Armchair Contemplatives

Mount Shasta photo by Bill Buchanan.

Bill and Ruth are regular readers of this blog.

At the end of Book One of The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, I wrote, “I don’t like his God.” What I felt is that his God is incredibly demanding, and I found myself yearning for the homeliness of Evelyn Underhill’s God in her two-level House of the Soul.

But then it occurred to me that Juan de la Cruz’s book could be compared to a manual on how to climb Mt. Everest. To do that requires demanding training, sacrifice and investment. It’s not God who’s “demanding,” any more than it is Mt. Everest that’s demanding. What’s demanding are efforts to scale seeming insurmountable heights.

I’d rather see Mt. Everest from a distance than from the top. I guess the same goes for my preferences of seeing God. Ninety-nine+ percent of the Hebrews saw Mt. Sinai from the plain. Only Moses ascended to commune with Yahweh, sovereign of the universe.* And we have his testimony of what God calls us to be and do, along with the testimonies of all the prophetic mystics of every age, of every faith and culture.

With many of you, I am content to remain an armchair contemplative. I am grateful for the stories and writings of saints, contemplatives, mystics, and spiritual authors. The spiritual horizons they offer inform and inspire our own spiritual quests. “Success” is not my spiritual objective; in fact, I don’t consider success a spiritual objective, period.

I’ve written elsewhere that a sense of “having arrived” is when we may be in the most spiritual danger. John of the Cross understood this; he warns that such folk judge others as the boastful Pharisee contrasting himself with the Publican sinner. John writes that it may be best that God not free such people from their imperfections, despite their petitions, lest they “wax haughtier in their pride.”

So I guess I should thank God for my imperfections!

John of the Cross is the first to admit that the purgation of dark nights, first of the senses and second of the intellect, does not “earn” God’s companionship. Rather it allows God’s ever-present, unyielding love to touch us, to infuse our souls.

As I move into Book Two of Dark Night, however, I resist John’s supposition that he is sufficiently purged as well as his original premise of purging the sensual and the intellectual.

Moses first encountered I AM in a lowly desert shrub that was burning and yet unconsumed. Jacob physically wrestled with God in the middle of the night. Ruth embraced Yahweh in her fidelity to Naomi. Elijah heard God in a “sound of gentle stillness.” Hannah’s fervent prayers to get pregnant were answered. God blessed Solomon with wisdom at his request. Jewish faith has been traditioned in teaching and chavrusa, debating the meaning of sacred texts in small groups or partnerships.

Mary experienced birth pangs to give rise to a refreshing renewal of the faith of Abraham and Sarah. Jesus prayed in lonely places and was sought out for his healing touch and compassionate wisdom. The Christian story is that God has been embodied in Jesus himself, whose Spirit inspires and empowers his followers. And Christians believe themselves to be members of the Body of Christ, which cannot say to the head or the hand, the intellect or the senses, “I have no need of you.”

John of the Cross’s spirituality appears to be, to me at least, more a product of Hellenistic dualism than of the Bible. Though his concept of letting go of all that is not God is admirable, I myself find everything good is of God.

Four decades ago, an elderly gay Roman Catholic priest visited the congregation I was serving and joined us for brunch afterward. He told us he first learned of God as a child on his grandmother’s knee, and though he grew up learning and studying a harsher and more demanding God, he now, in retirement, was welcoming a gentler understanding of a “grandmother God.”

Related Post: My Dark Night of the Soul

*Moses was accompanied part way by others and further by Joshua but only Moses entered Yahweh’s cloud at the summit as described in Exodus 24.

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Photo used by permission.

A Single Unified Force

Those of you who follow this blog may have already guessed that I sometimes use The New York Times ScienceTimes for a kind of lectio divina. The day I am writing this, my text was the exciting observation of “Ripples from the Big Bang”: “faint spiral patterns from the polarization of microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang,” believed to be evidence of the theory of inflation, the force behind the original cosmic explosion that became our universe, dating back to a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second of our cosmic “grand opening.”

I gravitated to the phrase, “a single unified force,” that predated the Big Bang: 

Knowing inflation’s identity could be crucial if scientists are ever to unwind cosmic history back to the beginning, when they suspect the universe was ruled by a single unified force instead of the four distinct forces we know today: gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. 

To me this is as awesome as anything found in the first chapter of Genesis! And also mythological in its best sense: not an untrue narrative as most people misunderstand myth, but a narrative with intensely deep meaning for human imagination.

I had heard the Big Bang began with something the size of a marble, but this article suggests something infinitesimally smaller: “a subatomic quantum speck.” I have speculated in the past that this “marble” or “speck” could be the origin of our spiritual intuition that we are one: one with each other, with all creatures, with earth and stars, with all that is. The spiritual yearning for unity, overcoming dualism and differentiation, is really, I have thought, a nostalgic wish to return to the womb of this “subatomic quantum speck” and its “single unified force”—the “good ol’ days” of the cosmos.

Yes, I am probably overstepping my intellectual abilities as well as my education. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I might as well stick both feet in my mouth by confessing that, after a career of objecting to dualism, especially of body and spirit, I’ve never quite understood that dualism is by definition a bad thing. When I was ministering to people losing their bodies or their friends to AIDS, the separation of spirit and body came in handy to let go.

And I didn’t quite understand how a duality necessarily implied a hierarchy; why couldn’t a duality be like yin and yang, where one side is part of the other and vice versa? Or why couldn’t it be like the explanation of the Trinity where each part is a dimension of the one God—you know, just as a daughter can be a sister as well as a mother? (I was reminded this past weekend during a course on Hildegard of Bingen that she viewed the Trinity as inseparable: when one was present, all were present.)

In child rearing, differentiation is a preferred outcome. Only dysfunctional families desire a child to be a uniform expression of parents. Even so, differentiation of the cosmos has given us everything from black holes and supernovas to our pets and lovers. Differentiation, I would say, is a good thing.

I’ve used the metaphor of an expanding delta at the mouth of a river, spreading fertile soil and water to a broader expanse, to affirm the church’s diverse expressions as a good thing, rather than seeing it as the Body of Christ “broken” once more. And I apply this same principle to broader spiritual and religious diversity.

In my view, all of these are additional “ripples from the Big Bang,” and I look on them and consider them good. It’s only bad when we think our ripple is superior, or the “one way,” or the only way, or the “crown” of creation. Diversity is good. Evolution—biological and social—is good. Multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-disciplinary, multi-species, multi-ecologies—all are good.

Being united is also good, but absolute unity would cause the universe to collapse on itself, and we and everything we know and everything we have yet to discover would disappear.

Given the diversity of you readers, I would also consider it good to have pushback and feedback. Most everything I’ve written (not just here) raises issues for somebody out there. My ignorance far exceeds my knowledge, my imagination overreaches my scholarship, reality is way beyond my grasp.

I take comfort in the first Genesis creation story, in which Yahweh repeatedly pronounces everything created “good.” The ancient Jewish story is on to something, I believe.

Each Wednesday of Lent, I am providing links for the following six days, should you wish to use this blog as a Lenten resource for reflection.

Thursday:      It’s a Small, Small World

Friday:            Everybody Has a Story

Saturday:       Peace in Jerusalem

Sunday:          Treasure in Earthen Temples

Monday:         Our Mother

Tuesday:        The Thoughtful Pause  

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Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.

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Our neighbors have a tall, silver, windowless van in which they transport merchandise for their antique business. When I first saw it, I kidded them about whether it contained aliens, or perhaps alien pods to replace people in the complex. Then I clarified that I didn’t mean illegal aliens, but extraterrestrial ones, like the coneheads of Saturday Night Live.

The pods reference was to the 1950s sci-fi classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which extraterrestrial aliens use pods to grow exact duplicates of human beings, but without emotions or individuality. I had always thought it was a metaphor for the conformity of McCarthyism, the anti-communist hysteria I referred to in last week’s post.  But I discovered on the internet that others think it a metaphor for communism itself or any totalitarian state or rigid ideology, such as fundamentalism or even orthodoxy.

Yet what it makes me think of are the body snatchers that found their way into Christian thinking—you know, those who introduced the Greek notion of body-spirit duality that contradicted the Hebrew and early Christian concept of the soul, an indivisible unity of body and spirit. To separate spirit and body meant that the spiritual was higher, eternal, and closer to God in the heavens and the body was lower, temporal, and separated from God, being closer to earth.

Despite four central theological affirmations to the contrary—Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection, and the church as the Body of Christ—Christians got it in their heads that the body was not a locus for divinity. But, as I wrote long before I read it in one of James B. Nelson’s books, we know God through our body or we don’t know God at all.  That I thought my words original suggests how much the work of Nelson and other body theologians had permeated contemporary Christian consciousness.

I thought I had to go outside of Christian tradition to find affirmation of my bodily and earthly experience. That’s why Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek became my second Bible in college: Zorba’s sensual zest filled a gap in my theology. That’s why Romantic Age poets and Process philosophy and Native American spirituality helped me see the sacred in nature’s every turn. And that’s why science from biology to astronomy now inspires me.

Little did I think that God evolving earth and bodies was a cosmic laying on of hands imparting holiness. Little did I consider the metaphor of God putting on human flesh as an incredible affirmation of the body, especially a body willing to touch other bodies with affection and healing. Little did I know that resurrection reclaims bodily experience as having eternal significance. Little did I understand that the concept Body of Christ meant that “the anointed one” transcended being a first century Palestinian Jewish male, becoming a body of every age, race, condition, gender, sexuality, and nationality.

If only I had known of Celtic Christianity then—the notion that Christ walks among us in two shoes—the Bible and Creation, and that sin can be removed by the grace encountered in nature, love, or Christ. If only I had read the Benedictine nun Julian of Norwich (1342-1420), that “Our sensuality is grounded in Nature, in Compassion, in Grace… In our sensuality, God is… God is the means by which our Substance and our Sensuality are kept together so as never to be apart.” In other words, in God our essence and our embodiment are one—the integrity sought in the spiritual life. And if only I had been taught Teresa of Avila’s (1515-1582) insight that now on earth God’s body is our own!

I believe more people could comprehend the spiritual life if they understood that spirituality is not an out-of-body experience, not an other-worldly encounter. Rather, our bodies participate in the divine life, the cosmos is God’s body. “In God we live and move and have our being.”

Beware of the body snatchers!