London's Internet Church - 14/03/07

God is hidden from our view yet as we have explored together in the two previous talks, there may be good reasons for this occlusion. Lethal civil wars in which “god” was invoked on both sides; the necessary deposition of a “god” who had been enrolled as the underwriter of tyranny; the “god” who had been confined to an idea in our minds – the true and living God has been so defamed and distorted in the past of our North West European culture that unlike the experience of some other contemporary cultures in the world, God has hidden himself from our consciousness. It may be however that his hiddeness is the way to draw us into a profounder understanding of his real identity.

The theme of the hidden God is present in the story of Jesus Christ who was a King but when they came to take him by force to make him a king - as they conceived a king should be - he retired to the mountain and hid himself from them. It would have been impossible for people without the illumination of his passion and resurrection to understand what manner of king he was.

God hides so that he can return to minds more open to what is beyond our present understanding.

But on the historical plane, the true and living God having become hidden, souls were starved and our worship became stale. It is interesting how the great prophet of atheism Nietzsche spends very little time deploying philosophical arguments against God rather he deplores the joylessness of so many Christians in his day and says “what is decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.”

But the absence of God is itself very eloquent and a human society living without a rooting in God soon exhibits signs of distress.

Last time we considered our introverted way of being in the world. By abstracting ourselves from the field in which we are growing, we have lost an awareness of being participants in a web of life. Instead, with minds detached from our bodies as from all of nature we have developed an idea of ourselves that we are as the philosopher Rene Descartes put it, “masters and possessors of the earth”. Without any respect let alone reverence for matter we have become exploitative in a way that has left scars on the planet and imperilled the ecosystem on which we, in reality, depend.

We are just waking up to what is happening and I believe that a new openness to God will be part of the healing which will follow the ills which we have wished upon ourselves.

But we must be careful not to fall into old traps and once again to confect a god out of our own anger and condemnation of others. I have discovered that there are many, unwholesomely angry people who claim to be committed to studies in the field of peace and justice. There are many politically correct people who desire a revolution and sometimes even do so in the name of God but who exhibit the control freakery and the lust for domination which brought discredit on the old notions of God and against which there has been a legitimate protest. The truth about God is a life or death matter and theological errors are literally deadly.

I was speaking recently to some young lawyers at the Inner Temple about the place of religion in modern society. On this occasion I was singing from the same hymn sheet with the Chief Rabbi and the Cardinal but still an anxious young man pleaded with the audience not to let religion back into the daylight world. “Don’t let them back into the house,” he said in an unconsciousness quotation from the New Testament. His case was that religious people had caused so much suffering in the past. For reasons which I hope that I have made clear, the young man’s protest stirred some sympathy in me; even though the dogmatic terms in which he spoke reminded me uncomfortably of some fundamentalist Christians.

But it is also true that a focus on events of the distant past distracts us from the evident fact that in the 20th century, in the absence of God, political religions were manufactured out of some of the ideas which emerged from the nineteenth century crisis of faith. The “nation”, or some “class”, or some “race” was divinised often with pseudo-scientific décor and with disastrous consequences. As Burke remarked “a theory concerning government may become as much a cause of fanaticism as a dogma in religion.”

Few people of course have been as clear as the historian Jules Michelet in seeing and welcoming Nationalism as a surrogate for Christianity – “It is from you that I shall ask for help, my noble country, that you may fill within us the immeasurable abyss which extinct Christianity has left there.”

These political religions have unleashed incalculable evils and it is my contention that one cannot fight a Satanic force with morality and appeals for tolerance wrapped up in citizenship courses alone. A religious evil, can only be exorcised by an equally strong religious good.

More than 60 years has elapsed now since the publication of the U.N. Charter at the San Francisco Assembly. The energy which created the Charter was informed by the horrifying experiences of World War II and the social spiritual capital of Western culture. It seems to me, however, that the rhetoric of human solidarity which has been such a blessing to the world and which was incorporated in the Charter is losing its power. Mere appeals to ethical fraternity do not seem to evoke the energy which sustains civilisations. Simple ungrounded assertions about human dignity, when all sense of the sacred and reverence for the other outside my immediate individual consciousness is fading, seem more and more to be “sad, slight useless things to calm the mad.”

We can all admire the austere faith of atheism whose adherents stand before a meaningless world with courage and lucidity making a meaning out of life for themselves. By contrast the meaning for human life that has been constructed more recently seems a very frail basis for happiness, creativity or sustained fruitfulness. Descartes said famously “cogito ergo sum”, I think therefore I am. The modern equivalent seems to be “eligo ergo sum”, or even “tesco ergo sum” - I choose therefore I am. Our problem now is not so much believing in God as believing in humanity.

Do we really believe in our heart of hearts that this civilisation in its present form is going to endure much longer? Our societies are so very complex that they are highly vulnerable. They are especially vulnerable if individualism breaks down any strong sense of neighbourly solidarity and the rich simply save themselves. This was the real lesson of Hurricane Katrina which remains when all the blame game has been played out.

At the same time, in this period of spiritual destitution, we are confronted by a fanaticism which has its roots in pseudo-religion, in an idolatry which has confected a god out of human anger and a desire for revenge. We have ample evidence of the danger of false and self regarding religion. This is why the great prophets spent so much energy in denouncing idolatry but what follows from this recognition? Are we to ban religion of all kinds from the public square, to seek to relegate it to the margins of life where the credulous and fanatical can speak in words of fire to one another without challenge until the cauldron of their anger boils over? Or will Western Europe read the signs of the times and come to understand that the hidden God is exercising a gravitational pull on our time and that it is time for him to return not as the absolute ruler whose will was annexed to justify the tyrants but as the God of love who showed his power in vulnerability and who is the God of promise and hope? No one has seen God at any time says St John but he has made himself known in the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We have a lot of unlearning to do because spiritual truth is not accessible by the way that Descartes has mapped out. We do not so much think ourselves into new ways of living. It is more the case that we live ourselves into new ways of thinking. We do not so much resolve the God-question in our heads. It is resolved in us when we agree to bear the mystery of God’s suffering in the world and God’s ecstasy in the world.

This unlearning begins with a return to our bodies and to our creaturely experience. That is why Jesus teaches that the first step in becoming a human being is to refuse to be a little god. This is a hard saying when the Cartesian way of being in the world which ends in our assuming the role of “master and possessor of the earth” does precisely consist in making ourselves little gods. Unvarnished or unspun “What is” - is the great teacher. That is why Jesus refused the drugged wine on the cross and why we so often resort to drugs to keep our illusions in place. “What is” is the great teacher – which is why Jesus spent thirty years living before his three years of teaching.

Unlearning brings us to the place where we can begin to bear the mystery of God. We can acquire the beginner’s mind. Sometimes a picture comes unbidden to my mind of our lives being like a frail craft afloat on a huge body of water which is the life of God himself. St Patrick whose festival we celebrate on Saturday says that the experience of God in Christ points to a God who is with me, within me, behind me, before me, beside me, to win me, to comfort and restore me.

In the course of coming to realise this truth, Jesus teaches that the hiddeness of God plays a significant part. In St Matthew Jesus talks of God’s realm being like a treasure hid in a field [Matthew XIII: 44]. God’s reality is like yeast hidden in everyday dough [Matthew XIII: 33].

When things are lost however we are required to go on a search like the woman searching urgently for her coin in the story in St Luke [Luke XV: 8] or the merchant looking to purchase the pearl of great price. [Matthew XIII: 46]. The search demands single mindedness and it is significant that the merchant had to sell everything he possessed to afford that single pearl.

At the same time we are challenged to recognise that in reality it is we who are lost and hidden and that it is God who is looking for us like the good shepherd searching for the sheep that has gone astray in Matthew XVIII:12.

But the end of our exploring is not in reality to get anywhere but to arrive at the here and now. The image of the journey is only accurate as far as it goes. The end of our exploring is to awake to where we are now. That is why Jesus continually says, keep alert, watch and pray. We are involved in a mass cultural trance so that we only see with the material eye and we are looking for the bottom line in a way that obscures true north and where we are. Spiritual discipline is intended to void illusions and prayer is the great dispeller of illusions which clears the way and gives us the strength to be fully present.

Being fully present and awake involves acquiring the beginner’s mind which is the fruit of much unlearning. We are surrounded by so much information we can be kept almost infinitely amused and diverted. It requires considerable spiritual discernment which is a gift given in our own day only sparingly.

What we call God is a mixture of infantile projections and deep wisdom – weeds and wheat growing together in the field of our own lives. This continues to the end and I believe that the picture of Jesus hanging between the two thieves one who is enlightened and one who is still in the darkness suggests that the final harvest is not for this life. You will also notice that Jesus forgave both the thieves hanging with him even though one was not open to the news about Paradise.

All the while we have to be alert to the truth that some so called religious people are so conscious of their spiritual elevation that they are blind to their faults. These faults are even exaggerated by association with a dogmatic view of God and the idea of God becomes a means for the humiliated ego to re-ascend. Idolatry is always a presence danger in all human societies. Some religious people attach themselves so tightly to their last conversion experience that they create an obstacle to the next one.
Jesus’ constant reference to lamps points to our calling to grow into illuminated people, honest about “what is” and able to detect self serving truths and cultural lies, like the lies so often told about what God wants which bear a suspicious resemblance to what we want. If our lamps are not lit through simple prayer and attention to “what is” then we shall be entoiled in group think.

I do however think that there are hopeful signs that people may be once more open to this truth. It is a great privilege to work in London with so many opportunities to take the pulse of the times. I was sitting next to one of those responsible for the launch of the Metro free newspaper. He said that it had been a huge and unexpected success especially with young men whose early exposure to the internet had given them a detestation of spin, a disaffection from the offerings of more traditional newspapers and an openness to publications like the Metro composed largely of straight news stories from Reuters.

I know the reality of what I am saying but only in snatches and with a frequent experience of failure and falling back into the old grooves. Yet it is humbling and encouraging that we come to God not by doing it right which so often inflates us but by doing it wrong and recognising it. We are called to the beginner’s mind and eye which hesitates to judge and which is a kind of second innocence which lies beyond the desert of criticism and the illusion that we get what we deserve. St Paul says in his letter to the Christians of Corinth [ICor. IV: 1 ff] “Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God”. Stewards are required to be faithful to be sure but it is inappropriate to rush to judgement “before the time, until the Lord comes who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts”. Until then says Paul “I judge not mine own self”. Judgement is what happens at the end of the story and if we judge too early we impose a premature halt on what is still unfolding.

We have to live the mystery without yielding to the temptation to go straight to the bottom line or to “cash it out”. The world is the temple of the God who is the mystery of the world and those who buy and sell religion, the merchants of grace who are ritualised and not incorporated in the mystery; they are the ones whom Jesus drives from the Temple. There is a wonderful sermon of Meister Eckhart on this theme. [Volume I, Sermon 6 in the edition of Michael Walsh SJ] “The merchants must go when truth is revealed for truth needs no merchandising.” God who is our life “seeks not his own: he is perfectly free in his acts which he does out of true love. So does that man who is at one with God.”

The image of the river means a great deal to me, not some tranquil purling brook but the mighty Danube on which I found myself in the aftermath of the NATO war against Serbia. Its power was vast. The banks were indistinct and shrouded with trees which reached down to the water’s edge: the depth was unguessable and the waters were dark and heavy with silt and toxins. The river filled me with alarm. I thought of Jonah and how he fled from the presence of God and tried to hide from him. A storm arose on the waters and although the sailors laboured to save the ship, they eventually realised that they must throw Jonah over the side if they were to survive. Jesus talks about the sign of Jonah which will be given “to this generation”.

Jonah went down into the deep waters; he was immersed in that terrifying ocean and spent three days in the belly of the great fish. It is not called a whale in the Bible but of course for a symbolically insensitive generation questions have been asked about the capacities of a whale’s throat and whether a man would really survive in its belly for three days. But here is deep spiritual truth - Jonah chose exile rather than embrace the enemy city Nineveh.

Christianity has often presented itself to the Western world not as a way of seeing all things but as a competing ideology among other ideologies. Instead of leading us to God in new and surprising places it has often attempted to confirm us in our conviction that God is inside our place. Simone Weil has suggested that “the tragedy of Christianity is that it came to see itself as replacing other religions instead of adding something to all of them.”

At this point in preparing these talks I was suddenly confronted with the truth that I had always envisaged myself living as someone who was rowing against the current. The future was behind my back as I sculled, at the source of the stream, but then the call came to turn the skiff around and recognise that the future to which the stream was tending lay in the sea.
The Bible resounds with God’s call to all human persons but we have so often narrowed the idea of vocation significantly to mean merely a call to religious orders. Now is the time to recover a sense of the call of God in each one of us. He calls us to reflect on his hiddeness and to recognise our lostness. He gives us lamps so that we can unlearn and acquire the beginner’s mind. He teaches us to look for him in unexpected places and people. He stirs us up to be watchful, to be expectant and to look for his coming in this new wired up world of huge promise and huge peril.