All speech is problematic in
various and diverse ways, but a number of major problems show up in speech
about “the spiritual realm,” that is, the in-between of consciousness. I
am ever mindful of the words of St. Thomas Aquinas on God: “We cannot say
what God is, but only what God is not.”
Although I use the word “God”
while doing my public duties as a priest, and in my private prayer and thought,
I am ever aware that both “I” and “God” are highly problematic words. They are not wholly convincing words. Neither “I” nor “God” speaks about
a concrete reality, or a “thing,” nor even an existent being. Leaving “I”
aside for the time being, consider the word “God.” When “I” use it, when
“God” is used in much speech and prayer, a non-existent reality is intended, or
spoken about. “God” is non-existent reality in the sense that “God” does
not exist in the proper sense of “exist.” To exist is to “stand out,” to
be in space-time, to be a being or a thing, or a process, or a quality, and so
on. The word “God” intends no existing being or thing or quality.
That speech about God is
necessarily analogous must be born in mind. The meaning of ordinary words
must be “stretched” in a fully extraordinary way to speak of “God,” and that
truth shows up immediately in such a statement as “God exists.” For more
precisely, “God” does not exist, but is; and what is, is not a being, even
“God,” but “esse per se subsistens”, quoting St. Thomas: be-ing (to be) subsisting
through itself. God is not a god, not a being, and so on. As I
summarized years ago: Deus nihil. God is nothing, no-thing.
Begin again. In
consciousness I experience neither the reality of “I,” nor the reality of
“God.” In being conscious, one is conscious of beings and things
“outside” of one’s body, but also conscious of being conscious, aware that one
is aware. I am conscious neither of “I,” nor of God. “God”
symbolizes the “beyond” of consciousness, as well as “the ground of being,” the
ultimate cause of what exists. As the “beyond” of consciousness, what one
experiences is, at least at times, a moving into consciousness and forming it,
but not becoming a direct or knowable object of consciousness. The divine
that presents itself in consciousness is experienced as a movement or process
or even as a quality such as “light,” “peace,” “joy,” but not in any way that
one could say, “I know God.” What presents itself arrives along with the
awareness that it is reaching in from the beyond of consciousness, beyond the
horizons of one’s awareness, so that one cannot in truth say, “I am
experiencing God.” For one to claim that “I experience God” mistakes the
part for the whole--the process experienced for the whole of what is ever
beyond consciousness.
Begin yet again, for I am not
feeling the truth of what I am writing. I am not “seeing” as I write, but
in part remembering. I cannot here and now summon up an experience of
divine presence, but I can summon up remembrances of past experiences. My
mind is powerless to produce an awareness of the divine presence, is it
not? I can respond to movements in consciousness, but awareness cannot
create or cause these movements. They come when they come. And yet,
as noted, I can remember, and respond now to experienced-reality remembered
now. I can say, for example, “I love you,” to that which stirred or
guided or illuminated in years past.
Do I really understand that about
which I am writing? Not really. I grope in semi-darkness, in
twilight. And that is the story of my life, perhaps. And yet,
because I do not see all, or see well, I will not stop looking, gazing,
wondering, seeking. One seeks because he is moved to seek. One
seeks “God” because the divine partner moves one to seek. That is what I
learn from Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Voegelin. “We love because he first
loved us,” as St. John
states the matter. Love for God is not affection or feeling primarily,
and perhaps not even choice of some abstraction called “the will.” Love
for God is a joyful response, a search, for that which moves one to
search. It is a “yes-saying” to the direction in which one is moving, not
in space-time, but in consciousness: from nothingness or at least
less-being into a fuller mode of being, from relative darkness into relatively
greater light, from less eudaimonia to more eudaimonia.
(Eudaimonia, a Greek word usually translated as “happiness,” means more
literally good-spiritedness, or being in the good [divine] spirit). There
is indeed direction, movement, in consciousness, from relative opacity to
relative clarity, from some dis-ease to greater ease, from strife towards
peacefulness. The direction points towards the divine partner which moves
and seems to cause consciousness, although the cause is unseen.
By “God” I mean “You.” You
beyond all words, names, thoughts, feelings. You in whom my “I” rests
contentedly, “like a weaned child in his mother’s arms.” You are “known”
by moving me towards You, and yet You never appear to my wondering eye “in all
of your glory.” You let the light of You gently illumine my mind or
consciousness, so that I see, and am aware of seeing, but You whom I long to
see I do not see or know or feel. “In your light we see light,” quoting
from a psalm often quoted by St. Thomas.
When one is conscious, one is conscious in and through the light that You let
fall into the “soul,” into consciousness. You are the light, unseen.
“Who are you, LORD?” That
is ever for me the Question, the great and persistent question of my life.
I hear it in Moses, in Paul, in the wondering of the Apostles before
Jesus. If I am not mistaken, it is the question of Plato, of Aristotle,
of Plotinus, of Anselm, and of all of the seekers of truth I so love and
respect. What I want is not a “this,” or a “that,” not a particular you,
but You who form all by moving into, guiding, even hiddenly. You are
unseen, yet present; real, but no thing. “You are the joy of my heart,”
many souls say, whether in words or in feelings or in inarticulate speech.
When I hear, I am hearing by and
with You. When I see, I am seeing with You. (But I will not make
the gnostic claim of Emerson, that “the mind of the Creator shoots through my
eyes,” or some such over-reaching claim.) And yet, Martin Buber is surely
right: “In every you we meet, we gaze towards the train of the eternal
You.” Yes, indeed. You are the ever-present non-present forming
consciousness at every moment, “the life of my life,” in St. Augustine’s apt phrase.
A soul, a mind, opens to You by
faith, but lives in You and to You by love. This is the “fides
caritate formata,” of which St.
Thomas wrote: faith formed (or enlivened) by
charity. Fides informata, unformed faith, is mere belief, even
religious belief. But faith formed by charity gives life to the spirit,
for it opens up the soul to the life, the mind, of the Creator--that which is,
creating, forming, moving.
Return to earth. Return to
the truth of concrete experience, here and now. It is not “I” that “I”
experience, but a movement between what I call “I” and You, the divine
Partner. My “I” is not, cannot be, alone, apart from You, for You are
that which enlivens, in-breathes, forms, guides consciousness from moment to
moment. You cause consciousness now, and only now, as You are only
now. Neither past nor future, but now. Eternal now, eternally
present.
Make it simpler: Beauty in
all that I experience as beautiful, Love in every act of loving, Knowing in all
knowing: You. Apart from You, without You, I would not be at all. I am to the extent that I am in You. In myself alone I am nothing, “a
mere breath that passes, never to return.” But not even that. In
myself I do not exist, or have any being at all. All that is, to the
extent that it is, is in You. That is just the way it is. To move
into You is greater life, light, peace, joy; to move away is growing darkness,
decay, unrest. Reality is indeed heavily tilted towards You. All
that is, is, only because it is in You.
As I write, I see You stirring in
me, but I cannot in truth say that I “feel” You. The sense is more an
awareness, a trusting, loving awareness that You, ever-beyond, are
ever-present. There is no present that You are not forming now.
What shall I ask You now? I do not know what to ask, as my body and mind
feel so tired. But I can rest thankfully in an aware unawareness that You
are here. “O night more lovely than the dawn:” “amada en el amado
transformada,” borrowing from St.
John of the Cross.
You have shown me You in others,
on their faces, in their voices. You have shown me You radiant in the
mind of a philosopher, suffering yet glorious on the face of a dying man, most
humble and gentle in a little creature. You have shown me You hiddenly,
and filled me with joy in your presence.
Those who claim to know, may miss
the hidden beauty known in unknowing, but loved. It is love, not
knowledge, that joins You to me, to every you. And yet, when You will,
You cast a glance into consciousness, making it radiant with your utterly dark
light--your “light” that is seen as darkness by our unknowing minds. And
that indeed is the “night more lovely than the dawn.” To be dark in You
is beauty more than seeing any thing. To be lost in You is to be found in
truth. To be only in You, and not in any thing, surely not “in oneself,”
is “eternal life,” true life. Not to exist at all, but to be love in the
divine Lover: that is life indeed. When the self is selfless, and
the I not an I at all, then “God is all in all.” Not yet, not for this
passing being. But the direction is clear to me, the movement real:
from here, to There, from a being-thing into no-thing.
“And all shall be well, and
all manner of thing shall be well,” “when the fire and the rose are one.”
***
Rambling words, not well thought
out or organized, but jotted down in part to engage in loving the One unfolding
as presence in consciousness. No knowledge, no revelation, no certainty,
no creed, just a desire to respond to what moves me, here and now.
