanced in the sundry, the essential, aspects in which it lives. Falling on one’s knees in adoration of the Lord Creator cannot be authentic unless it is accompanied by getting up, by arising, and going somewhere (as have Logos and Spirit), by moving in sincerity to embrace that which the Creator has done—the other of my life, the world of my being. In theology the danger is that focus becomes fixated on solely one of the three personae [vi] of the Trinity, but the orthodox position always sets them as bounded together in a ceaseless dance (perichoresis) of being and action. Any sound Christian spirituality must replicate that orthodoxy.
As a positive, an authentic, imagery of the divine and holy is critical to the journey to wholeness, so too is a proper, a realistic, vision of man. From the very foundations of Christianity, the doctrine of the resurrection of the body has confirmed the essential unity of body and soul, the harmonic vitality and solidarity of man’s sundry functions and aspects. The resurrection of the body was presented as the unconditional demarche countering the Gnostic idea that man should attempt to dis-embody himself, deny himself and his world as items lesser, wanting, or evil. It has not in that demand stood either constant or unwavering, and Gnostic ideas have incessantly bit at its foot, a serpent at the heel of the truth. Yet, Christian theology, ever striving to hold its position, went beyond the doctrine of resurrection, and anchored its affirmation of man’s worldliness in the doctrine of the tri-unity of the divine Being itself. The powers to create freedom and to bring it into its perfection, the potencies, the “missions” of Father and Son, are unified in the essential divine conjunctive of the Spirit. The Spirit unites not only Father and Son, but their missions, their worldliness, and theology, therefore, ever speaks of the divine action as from the Father through the Son in power of the Spirit, or a configuration thereof. This Spirit is dubbed the Holy precisely because it is essential at once to the unity and life of the divine, and its sacrificial work, its self-gifting of the world and its progress. Christian spirituality is the played out invocation of this same Spirit to become, to be, the animation of self—Veni Creator Spiritus [Creator Spirit, Come]!
For the sincere Christian, spirituality is about building a sturdy base within oneself to operate caringly and well within this world. If the concern is to create a platform from which to “reach God”, there is committed again that sin of both Paradise and Babel. There is a blatant discard of the meaning of the incarnation of God. The unwavering orthodox position has ever claimed man cannot ascend to God, and God neither invites nor challenges with the impossible. God does invite man to be transparent before God for the only viable experience of God arises out of the encounter with one whose life is godly, wholesome, personally integrated and socially open. In terms of theology, God can be glimpsed only in grace, a grace intimately linked to the incarnation of grace, be that the Christ or his disciple, the Christ-ian.
The factual reality of spiritual life is a movement, a constant movement, toward the embrace of the full potential of the present moment. It is a journey of opening oneself, of freeing oneself, to be fully present to self and the world. It requires attention to the movements within oneself, focus, forethought, practice, control, and the discernment as how best at any moment to integrate those powers, not for one’s own reputational aggrandizement or passing emotive satiation, but for the sake of the environment that constitutes one’s world, one’s creative and redemptive world mission—whether the stage on which that is played be great or small.
As in leading an orchestra, one must comprehend the score, appreciate its artistry and powers, understand how to creatively conjure the appropriate emotions and speeds, know the instruments and their capacities, when to summon and when to silence them, so too in spirituality. Being equipped and oriented toward the proper, authentic, healthful, and true images of the whole–the Holy and the whole of human nature–one needs then learn, exercise, develop, and hone the flexing and the limits of those varied faculties that constitute the human instruments of mobility. One must have focus and discernment.
Focus:
We are so well integrated an organism that we do not, without some disruption to it or some purposeful concentration, note its varied parts, their parts and modi operandi. We enjoy our taste buds, but few are inclined to focus upon where amongst them we taste bitter, sweet, or savory. We take in a constant vista, but only the artistically oriented tend to pause to deconstruct, and reconverge the lens of eye. And so it is with hearing, touch, smell, movement of limb, breath, and balance. Varied approaches to spirituality provide exercises to discover, to study, to learn the mechanics of these systems of our worldly interchange. The East has been more astute in experientially developing such. The West, incessantly haunted by gnostic misgivings, has been more oriented to meditative consideration of the sensual—controlled reflection upon, a distanced and imagined experience of the sensational and passionate. Without regard to the methodology chosen, the journey to wholeness requires one to be aware how these varied components of intake and response to world function, how to engineer them, how to apply control to them, in brief, how to concentrate sensuality. And having come to some understanding of the senses and their ways, one must move on to do the same for that spinner of ideas, thoughts, and images: the mind. This stream ever flowing need not be a meandering torrent of rapids. Thought, with practice, can be corralled. The meditative, the image laden focus, can be observed from a distance. The gates of the internal flux can be opened and closed. The contemplative silence of the mind can be found. The honing of these abilities requires one be dedicated to the task in sincerity, truth of purpose, and practice. It need not, however, consume a life or a lifetime. Not everyone is called to be an Avila or John of the Cross, just as not all are gifted to be a Chopin or Michelangelo, but it behoves each to, at minimum, learn control over more than bowel and temper, and exercise some artistry in the being of human.
As with learning the scales in music or the vocabulary and rules of grammar in a second language, practice means work, discipline, sacrifice of self, time, and effort. The learning of the functionality of the varied parts constitutive of body requires understanding the mechanisms of exciting and extinguishing their vitalities. The toil and time, the ascetics, of such exercise is, however, not an end. It profits a man nothing to be able to run through the scales on piano if such accomplishment leads not to music. One may learn the control of breathing, mind and every limb and sense, but for what purpose? Ascetic practices are about learning how to operate the magnificent auto-mobile that is man. They are preparatory procedures. They may serve on occasion to renew or further hone a technique. They are not their own reason, purpose, and end. The terminus of focus, internal and external, is to be open and free before self and world, to be able to stand back from every and all part, and to be able to relish and love every and all part, to comprehend the threshold whereupon virtue and vice, ill and good touch, to, from a distance to self-interest, be intimate with the other and world, to, from a comprehensive love of self, give oneself away in care, in service, in love. The end of all exercise of posture, mind, and sense is to be fully oneself in the world, to be fully human, to hear the harmonics of all creation and to be able to sing one’s singular part in un-extinguishable relish.
Being not solitary animals, to this fully human end, although it may not immediately appear so, it is essential to enlist a guide, teacher, or learned companion. Whether that person be named a spiritual director, a fellow traveler, or guru matters not. It does matter that this guide knows the road ahead, has learned the maneuvers of the trek, the challenges of the path. One cannot lead where one has never ventured. One cannot teach, support, assist, encourage, bolster, warn, or advise concerning that which one has not already experienced, and healthfully incorporated into one’s own being. The guide’s function is to keep secure the course and the progress of exercise. Obedience to the guide and the guidance given is critical. This obedience is an act of trust. It is also an exercise in focus as it is a temporary brace for the structuring internally underway.
The issue of trust and obedience can be a ground for abuse. The guide must be free of self-possessiveness and allow the student to fledge. Too often the spurious notion of self-mastery is transferred by the guide to self, and the guide comes to think himself not the freely giving proficient passing on the benefit of his travels but the “master”. Obedience buttresses both learning and focus in the student, but too easily disillusions the teacher with notions of superiority. The guide is always the servant, the freely bound ancillary to another’s journey.
The guide must also be prepared to enforce discipline for the sake of both safety and realistic expectation. The guide must know when to cry halt and when to demand more. The abecedarian, in neophytic enthusiasm, may insist he is capable of more austere exercise than that given, of lengthier times of meditation or privation, and such may be true of the moment, but such plangent petitions are invariably rooted in an ignorance of both the road and the summit, in the superficiality of a self-aggrandizing delusion that will lead to all manner of distortion and failure, for the point of exercise is not a singular show of force, but the development of the capacity to build piece by piece, the agility and stamina to revisit the action in repeatedly increasing intensity, endurance, and scope. One may be able to lift fifty kilograms above one’s head once, but can it be done repeatedly, consistently, and without any damage to the body? Just as in bodily exercise a trainer will not indulge the singular lifting of the maximum weight possible, so too in spirituality. To gain the proficiency to rightly and repeatedly experience and manage an increasing amount, one must begin with learning the proper form and stance, and exercise that using smaller and more manageable amounts, building incrementally toward greater overall strength and competence. The guide who allows otherwise, be it regarding either muscle or psyche, by and in the neglect of duty to discipline, enables compensations, weakness, damage, and finally, desertion of the entire enterprise.
The spiritual guide must be prepared to maneuver the retreatant through the exhilarations of light, as well as sustain the retreatant through the horrors of the blighted self espied in that enlightenment, to manage the experiences of blessings and joys, as well as the pains, labours, sorrows, and their contrail in enervation, exasperation, and the hurling of self into capitulation. Any mutinous stand must be met with swiftness, severity, and resoluteness. When the retreatant is confronted with the rock face of a spiritual impasse, there must be an equally defiant guide shouting “Keep going!” When the will to persist fails, the guide must supply the persistence by his unwavering will. Likewise, when, in the euphoria that so often accompanies exhaustion, the retreatant thinks he is at the summit, that he has plummeted the depths of soul, sin and grace, the guide must be compassionate, knowing he once stood in like place, that while there is still far to go, that merely a surface has been penetrated, a lesser plateau reached, that there is room to share in the gladness before gently pointing out clouds still shroud greater vistas. There is a station here to pause and reflect with the neophyte or journeyman that even the great contemplatives have experienced the depths of self-opacity, and have been sensitized therein to the grace, the intuited giftedness resident at the heart of enlightenment with both its enthrallments and abominations.
Last, it must be noted, the history of spirituality is not vacant of complaint about useless confessors, and guides unprepared for or uncommitted to the task. There are still, most unfortunately, confessors and nominal spiritual directors who seeming take neither notice nor care for the person before them, who, particularly in seminaries and religious institutions, manage others through the system, assuring no more than the ability to cosmetically function as cog in a system. Dispensations are granted without inquiry into obvious ignorance, immaturity, gross disorientation, and dysfunctionality. Prayer is made something only to recite, spiritual duties roles to perform. There is exhibited no real concern for the nurturing of either wholeness or holiness. The entire momentum, if one may call it thus, is toward staging, presentation, the veneer of professionalism and orthodoxy. The end result is spiritual cachexia, desolation with its attendant anger, and dereliction, if not of role, then duty.
An Excursus: As the fulfilment of our nature cannot be found by surrendering into a senseless cycle wherein new distractions are ever sought out to distract from distractions, by gadding about in meandering lines with gadgets of endless information, so also, there is no vitality in simply sequestering life in private privations and exercise, no ascent toward the perfecting of our nature if prayers are merely words to be said or silence to sit in. There is no spirituality if the end is oneself, for such is the exercise of egotism not selfhood. There is no spirituality if it neglects to be social and engaging, if it fails to be that which man is: in-the-world for the world. The greatest good, the fulfilment of our nature is nurtured in the faithful man’s opening of self to wholeness, to holiness, to that which the Christian understands as the experience of God in his creative graciousness. Life does not simply happen, it is existential, it is made, and since the time of Adam that has been a social activity. Its meaningfulness is not bought in a shop. It is the surplus we find when we spend this life well, with, and for others. Prayer, penance, and the patient learning of temperance in and of all things can be neither disparaged not divinized, for such are the subservient instruments to orient the self away from egotism and toward the sociality of the self. They serve to balance the self, keep it realistic, free it from delusions of ethereal grandeur. They exist to free a heart, open a mind. The Christian is not invited to the presumption of a gift, a promised “after this world is done and ended heaven”. The Christian stands under the commission to “Go!” into this world, a world awaiting to be made, to be revealed, to be allowed to be, that which in its truth it is: the manifest of God’s Love, “the Kingdom”.
Discernment:
The honing of focus coupled in sound guidance should provide one with ever increasing insight into self, a discerning inner eye capable of healthily weighing and truthfully evaluating the dispositions of self, the stirrings within self, the directionality of self. This discernment is a type of self-distance, an ability to judge oneself, one’s actions and inclinations with detached honesty. From another perspective, it is a self-intimacy, an embrace of self on the most sincere, caring, truthful level. In this it is the pure freedom of the self, a transparency to the self and its powers, a humbled presence, a careful presence, a caring presence, a loving presence. It is self before self unobscured by the flux of passions and thoughts.
In my room the windows are fitted with double panes of glass. Depending upon the time of day they make a shadowed image of that which is either before me or behind me. The mind has a similar arrangement such that looking cursorily upon the self one sees something other, a self variably doubled, refracted, reflected, magnified, or ghosted. In this conflation, the flux of experiences and ideas, the truth of the origins of ideas and actions, can become fused and confused. It takes the discerning eye to say this is behind me, this is before me, this is real, this is true, this is shadow, delusion, distortion. Discernment speaks only of reality: this is true, this is not. Discernment is oriented solely toward the well-being of the self: this harbours good, this does not. Because it is self freed to being honest with self, discernment knows both sins and graces, and in them the singular vitality which is forgiveness, mercy, and the inestimable gift of the other before whom self—never a solitude–ever stands.
As this inner sight is, in action, not a cold adjudicating estrangement but a loving truthfulness, so also is its external manifestation: worldly detachment. Again, this constitutes regarding reality neither dispassion nor denigration. It is a freedom before the world wherein the world and its multifariousness exists not for one’s self-definition, interest, or aggrandizement, but as the other, as a being in its own right worthy and requisite of sincere respect and reverence. The world ceases to be “it”, mere quanta for me, and is revealed as yokemate on the pilgrimage to truth, my “thou”, the inestimable gift of other, the plenum of self and all others, the satiate gift of the Gifting One, the incarnate Lord Self-Creator, God.
The reader having read betwixt the lines above will know the body is the self and the soul is the other, is had, is known, is illuminated in the other, and that thus, theology, in the arras of its arguments, draws the Holy One as the Ultimate Other who is the creator and gifter of all souls, the One who makes his other, the world, his body.
A reverie on sacred verses: We tend to deracinate the saints from the world, make them celestial beings, risen in serenity above the mundane, evaporated in a phosphorescent romanticism. It is a final absolution, a washing away of all of life’s pain and vicissitude. It enisles a life in a halo, confines, defines, marks it as forever done and bounded, and in that it quantifies it. It negates the incorruptible quality the life well lived seeds into life. Jesus, Christianity’s Sanctus Primus, was no starry-eyed romantic, no poseur awaiting a halo and crown, nor did he decide to open his arms to others and for others with the intent of having them nailed to a cross. He opened his arms because he was seized in this world with a unitive vision of God and man that inspired and compelled the surrender of himself into prayerful and careful service to others, into the true centrality of man’s sociality of spirit, and was transformed in that, and by that, into that Spirit itself. The revelation of the divine love and care for humankind was his concern; crucifixion the repercussion he prayed against. His death ended with an exasperation to God: “Why hast Thou abandoned me?” Caring and careful about the spirit with which we embrace one another, he surrendered to God his soul. A social and loving man, he died in his solitude, his God unseen, his friends vanished. Darkness, we are told, covered the land. The disciples who wrote thus wrote not of clouds, eclipse, or some obscuring of sun; they wrote of their world, the end of their world. The master, the teacher, the Rabbi, the one who had told them to call him friend, is dead, has died the death of the criminal, the disgraced, the ritually defiled. Their discipleship is ended. They return to their accustomed worlds, their families, their jobs. Darkness covers the land. It was their question upon his lips: “My God, my God, Why…” There is no other word, no other understanding.
The cover before the Temple’s inner sanctum is torn asunder, the most sacred icon, the Ark of Israel’s God, is uncovered, desecrated, and no Just God lashes out in anger. The impotence of God has been uncovered. The just man, the good man is dead. Sin, ill-will, hate, little minds and hearts—these have triumphed. Darkness covers the land because the powers of hell have won, the gates of Hades been unhinged. Thus, the dead are seen. Creatures of the night emerge. Nicodemus, who came to Jesus under cover of night, comes out again, now to bury him–swiftly, for in the darkness the Sabbath is coming.
The day before the first Sabbath, God created Adam. He breathed into him his own breath, gave into his usage and power all that had been made, but Adam was soulless. Like those mythological creatures of the night that ever crave blood (life, soul), he had no reflection. He could not see himself anywhere in creation. God took pity. God placed him into a deep sleep, and out of him he drew forth the other. Adam now has a reflection. He knows himself, recognizes himself: “my flesh and bone, my from-the-within-of-me!” The thou he recognizes is not his soul-mate, but his soul. Thus, the next day, that all creation may find its soul, God creates the Sabbath, consecrates in time and space a sleep, a reverie, a dream-time for all. In a Sabbath day of rest, the corpse of Jesus rests shrouded and entombed.
The body dies. The soul does not. Since the time of Adam, the soul is in the other. In that Sabbath day of deepest sorrow, in that Sabbath day desolate of dreams, a handful of women wait. (It must be women for this tale knows that other of Adam and his Eve.) They wait not for God, but to visit a grave and mourn. Yet, when God sets us in the silence of sleep and rest, God is still afoot. As marked Bonhoeffer, that which man cannot do of himself, God accomplishes with him in his rest. A transformation is brewing. In the still of the dark, in the depths of the heart, a transvaluation is taking place. Jesus was their soul. They are, they shall be, his body. They shall not allow it to see corruption.
The soul is in the other. God’s other is the world. The divine soul is in the world. Darkness and death cannot overtake it. Light, life, love—these have a power greater. Sin has not won. God is not impotent; God is incarnate, and in Jesus they have seen this, felt this, touched this. Thus, they rise up. Moved with fervour for God’s magnitude, like Moses, they smash the tablets of the Law before the sins of men and ascend again the mountain of God. They ascend the mountain to see their Jesus wrapped in the clouds of God. In the fragmented Law they find the holy words and promises anew. In reflecting upon the beclouded Jesus’ death they find themselves reflected back. His death was theirs, and so he becomes their vicarious victim, the light that overcomes their darkness, the propitiation of all sin, the cure of all ill.
Like Jesus, they have been into a wilderness; they have felt the crushing darkness; they have heard the silence of eternity, and known the blinding, burning light of its face. They have passed through the courts of the Temple, past the altar of sacrifice, and looked upon the Ark unveiled. And like their Jesus they could give no name to this vitality, to this animating presence. They know it simply as life-giving (like parent, like lover), and so call to it: “Father”, “Love”. And to open every eye to this vision, every heart to this power of God-in-us, God-with-us, this power of “grace”, they left all of self behind to be the Body.
The first Sabbath was created for the salvation of the world. Without its sacred rest no resurrection could have taken place, no transcendence to humankind’s ultimate good and meaning be engendered. Christianity begins in a Sabbath rest. Its spirituality is, likewise, not a venture without need of pause.
On the first Sabbath’s eve, God breathed into Adam, and Adam busied himself with judging the world. Like Adam, we busy ourselves, distract ourselves, get caught up in the gravitational pull of our interests, vocations, avocations; we fill life up with doing and having rather than fulfill it. We forget God did more than make time and stuff; he made also silence and space. He made a Sabbath rest that man would ever have space to breathe out that breath divine, and see his soul before him, and love it.
From its very inception into history, the sacralised Sabbath rest was sabotaged. Prophets demanded merchants close their shops, and shoppers stop their haggling. The Christians that coopted the Sabbath for themselves did their ever exceeding best to fill it with Bible and devotions. It lives now as relic, antecessor to a “day-off”, another day to fill with obligation, diversion, deflection. When pause does come it is by, not holy, not wholesome choice but exhaustion or catatonia.
There is a purpose to nothing. If every moment of time is filled, reality becomes one great farraginous clump. There is no space to move, to be free, to breathe. From within this solidity, there is no place to step back in appreciation, no place to step forth and reach out, to love. In Genesis, every day, at the end of day, God stepped back from creation, surveyed it, appraised it, and blessed it: “it is good”. Night came and God was silent and still.
As sleep renews body, the Sabbath renews soul. It places man in sacred silence with nothing to do but absorb the oneness of universe. It is time emptied of every this and that, I and Thou. It is space left empty for intuition and the still of wonder. The doer of nothing becomes the pure giftedness of reality. There is no wholeness unless life is allowed to have holes, spaces to breathe blessing, spaces for novelty, for the impossible to imagine to take seed. Thus, all the exercise, focus and insights of spirituality move not to rest eternal but to that Sabbath rest, to free oneself, allow oneself the space to breathe out into this world that breath divine, that Holy Spirit infused into each of us at our humanity’s dawn.
Veni Sancte Spiritus [Come, Sacred Breath]. [vii]
[i] Robert Manders
[ii] Man seeks his ultimate good, the perfecting of self and life, the “peace that surpasses all understanding”, be it envisioned as a time-less endurance of “heaven” or the beyond-ness of time’s flux of “nirvana”. In both cases, time and its flux are superceded, merely the notion of the constitutive of “being” varies.
[iii] Thomas Merton opined the heterosis of Western religion will rest in Christianity being impregnated with Buddhist disciplines and vision. Have we a stirpiculture to bring these two strains of spirituality together? There are genetic similarities as well as distinctions, and as their sundry forms evince, both traditions are pliable and pluralistic. Christianity understands pain, suffering, and death the result of inordinate desire, which it names sin. Buddhist thought tends to hold all desire as disorienting and conducive of suffering. Christianity places an emphasis on the sociality of man, invites both direct and vicarious action to relieve the pain of the world, and looks to an eternity wherein every tear is wiped away. Buddhism looks more to the individual, a detachment from the world, and a “state” of eternality beyond all desire, change, and pain. Both are turned toward a type of “peace and rest eternal”. In the gaze toward the unpronounceable silence of eternity, the West ever thinks in terms of time, space, and society, while the East does its best to eradicate any such notions. While philosophical dispositions and understandings are here the kernel of the issue, there resides in the popular prime images a more telling difficulty. The prime icon of Christendom is a man crucified, suspended upon a tree in torturous death, while Buddhism looks calmly upon a man seated in serene enlightenment beneath his Bodhi tree. We do well to remember popular iconography is more potent, pervasive, and persistent than whatsoever intellections may be raised up before it.
While the West has long been informed of Buddhist thought, that knowledge was muchly confined to the clerisy until mid-last-century. Whether Merton’s ecumenically realistic and healthful hypothesis references the power with which these ideas entered the wider awareness, or simply represents a fruition of Buddhist thought in the West, we do well to inquire if it is pragmatically too delimited in scope for the present wherein, with the allure of novelty bolstered by the appearance of less diverse and complicated dogmatics, another spirituality, replete with its morality, has entered the Western stage, and presses for attention, consideration and dialogue–religiously, cultically, and culturally. In this rumination, we ought keep also in mind that Christian theology in the twentieth century has moved decisively toward viewing Christianity more as spirituality than composite of dogmas, and thus, from the traditionally voiced ideas of Karl Rahner and Paul Tillich to the more explorative soundings of Raimon Panikkar and Choan-Seng Song, Christ is become understood as the Spirit of freedom summoning the genetic enhancement of all cults and cultures to their fullness and truth.
[iv] on John, Reflections on a Vision, February 2016
[v] Occidental Ideas, Part 18: The Enlightenment, October 2014
[vi] on “Masks” and its Christian heritage, February 2012
[vii] Lest I be assailed by queries from both right and left, this offering is neither hermeneutics nor doctrine; it is a reverie. Like Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, it is a water-coloured dream, an instrumental whose meaningfulness resides in that which one can receive from the sincerity of its notes, be that words or Word.