Lent Lecture IV: Finding and Being Found by God |
We have come a long way together. We have seen some of the reasons why for many people in NW Europe, “God is missing and not missed”. We have acknowledged the complicity of almost every part of the fragmented Western Church in the destructive civil wars of early modern Europe. We have noted the alliance between certain notions of God and absolutist regimes and the consequent animus against this understanding of God by those who struggled on behalf of the many against the will of the one. We have reflected on the consequences of the relegation of God to the status of an idea in our minds as distinct from the pre-comprehensible God of the Bible.
Then returning to the Biblical record we have glimpsed the “Deus absconditus”, the God who hides himself for his own purposes to draw us out of our previous level of understanding and to prepare us by his very absence for a fresh vision.
We examined some of the evident distresses which have followed the disappearance of the living God from our consciousness. There are many indications that part of the business of the 21st century if the human race is to thrive is the re-integration of “flatland” thinking which is preoccupied with number based knowledge of discrete objects with the wisdom which sees the connectedness of mind, body, and the soul with the Spirit.
There is a new appetite for “spirituality” in these conditions but there is also a danger that it will take the form of some consumerist cultivation of exquisite interior states at the expense of a proper engagement with our neighbours. At the same time there is the greater danger of the return of idolatry - the manufacture of gods in our own image as a way of satisfying our own humiliated egos. This is a perennial threat in all religions.
Thinkers like Richard Hooker in early modern England doubted whether states could survive without a common religion. The suggestion that this contention has been disproved by the pluralist cultures which followed the breakdown of the Christian consensus is challenged by the growth of political religions to fill the vacuum. The divinising of nation, class or race was the root cause of the appalling slaughter of the 20th century. Perhaps now we are ready to see and receive the God who is at an infinite distance from our infantile projections. This is God as we see him in his human face, Jesus Christ who came as a vulnerable child, took the form of a servant, lived as an itinerant, died loving the loveless into loving and opened the door to the resurrection life in which, as St Peter says, we become “partakers of the divine nature”.
But how do we lay hold of this God who leads us by indirections to the truth which passes all understanding? In the end of course we do not find God rather he finds us. Annunciation is the foundation of authentic faith – a call from the side of the Other. Abraham – leave your household gods. Samuel – called when communication with the Lord was very sparse. Hail Mary, the Lord is with thee. Sometimes these addresses are so modest that we are not really conscious of having received them but such indeed is the condition of the person described by St Paul in Romans VIII: 26 - “the Spirit helpeth our infirmities, for we know what we should pray for as we ought but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered”. Even the search for the true and living God is his work in the beginning.
This does not mean however that we are passive as we pursue God into unfamiliar country. The journey is demanding and we must be properly prepared and equipped.
Ancient guides to the path describe three stages. I shall be trying to uncover this path with the aid of one of the most encouraging and courageous of the ancient guides who wrote at the very end of the springtime of the Christian Church in the first half of the 7th century when it was possible to look back on a long period of exploration and assemble some of the experience.
My titles for the three stages are:-
Foundational Practice.
If we are to be strong and simple enough to encounter the true and living God then work is necessary to attain that inner silence and tranquillity [hesychia] which is necessary if our endeavours are not to fuel our illusions.
The starting point in the teaching of Maximus is to retract our ego projections and come home to ourselves in our creaturely frailty and vulnerability. “Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus who being in the form of God counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God but emptied himself taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself becoming obedient even unto death, yea the death of he cross.” Philippians II.
Jesus teaches in his life and death that the first step in returning to our true character as human beings called to be partakers of the divine nature through love is paradoxically to refuse to be little gods.
We live at a time when people fantasise about building perfect bodies and there is considerable ascetical effort expended to this end. Christians ought to emulate the humility of one of the fathers of the desert Abba Pambo as we see the efforts our neighbours are making to build the body beautiful. Abba Pambo was visiting the great city of Alexandria with some of his young disciples when he saw a prostitute. She was equipped with all the allurements of middle eastern seduction, the nose ring, the bangles and the heavy application of fragrances and cosmetics. The desert sage burst into tears and his disciples asked “Why do you weep father? Is it because this woman is most certainly damned?” “Yes” replied Pambo “but much more because she hath more zeal to please vile man than I have to please the living God.”
We must not neglect our physical existence but train and discipline our bodies with the object of coming home to ourselves and not to some fantasy self of the kind projected by the celebrity magazines.
You can often see the effect on the body of living mainly in the mind. “We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others and so to make an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being and neglect the real one…..How clear a sign of the emptiness of our own being that we are not satisfied with one without the other and often exchange one for the other.” Pascal Pensees.
The more we seek the education of silence and stillness in the prayer which goes beyond thinking and words and the more we dwell in our real bodies then the more clearly we shall see how illusory is the promise of happiness and fulfilment through accumulation and possession of things.
There is a huge treasury of advice about ascetical practice but the topic is best pursued personally and privately with some experienced soul friend or else we can even get involved in building some fantasy spiritual self. “We want to live an imaginary life in the eyes of others and so to make an impression.”
The aim is however hesychia a state of inner tranquillity where there has been a measure of detox and we are ready to begin replacing an ignorance about the God who is missing and not missed with a receptivity to the call of the living God.
Attaining hesychia also involves a purification of the mind. Maximus teaches that the root of all illusions
and vices is self love and he has some very practical teaching about the resentment of others which self love engenders. “If you harbour resentment against anybody, pray for him and you will prevent the passion from being aroused….If somebody regards you with resentment, be pleasant to him, be humble and agreeable in his company and you will deliver him from his passion.”
“Philadelphia”, brotherly love is an important sign of progress of deliverance from self love but the acid test is love of enemies. The Lord says - love your enemies. “Why did he command this? To free you from hatred, grief, anger and resentment and to make you worthy of the supreme gift of perfect love. And you cannot attain such love, if you do not imitate God and love all men equally. For God loves all men equally and wishes them - to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth [ITim.II: 4]”
It is at this point that we ought to turn to the second stage of growth into wisdom. The hidden God leaves traces of himself and draws us out of the broad highway to follow tracks indistinct at first which will lead us into another country where we can be found by the true and living God.
This second stage enables us to contemplate the created world with a purified mind able to see the cosmos as a whole and dwell on its inner structure instead of being diverted by particular phenomena. The pure mind can relate created things to the Creator and celebrate them as gifts of his divine love.
T.S.Eliot in famous lines from his drama “The Rock” poses a question which haunts the modern world
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
[T.S.Eliot Chorus I from “The Rock” 1934]
In the Paradise Garden there are two trees - the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge.
The fruit of the Tree of Life is true knowledge of the divine creation. This is what the Biblical tradition regards as Wisdom. “Wisdom is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her.” Proverbs III:18.
What of the Tree of Knowledge? This is knowledge wrenched from its source, which according to the first book of Enoch “caused much bloodshed on the earth”. The knowledge from the second tree is partial. It is knowledge only of a god-forsaken world in which human beings themselves have assumed the role of gods. In the process they have tasted the bitterness of toil and death which follow the divorce from the Creator and Source of Life.
The knowledge in Wisdom, springing from awareness of the Creator, [“the fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom”], has power to penetrate our lives and effect a transformation of mind. This transforming power is symbolised in the Bible by anointing. Christ is the anointed one [Christos in Greek means “anointed”] who possesses the fullness of the Wisdom of God and who is in the world to open up the way to Paradise Regained.
At this point it would be only too easy to fly off into esoterica. Our chief resource is the biblical narrative which we are invited to hear, read, mark learn and inwardly digest in the company of the whole church of all the ages in a process of de-centring and de-familiarising which opens us up to the Word beyond the words.
Much of this living tradition is conveyed to us in the liturgy which is why the provision of a comprehensive common lectionary is so important with those distillations of the New Testament witness which are expressed in the creeds as well as the signs which he commanded us to “do in remembrance of him”.
For those seeking a way to Paradise Regained, work is required, not merely conceptualisation. Work, public work is what the word liturgy means. The liturgies of the ancient world were public works in which citizens were assembled to build a road or a temple.
Liturgical work begins by leaving home and setting out. If we contemplate our present ecological and social distresses then we must long for transformation. The partial god-forsaken knowledge which comes from the Tree of Knowledge easily slips into a rejection of otherness and openness by taking refuge in the circle I form with myself. This is a refusal to follow the examples of Peter and Abraham, to cast out into the deep and genuinely to leave home and our household gods.
The scientific method itself can be a powerful preparation for this authentic casting out into the deep. The scientific method which has been one of the great achievements of our civilisation, frequently offers a vital detour to wisdom since science can open up the world by de-centring the self and distancing ourselves from ourselves in the search for a more genuine holism. The observer can never of course be excluded from the equation but the self can be de-centred. Wisdom finds itself by losing itself.
Liturgical life proceeds as we lay hold on life, symbolised by the bread and the wine, and pronounce a blessing in giving thanks for them. In this act, we make our protest against the various forms of reductionism which reject openness and otherness by taking life, not with thanksgiving, but “for granted” as nothing beyond the obvious. In pronouncing this thanksgiving, we cry out, not to some confected divinity of our own, but to the pre-comprehensible, open to the mystery of which we are a part.
All closed systems, ideologies which purport to describe absolute totality, [we think of the materialist ideologies which until 1989 held sway in the East of our continent and are still powerful in our own culture], suffer from the defect that it is impossible to postulate such a system without to some extent surreptitiously putting “myself” in place of the whole.
Wisdom is open to mystery which is to be distinguished from the kind of puzzle which ultimately yields to the “little grey cells”. Mystery is the only appropriate designation of the totality of which we form a part so that we cannot achieve an independent standpoint from which we can view the whole as an object, get behind or fathom it. The appropriate approach to mystery is a cry, Lord! Open thou our lips.
Take life with thanksgiving and cry out to the mysterious source of life, the eternal Wisdom who dwells in silence, this constitutes the primary affirmation in our search for living Wisdom.
With our crying out and the thanksgiving comes liberation from the hermetically sealed bubble of the self which many non-philosophical moderns experience as a prison house.
There is further transformation in store. Descartes’ way of knowing makes of man, “a master and possessor of the earth” with all the consequent problems of domination and exploitation in our relations with the earth and with one another.
In our liturgical work, following the way of Jesus Christ, the expression of the Wisdom of God, we offer up and hand over our life and our things to the Source of All Life and Wisdom. By this action of handing over, the master of the feast becomes the guest of divine Wisdom. It happened at the wedding in Can of Galilee.
As we hand over our things and offer up our possessions the way is opened for them to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, the Communication of the Wisdom of God and received back as gifts of divine Love. The master becomes a guest. The possession becomes a gift. Divine Wisdom transforms the self and the world it inhabits.
The experimental liturgical life has been refreshed in the course of the 20th century. The beauty of the liturgical life is the signature of Divine Wisdom and it continues to be alluring. It is still sometimes difficult, however, to discern real action, movement and desire for transformation in liturgies which can appear to resemble either cultural fossils or dreary audio-visual aids to acquiring knowledge of Christian doctrine or exhausting monologues in which we do not let God get a Word in edgeways by silence and stillness.
The truth is of course that we have turned so much of our own traditions into mere knowledge in the pejorative sense. The poet Auden sadly reflected that even the early Christians saw their agape decline “into a late lunch with Constantine”. The scribes are still with us, picking over the rags and bones of dead men’s thoughts as a substitute for engagement with living Wisdom.
But if you have kept Maximus company thus far we are ready just to glimpse that consummation – the third stage, contemplative union - of which it is not lawful to speak except indirectly.
Maximus says that the love that we discover in union with Christ the Wisdom of God “is the door through which the one who enters finds himself in the Holy of Holies and is made worthy to behold the unapproachable beauty of the holy and royal Trinity. This is the true vine in which he who is firmly rooted is made worthy of becoming partaker of the divine quality.”
The true and living God who has led us to himself by indirections is in no way circumscribed. He is not a mystery in the sense that mystery is defined by Hercule Poirot, something that will eventually yield to the little grey cells. Rather we shall find as we go beyond ourselves in love that we are embraced by a mystery which is unfathomable and beyond our comprehension because our minds are too small and our arms too short. God dwells as St Paul says in “inaccessible light” but he is open to our love.
