Running and Returning

Can we even talk?

I have to admit that, as a "reader" and someone who has come to love discovery, learning, knowledge, it is a bit "unnatural" to try to move away from intellectual concepts to "pure" experience.  I know, of course, that experiences can never be "pure" as the "I" that experiences them has been conditioned/shaped/created by all the experiences, internal and external that went before.   Nevertheless, there is a great emphasis in so much writing on contemplation that warns against trying to "get to it" in an overly intellectual manner. 

From the Cloud of Unknowing: 

"For God limits his divinity to come down to our level and our souls find an affinity with him because we have the great distinction of having been created in his image and likeness.  And he alone and only he is able to fulfill the longing and intentions of our soul; by virtue of his grace, which re-creates us, our soul is capable of comprehending him completely by love, though God can never be comprehended by any created intelligence–either by a human being or by an angel. But by that I mean that they do not comprehend him in the understanding, not by means of their love. He is only incomprehensible to their intelligence, not to their love. "

Years ago, I read a book whose name I no longer recall that recounted the story of a Jewish woman who was trying to recover / participate in the mystical traditions of Judaism.  One of her questions was how to "remain" in the state of contemplation and not leave it.  The answer seemed to be that she could only "run and return."   She could "run" up the mountain to the more clear presence of God, but inevitably she had to "return" down the mountain again.  

Again from the Cloud of Unknowing: 

"..pay attention to his wonderful divine activity in your soul.  Properly understood, it is always an impromptu and unpremeditated impulse, which leaps up to God as a spark springs from the coal...Yet because we are fallen creatures, he can quickly fall prey after each impulse to some thought or memory of some deed that he has either done or left undone. But so what? The soul can immediately spring up again as unexpectedly as it did before." 

Perhaps an answer is that, at the top of the mountain, I can only "be still" in the presence of God.  When I return to the bottom, then there may be a place for talk.  One story I read at some point said that Moses on the mountain did not receive any commandments, but he heard only silence, but at the bottom of the mountain, he delivered the tablets of God's word.  No one, however, suggested that the tablets, however, were the "real thing" but in a modern idiom, only a "reflection" of the "real thing."  

A blog cannot be a place to have the real thing, but some reflection may be OK, as long as it does not become the "only thing." 

Jeffrey Shy

Mesa, Arizona

"Running and Returning"

Eating is better than looking

Since no one reads this blog, as far as I know, it is not absolutely clear to me why I should keep writing it.  Perhaps, however, like many things that we do not know the end of, it is best to proceed on "Faith" and just do it. 

In the last year, I think that I finally reached what I hope is the "bottom" of the "search for the nontheistic God."  Quite simply, all my explorations as to the nature of God led me to, simply, nothing.  I wish that I could say that experiencing this was a profound revelation.  This was not a "somethingful nothing" of great significance, but simply an "absence."  No matter how far I looked in the philosophy of religion and in theology and and science, I did not find anything that made any difference to me.  By the time I eliminated all of the logical paradoxes and morally repugnant elements, I was left with simply, nothing, or at least nothing worth having. 

I have been reading, this past couple of weeks, the book The God We Never Knew by Marcus Borg.   Although I fear to distort him in paraphrase, at the center of this work is his realization that the traditional supernatural theistic view of God, was not the only, nor indeed the most (or at all) desirable way of looking at/for God.  I would like to engage in an extended quote:

"The consequences of supernatural theism for my religious life as a Christian were severe.  Four were particularly important.  It made believing in God difficult, as it has for many people. God became remote at best, unreal at worst.  The question of whether I was a believer or an atheist became the question of whether I believed in the God of supernatural theism. It also made the problem of evil acute. If one thinks of God as an all-powerful being who can intervene in the world at will (as this way of thinking about God most commonly does), then it follows that God could have intervened to stop the Holocaust and a whole host of other collective and personal disasters but chose not to. It is difficult to believe in such a God. It also affected my sense of what the Christian life was about. Because I thought of God as remote, 'up in heaven,' and not here, I thought Christian faith was about believing in a distant God; indeed, this became the central meaning of faith. Finally, it made prayer problematic. I could see no framework within which prayer made sense. It seemed like addressing a distant God who might not be there–like speaking into a universe that might be empty."   (sorry no page citation as I read this in a Kindle e-book version).

While my experience was not precisely the same, it was close enough to this that I feel as if I am reading about myself.  Borg goes on to describe his own "concept" of God as "Panentheistic."  Since I am not writing a discourse, I don't feel the need to define that, but a quick search of Wikipedia will give anyone who wants both definition and discussion.  I cannot say that I can truly espouse a panenetheistic view.  What does it mean to say that God is "more than" or "beyond" the universe as well as being in the universe?  I am not sure that it really can "mean" anything at all.   I would probably prefer, at this point, to lean more firmly on ideas of relationship and experience.  We can "experience" God only insofar as we can find that we are in "relationship" with him.  As a creature wholly of the universe, the only "place" that I can experience God or have a relationship with him is here and now, so an extra-universal deity cannot mean very much to me.  If there are "extra-universal" aspects of God, then they are, as it were "veiled" to me.  I cannot really conceive of anything "outside" the universe, other than just making words about it, so the "God is more than the universe" or "transcendent" is not really meaningful to me." 

On the problem of evil or theodicy, Borg touches very lightly and cautiously.  From my current point of view, I think that we can simply say that the conceptualization of God as omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, etc., is incompatible with the world as we experience it.  Why not then simply say that God is not all of these things?  Who said that God was all-powerful?  On what evidence or based on what experience?  Quite simply, we do not experience a loving and good God as all-powerful, so to insist that he is so is to place an insurmountable stumbling block in the way of having any experience of "God."  If I must abandon these ideas to have the experience  of God, then so be it.  I abandon them. The "Pandeist" concept of God is perhaps a little easier to live with, but maybe the problem is having any verbal concept of God period.  I suspect that some might say, "Well, duh...," but I am not always a quick study.  

It would seem that some people have an experience of the "numenous" and if that is the case, perhaps I can have or recapture that as well.  I would suspect that, in the longrun, having one good experience is better than a thousand verbal descriptions.  Eating one really great Neapolitan pizza is better than all the photos and descriptions that one could ever have.  Perhaps it is time to stop looking at the menu, and get on with the dinner. 

"Eating is better than looking"

Jeffrey Shy

Mesa, Arizona