The Logic of Worldly Success

 

"The logic of worldly success rest on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men!  A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!"

Thomas Merton, Seven Storey Mountain, p. 362

The One Who Writes with Fire

It came in a moment of reflection.  It was a brief meditation over a concept, or rather, a meditation over the interplay between two ways of conceptualizing the divine.

On the one hand, the concept--often troubling--of God as a consuming fire.  Generally, we do not want to be burned.  Burning is bad.  Burning hurts, a bunch if it's you encountering a hot pan, rather more so if you're Servetus after a particularly contentious Presbytery meeting.   Despite all the emo-Jesus Christian Contemporary Music that tries to make it seem romantic, fire-language still feels more than a little bit too reminiscent of Tomas de Toquemada.

Plus, there's a strong negative theology of burning.  Burning is what happens to bad people.  Lakes of fire!  Hot coals!  Sinners get the weeping and gnashing, plus, did we mention you'll be on fire?

Mysticism, of course, has always embraced the divine fire.  It is that light that is kindled in us.  It is the light that awaits, and that we will embrace as it consumes us.

This is the mystic vision, in both Christianity and every other human religion.  It's what Jesus brought and lived out, and what Paul affirmed and spread.

But America is not a very mystic place, and the idea that we will be subsumed into anything annoys us.  That'll destroy our individuality, we grump.  America has always been fiercely self-oriented, but now, it's reached a fever pitch.  Our consumer culture needs us to be distinct and separate and conveniently trackable, more than any culture in human history.

Consumed by the Numinous?  Really?  How will Netflix know our preferences in heaven if it can't pigeonhole our demographic profile?  Think what being indistinctly suffused into the nature of the Holy would do to Amazon Divines business model!  And the Google AfterLifeAds?  They'd be completely random!

The horror.

To my reflections on this idea came another image of the divine, that of God as Author.  I like this image, for reasons that are very slightly transparent.  Yeah, I like to write.  So sure, I see God as an author.  And yes, there's a wee bit of projection involved.  I get that.  But I'm aware of the limits, and aware that it's metaphor.

It just happens to be an excellent metaphor.  The very best.  Ahem.

God is the storyteller, the one who spins out the narratives of our existence and of time and space.  He tells not just our story, but ourselves, writing us into being.  He has authorship over us, and authority, and yet allows us to participate in the telling of the tale, like a master DM spinning out an elegantly complex D&D campaign for a circle of dear friends.

Two different images.  There's the One who Writes.  And the One who Burns.

When I was a little child, those would have been very different metaphors.

But what struck me, in my reflection, was that "burning" and "writing" are now interchangeable words.  They have become synonyms, in this digital age.  Burning is how we write, how we set data into a physical medium.

The two wove up in a reflection, of a God who writes us out with fire, burning the truth of our life into creation.

All this before my second cup of coffee.  What a productive morning.

Mysticism, Liberalism, and Post Modernity

Yesterday, as I walked to get dinner on a clear and beautiful Fall evening, I found myself inexplicably musing on a tension that exists between my own strain of flagrant and unrepentant liberalism and the liberalism of post-modernity.

I'm unquestionably a liberal, by any meaningful definition of that term.   I think the first response that any sentient being needs to have to an encounter with the new or the different needs to be openness, consideration, and forbearance.   That leads me to be open to gays and lesbians, open to people of other faiths, and open to individuals of varying political philosophies.  It doesn't extend to tolerance of intolerance, violence, and hatred, of course, but otherwise, we cool.

Underlying that worldview is a rather fundamentally mystic view of the nature of existence.  I believe that all things are interconnected, that I and you and everything are woven together in ways that we understand only through a glass dimly.  That sense of interconnectedness is itself undergirded and founded on my Christian faith, as I see my Creator's work all around me, and the potential grace of the Nazarene and the light of the Spirit in every human being I encounter.

Here, though, if I am honest, I think my foundation for liberalism diverges from that of secular post-modernity.

As I grasp that worldview, the underlying assumption is that all meaning is socially-mediated or derived from particular individual contexts.  There is no "truth," at least not with a capital "T", beyond those truths that we fabricate for ourselves.  What is good is what we individually say is good, and it is not possible to make any assertion of the good that extends beyond individual preference.

Within the context of that radically individualistic and particularistic worldview, tolerance of other perspectives arises from the assertion that if no perspective is normative for all, then no perspective is invalid.   We must accept all perspectives, because our own is just ours.

While both can yield acceptance of the stranger, one is an ethos of separation and difference, another, the ethos of interconnectness and union.

This, I think, may be one of the more significant distinctives between being a progressive person of faith and a secular progressive.  

Faith and Self Love

In a post over at thehardestquestion, Carol Howard Merritt recently pitched out a really solid reflection on 1 Corinthians 3:1-9.   The essence of her reflection revolves around the contrast between Spirit and Flesh that the Apostle Paul glances off of in this section, but develops more fully elsewhere.  She then uses that to reflect on the toxic approach our culture takes towards the flesh, particularly the flesh of women who look at themselves and find that they are not the airbrushed perfection they're told they're supposed to be.   It's open, honest and thought provoking, as her writing tends to be.

In response to a comment I left, Carol said:


"How do you understand/explain the nuances between loving oneself and self-seeking?"

This had the unfortunate effect of sending me off into a conceptual cascade that was waaay to long for a comment, which I'm going to subject you to here.   Just warnin' ya.  There's still time to escape.

Honestly, when I went a-parsing down that road, I found myself mightily struggling with the idea of "loving myself."

Love, as I understand it both conceptually and from the ground of my faith, is relational.  It's something that exists between selves.  In it's highest form, it bridges the chasm of existential separation that divides us, as in it we share in the joys and sorrows of the beloved.  Not to mention it being both the Most Excellent Way and the essential nature of God.

But when I look to the heart of Christian faith, to the Great Commandment, self-love is hard to find.  Love of God?  Check.  Love of Neighbor.  Check.  But of self?  Hmmm.  It's the measure of how you love your neighbor...but...um...there's not much else there.

Meaningfully saying "I love myself" requires a fragmentation of being, a separation of self from self.  You can only love yourself if you are not at one with yourself.  This is the odd actuality of our existence as sentient and self-aware creatures.  In self-awareness, the self reflects on itself, and is aware of itself as a being relative to other beings.  There is, in self-awareness, the capacity to look at who you are and be either pleased or horrified.   It's an essential characteristic of being human.

I'd insert a Sarah Palin joke here, but my self awareness tells me that wouldn't be gracious.

Oh.  Oops.

But unlike loving others unconditionally, loving yourself unconditionally often results in sociopathic unpleasantness.   That's Narcissus in a nutshell, forever poring over his beauty and the wonder that is him, trapped in a recursive feedback loop of self-regard.  It's true for self-hate, too.  Dark Narcissus can sit by that bleak pool, forever lamenting his thin lipped pimply visage and his stammering incompetence at all things.   That form of self-seeking-self-love is a closed circle prison, harming not just an individual but also those around them.

For self-love to be transforming and liberating, it needs to be both rational and ecstatic.   The rational part springs from our self-awareness as a thinking being.  Presbyterians do this great.  Ecstasy, though, comes harder for us.  The term "ecstasy" means essentially to "stand outside" of oneself.   Love does this.  And the love of God that is the first element of the great commandment does this best.  Pouring all your heart and all your mind and all your soul into the Love from which we all spring is the highest form of human ecstasy.

This love, as I see it, is also a form of love of self.  That's not to say that we are God.  Not at all.  Do I look like Feuerbach?   Yeah, ok, maybe a little, but I don't think like him theologically.

Rather, this comes from the rather theologically basic statement that God knows us completely, and that God knows what we would be were we fully conformed to God's grace.  It is that self that is worthy of love.  That's not a love of the self you know.  Not the love of the self whose value is defined by your sociocultural context.  But a love of the self God sees, a self transformed as you empty yourself into God, and the love of God fills you and transforms you and heals and completes you.  George MacDonald, C.S. Lewises master, described this as your "True Name," your identity as you would be were you perfected.  As, in the knowledge of my Creator, I already am. 

That is the self that I am not.  And as I love God, that is the self that I love, unconditionally. 

That, as I still struggle my way through it, is the difference.

God at the Edge

As I crank through my book-stack, I'm back into reading things I don't technically need to read.  Next in the rotation was a book given to my by one of the saints of my church.  The book, by Rabbi Niles Goldstein, is entitled God At the Edge.  Goldstein is a faith extremophile, meaning he's the sort of person who seeks out intense wilderness experience and wild-and-wooly EXTREEEEEME faith experience.  You know.  Wandering the wilderness of Alaska.  Trekking through Uzbekistan without the proper papers.  That sort of thing.

God at the Edge was quite readable, and the scholarship...particularly as Goldstein cranked his way through a variety of the mystics in both Judaism and Christianity who inspired him...was excellent.

What caused me to be a-strugglin' a bit with this book was the seeming inability of Goldstein to find contentment as a rabbi in a standard-issue synagogue.  The births and marriages and mitzvahs and funerals...well...they just weren't exciting.  He chafed and struggled with the tedium of it all.  He needed to be chased by bears, or shot at, or something...more...adventuresome.

I can understand that.  There's much within the lives of synagogues and congregations that is...well...boring.  Just routine.  It can be smotheringly irrelevant.

But there's this thing about even the most seemingly staid communities of faith: they are filled with human beings.    And those human creatures experience some pretty intense stuff.  A new life comes into the world...that's a big deal.  A marriage falls apart...that's a huge and complex thing, as fearsomely searing as the desert at the height of the day.  A life comes to a close, either softly or through a crucible of suffering...and that last breath rattling out after a years-long struggle against cancer is just as final as the sharp crack that ends a life on the battlefield.

I feel the extremophile yearning myself.  The voice of our Maker is more easily heard in places that kick us out of our complacency.  But the intensity of existence isn't something we have to wander far to find.  If we live and breathe, no matter where we are, it tends to find us.

Those who feel the need to seek it out just aren't paying attention.  They remind me of...well...this song:

Syncretism, Style, and Substance

Over the last half-year, I've been teaching a monthly class on styles and approaches to prayer. After sputtering a bit at the beginning...folks were just too full up on church on Sunday after worship/Bible study...I moved it to mid-week on Wednesday. Since then, it's been cozy and pleasant, as I've explore some of the classic techniques of Christian prayer with some of the dear saints of my church.

We've been following an online Upper Room guide to ancient forms of prayin', and it's been generally helpful. We've done lectio divina. We've done Ignatian prayer. We've even popped into the sanctuary and used the stained glass windows as a focal point for icon-based contemplation. Yeah, John Calvin wouldn't be pleased, but hey...if contemplating Christ is wrong, I don't wanna be right. A symbol is a symbol is a symbol, be it word or image. If you worship the image and not the thing it points to, you're an idolater. If you worship the text and not the thing it points to, you're an idolater. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

Yesterday, though, we did something a teesny bit different. I loaded up my little group into my minivan and went down to the C&O Canal Towpath for some walking meditation. It's a technique I've used for years, but it's not one I learned in church. It is, instead, something I did naturally. I then discovered that it was, well, a thing Buddhists do. In particular, it's the schtick of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn. It's a simple exercise in mindfulness and self-emptying, and particularly useful in stilling the anxieties and petty demons that can beset humankind. You don't fret about tomorrow, about things that might be. You don't anguish over the pains of yesterday. It places you squarely in the now, and at some fleeting, ephemeral moments, in the great peace that can be found in the Eternal Now of the Kingdom.

Having read up on it and practiced it over a decade or so, I find it's completely simpatico with a Christ-centered faith. It is simply a style of prayer. There are, of course, Christians who would be stressed by such a thing. Learning a prayer style? From a Buddhist? Outlandish! That's a step down the slippery slope of syncretism!

But focusing on form and technique rather than intent and purpose is the dangerous ground on which a Pharisee builds his home. If the purpose is deepening an awareness of our Maker, opening ourselves to the movement of the Holy Spirit, and finding a source of strength for our Christian journey, then it isn't to be feared. It is no more antithetical to Christ than pressing one's hands together in prayer.

I hear Buddhists do that too.

Staring Into The Fire

One of the more paradoxical things that one encounters in the reading of mystics like George MacDonald is the juxtaposition of their earthy, grace-filled and open-minded faith with a rather ferocious and intimidating view of the mysterium tremens of the Creator. Though mystics glory and delight in the created order, the One from whom all things spring isn't presented in terms of butterflies and bunnies and huggy bear Jesus, all viewed through a warm fuzzy filter of wuv, sweet wuv.

God, as MacDonald says again and again, is a consuming fire:

He is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God.

In this, MacDonald resonates with Merton and all those who have perceived the nature of God's love, including those few, brief flickers of presence that have formed my own faith. As I meditated on this yesterday, I found myself musing over how the Fire articulated by MacDonald relates to the teaching of the Dark Philosopher Heraclitus.

Heraclitus is the dude who came up with the idea that everything is change. "You can't step in the same river twice?" Heraclitus said that twenty-three hundred years before Disney Pocahontas sang it. He argued that nothing is constant, that everything is dynamic and ever changing, and that it is impossible to make any meaningful statements about being, other than that it changes. He's the father of postmodernity.

In his philosopical poetics, Heraclitus declared that underlying all being was an all consuming, all devouring fire, which he called the logos. Yeah, that logos, the same Greek term that English versions of John's Gospel translate as "Word."

I puzzled over this juxtaposition. There is nothing in mysticism that points to God as the engine of impermanence and meaninglessness. Nothing at all. Quite the opposite. Yet the imagery is so similar...so close...and the influence of Heraclitus on Western Philosophy so huge...that it felt like a non-random connection.

Perhaps it's a question of perspective.

We are creatures of change. As we view and perceive ourselves, we are ever changing. The organic processes of our bodies. The fleeting impermanent moment in which the light of self dwells. We are not the same being from one instant to the next...and yet, paradox of paradoxes, we are, and we cohere.

In our encounter with the One who formed us and in whose love we dwell, we are entering into relationship with that which does not change. As beings who are ever changing, we look at our Maker, and see that glory from the perspective of our own changing. Observing that endless, timeless presence in which lies all potentiality, we see terrible fire and change because we are changing. The Word is not flux and change. We are.

Perhaps, perhaps, we encounter God as we might view the tarmac beneath us as we book along on our motorcycle at 200 klicks per hour. "Wow, the road is moving fast," we might think. But it is not the road that's moving.

Though we perceive God as fire, that may just be...relative.

Mystic Bling

Another of the ways that mysticism tends to get spun in our consumption-addled culture is as a means to the acquisition of more stuff.

Why should the mystic walk barefoot up the mountain, when they could instead float...on the buttery smooth suspension of their eco-friendly Lexus RX450h, their holy tushie coddled warm against the heated leather seats, as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan serenades them through the astounding 330 watt Mark Levinson 15 speaker 7.1 surround sound system? Ah...such inner peace....

When you're connected to the universe in profound and mysterious ways, why shouldn't those connections result in the universe serving up some schweet, schweet schwag? After all, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And if you know the Creator of the Universe on an existential level, then why shouldn't you leverage your connectness, making Oneness with Being serve up some Oneness with Bling?

This approach to "mystic" faith can be found everywhere. It seems to have almost completely hijacked Kabbalah in the popular imagination, as folks traipse about imagining that the little red threads they wear somehow connect them with a future McMansion, or at a bare minimum will allow them to download Madonna's music for free.

This is, to use a delightfully archaic word, balderdash.

Though mysticism is earthy and practical and woven into the fabric of being, possessiveness is utterly alien to any true mystic. The desire to acquire is meaningless to those who yearn most deeply for God. As George MacD puts it:

The man who for consciousness of well-being depends on anything but life, the life essential, is a slave...

and:

But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it.

and, here sounding remarkably like a Scottish mystic Yoda:

If it be things that slay you, what matter whether things you have, or things you have not?

The mystic renounces desire for power in all of its forms, be it economic or coercive. They simply cease to seem meaningful. The unsatisfied, ever-empty hunger of the consumer is unknown and unwanted. That doesn't mean living a joyless, stale, or austere life. It simply means a different way of standing in relation to creation, one that is far richer and more abundant. As MacDonald puts it:

He who has God, has all things, after the fashion in which He who made them has them.

Next to the touch of a breeze, or the smell of the honeysuckle, or the laughter of your children, or the bright moon on a clear Spring evening, the cloying cornucopia of consumerism seems a rather empty nothing.

Mysticism and the Word

One of the ways mystics tend to get themselves into trouble is in their tendency to be... well... oblivious to the siren song of doctrinal purity and textual inerrancy. If your faith is grounded in the experiential and in deep contemplation, texts seem rather less satisfying.

It's a bit like having someone describe to you what it's like to spend a long evening eating steak fondue at the end of a beautiful summer day overlooking Lake Geneva. Hearing it is wonderful. But the hearing is not the thing itself. Neither are those symbols anything other than an imperfect vessel for conveying the heat of the oil, or the tenderness of the meat, or the cool breezes that played across the restaurant patio, or the way Mont Blanc stayed bright before the dimming sky.

It was really, really good, recalls now-vegetarian I, as the memory evokes a Pavlovian response.

That's one of the reasons that mystics are utterly unphased by the application of historical-critical method to the texts of our faith. As I continue my encounter with Scots mystic George MacDonald, I find he carries that same approach to texts. On the one hand, he respects them and is caught up in the story they tell. On the other, he acknowledges their limitations. They are limited in terms of technical accuracy in conveying an event. They also have within themselves the potential for spiritual danger, as he articulates here:

God has not cared that we should anywhere have assurance of His very words; and that not merely perhaps, because of the tendency of His children to word-worship, false logic, and corruption of the truth, but because He would not have them oppressed by words, seeing that words, being human, therefore but partially capable, could not absolutely contain or express what the Lord meant, and that even He must depend on being understood upon the spirit of His disciple. Seeing that it could not give life, the letter should not be throned with power to kill.

Human language is a marvelous thing. But the patterns of vibration produced by our vocal cords, the marks of ink on a page, and the patterns of pixels on your screen are intended to point beyond themselves. They are words, not Word. When we worship them and the patterns they form, and not the thing to which they attest, then we have wandered off the Way.

The Practical Mystic

Mysticism is typically construed as being the faith of the esoteric, a faith full of odd chants and visions, of obscure dreams and convoluted ritual. Mystics are the folks who sit upon mountaintops wearing loincloths, muttering mantras in an ancient language as they delve into the stern and secret truths of the universe.

As I read through the writings of George MacDonald, I'm reminded again of how totally inaccurate that perception of mysticism is. Mystics are earthy folk. Thomas Merton certainly was, as was the delightful Jallaladin Rumi. For all of his passion and all of the depth of his engagement with Spirit, Christ, and Creator, MacDonald's deep sense of the reality of his faith does not pull him from connection with being.

Instead, it grounds and centers him, in both creation and in the practical needs of day to day existence. Take, for instance, the way he counsels those who are feeling distant from God:

"Troubled soul, thou art not bound to feel but thou art bound to arise. God love thee whether thou feelest or not. Thou canst not love when thou wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee to the last...for the arms of thy Faith I say, but not of thy Action: bethink thee of something that thou oughtest to do, and go to do it, if it be but the sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend. Heed not thy feeling: Do thy work."

As someone who has experienced many times that dark night of the soul, MacDonald has the way out quite exactly right. Don't anguish. Don't navel-gaze. Don't force it. Just do what must be done. It's an approach to faith that speaks to the here and now, to action in the meatspace reality of our being.

His delight in things as they are extended to his view of miracles. He doesn't reject them, mind you. He just sees such glory in the created order as to view all being as miraculous:

In all His miracles Jesus did only in minature what His Father does ever in the great. Poor, indeed, was the making of the wine in the...pots of stone, compared with its making in the lovely growth of the vine with its clusters of swelling grapes--the live roots gathering from the earth the water that had to be borne in pitchers and poured into the great vases..."

That fundamental wonder at all being is something that mystics of all religious persuasions seem to share. It is, once again, a pleasure to find a brother who shares my joy in experiencing the First Book.

George MacDonald

As I fumble my way through the endless supply of stuff I Really Should Read, I've finally gotten around to George MacDonald.

MacDonald is a mystic Scot from the 19th century, one who was driven from the one church he ever served for his heretically open-minded views. He lived the life of a pauper and remains somewhat obscure.

His influences, though, are deep. Lewis Carroll might not have published Alice in Wonderland were it not for MacDonald. J.R.R. Tolkien acknowledged some of MacDonald's work as being formative. But it was C.S. Lewis who was most intensely changed by his intersection with MacDonald's writing and theology, to the point of declaring MacDonald to be his spiritual teacher. Given the influence Lewis had...and still has...over my own faith, it was high time for me to check out MacDonald's writings.

MacDonald was mostly a novelist, who spun tales of magic and mystery that were suffused with his faith. I'm intending to get to those later. No, really. I will. Phantastes and Lilith are going to work their way through my consciousness in the very near future.

Two of his books now grace my nightstand. One is a collection of devotional poems entitled "Diary of an Old Soul," intended to be read daily over a year. The second is C.S. Lewises own anthology of MacDonald's key teachings, the ones the were most formative to his thought.

I'm looking forward to it. A bit of reading is good for the soul, particularly if it's the right reading.

Spiritual Bodies

Here's a little remnant of speculative esoterica from a recent meditation, one that came as I prepared to eulogize a recently passed member of my teeny little church. As I searched for a passage to illuminate the Christian understanding of death, I found myself musing over the paradoxical Pauline claim that we have "spiritual bodies."

That particular bit of theological fuddliness comes to us from the letter to the church at Corinth. It's a puzzler because it seems to describe an impossibility. The soma pneumatikon that Paul says is our true nature seems on the surface to be in unresolvable tension with itself.

The word soma describes meatspace reality, our bones and sinews and loins and giblets. It is material. Pneuma is classically understood as spirit, intangible, ineffable, and impossible to quantify and measure. How can it be that they are somehow the same thing? It seems an impossibility.

For those who would see Paul as a dualist, the kind of Christian who thinks Body=Bad and Spirit=Good, this passage is a serious stumbling block. And for good reason. Paul, being of a semitic persuasion, could not be further from that binary understanding of being. This existence matters for Paul. It matters infinitely. If it did not, then our actions in this short span of being would have little relevance to our eternity. As it is, though, this life is the seed, containing the fullness of our eternity within itself.

As Paul describes it, our spiritual body is different from flesh, but it is also different from our psyche. But...how?

As I read Paul with unabashedly mystical eyes, I hear him speaking to a self that transcends self. The boundaries of flesh and the boundaries of individuation do not define the soma pneumatikon. Instead, my sense of that reality is that it is the totality of our transpersonal being. Our awareness of pneuma, of the Spirit, is at it's most essential about our connectedness with both Being Itself and other beings. That would seem to give a particular shape and form to the seeming paradox Paul describes.

Our spiritual bodies are the fullness of our place in being, as our actions and intentions play their way across inanimate being and through the other seemingly discrete selves that we encounter. Those influences are permanently part of the reality of creation, from the intense passions and anguishes and joys of our first love to that cutting remark we offered to our lazy, good-for-nothing daughter to the careless touch of a hand brushing across a painted wall. Those things and their echoes and ripples are part of our eternity, as surely as the hands that type this are part of me.

We do not perceive them as such now, of course. We can't begin to fully grasp who we are. But we're on the other side of the veil.

Fortunately, I had the good sense not to ramble on about this at the funeral.

Songs of Void and Emptiness

As I reflected on the violence of organic life yesterday, and how oddly incompatible it is with the love of God and enemy, I found myself looking upwards into the refracted blue of the sky and thinking about all that which is not life.

Creation itself is mostly nothing. Even I, as I write this, am mostly nothing. Yeah, I'm an organic life form. But if you drill down to the atomic and subatomic level, the physical form that is currently typing this contains far more emptiness than neutrons and electrons. The keyboard onto which this is typed, for all of it's clackity solidity, is also mostly nothing. But we miss this, because our perception is so limited.

As we look out into the immensity of the cosmos, that emptiness finally strikes us. It is at a scale that we cannot grasp, of a vastness of temporal and spatial measure that goes well beyond our ability to conceptualize. We can get a bit of it, through metrics and analogies. But the reality of it is well beyond the capacity of our minds to grasp.

And it isn't just empty of mass. It's empty of measurable feeling. It is, to us, both terrible and beautiful...but is completely oblivious of those categories. Love and hatred and loss and joy are not words that have any relevance to the lives of stars, or in the aeons over which a nebula dissipates. Though the mechanics of physics govern this immensity, and they can be grasped rationally, those natural laws are not themselves "reasoned." They simply are.

The resultant interplay of those forces also cannot be meaningfully described in terms of interpersonal or social morality. When tectonic plates shift, and a city crumbles or vast waves scour the land, and hundreds of thousands die, it is not malicious. Or cruel. Or hateful. It just is. When atmospheric conditions produce intense tornadic activity, and a town is razed, it is not that creation is feeling peevish, or is angry with the town for not being tougher on crime. It simply is what it is.

The vastness of the heavens and the interplay of matter and energy aren't moral or ethical. The music of the spheres is atonal, jarring, and disinterested in the needs of it's audience.

This poses an interesting paradox to the contemplative person of faith. Why?

Because when one spends time emptying self of self, and letting awareness of all things silence the endless internal jabbering of thought for a while, when you return from that peak state you return changed. But you are changed in a way that does not seem to reflect the great cool amorality of physics. Mystics are not hard-nosed pragmatists, or mechanistically utilitarian in their approach to other creatures. It has a rather different effect.

Confronted with creation's vast, near-chaotic dynamism, one becomes calm. Immersed in it's amorality, other beings suddenly matter more. After embracing that which knows no care or love, deep compassion for others is stirred. It is...paradoxical.

St. Augustine once famously called creation the First Book. As he and Calvin both affirmed, it's a nearly impossible book to read and comprehend...thus the need for our sacred texts to guide our understanding.

But perhaps it's not a book the way the Bible is a book, written in symbol. Perhaps it's more like a song, which is best understood not through analysis and deconstruction and debate, but by simply being still and listening.

Harmonizing

I encountered this delightful little video of scientists "singing" the praises of creation through the miracle of FaceBook, and felt obligated to pass it on after offering up the requisite tip o' the hat to Jeremy over at Master's Way. It's simple enough in it's own way, just another in a series of rather marvelous applications of Autotune. Lil Wayne hath wrought far more than one might have imagined.

After watching it, I drifted for a while into a reverie about that soaring place where science and faith almost...almost...meet. What I find fascinating about this video are two discrete but related things.

First, that it comes so very close to expressing the delight in the connectedness of all things that defines the experience of mystics within each of the world's religious traditions. Listening to this assemblage of scientists autotune their paean to the interwoven and interdependent structures of spacetime, I hear them harmonizing with Thomas Merton and Jacob Boehme and St. John of the Cross. Sure, it might be Carl Sagan, but with only minor tweaking it could also be Jalal'adin Rumi, or Chuang Tzu, or Thich Nat Hanh. The wonder they feel from their science is a close cousin to the wonder that the mystic intuits in those fleeting moments of union with all things.

Second, I found myself connecting connectedness to the core ethic of Christian faith. Folks of a radically atheistic persuasion will often argue that faith...particularly Christian faith, but they'll happily go after whatever you've got...is fundamentally evil. It's inherently irrational and opposed to science. Worse yet, it turns human beings against one another. Makes us hateful naaarsty peopleses!

But Jesus of Nazareth's message is a radical proclamation of orientation to the Other, a declaration of the fundamental unity of creation. We creatures are not separate from one another. We don't exist for ourselves alone, isolated from all other things.

Instead of focusing on our own interests, the central and defining fundamental of Christian faith is the ethic of love. That demands that we see ourselves not as isolated, separate beings, but instead calls us to understand ourselves in light of our relationship both to other beings and the One Who Is.

At its essence, Christian faith and ethics do not stand in opposition to the wonder many scientists feel at the intricate interweaving of ecosystems and cosmological constants.

It's a different spin, perhaps. But a harmonious one.

Polarities

As I continue to slowly digest my way through the theopoetic stylings of Jalal-a'din Rumi, I'm reminded of a strange paradox that occurs in our faith traditions.

That paradox occurs at the outer edge of the world's belief systems, where radically disparate theologies end up looking pretty much identical in practice. Islamic fundamentalists are really not all that different from Christian fundamentalists, who share many characteristics with ultra-Orthodox Jews, who aren't all that different from Hindu fundamentalists. Within all of these movements, the "other" is viewed with suspicion and/or outright hostility. Different traditions are a threat to the integrity of faith. Faith itself is radically dependent on tradition, whether that be in a sacred text or forms of ritual practice. That faith is viewed in radically binary terms, which is often framed by the language of conflict. Though the ultra-orthodox in every tradition would deny any meaningful spiritual ties with the others, they are, in terms of how the rubber meets the road, functionally the same.

On the other polarity of the world's faith traditions, there is an opposite but very similar phenomenon. As I've studied the mystical traditions in Christianity, what I find is that there is very little difference between someone like Meister Eckhardt or Jacob Boehme and someone like Martin Buber or Jalal-a'din Rumi. For the mystics, the divine is radically unifying, even outside of the bounds of their tradition. Their radical love for and yearning for God shatters not just the boundaries of the self, but also shatters the ways they categorically define "us" and "them." More striking, the experience of God that the mystics articulate is essentially the same. It is flavored by the language and concepts of the tradition from which the mystic comes, true, but the underlying experience appears to be something that transcends culture and language. Mysticism steers away from conflict, which is typically seen as a sign of spiritual failure. Instead, mystical faith finds that in seeking union with God, union is found with others. It is suffused with gentleness and grace towards the other.

It would appear, then, that among our many paths of faith there are two poles towards which we can be drawn. Both articulate, in their own way, an absolute. But one leads one way. Another leads the other.

GodSnack

As I continue to read my way through the poetry of Rumi, I pranged against an interesting spin on one of the more challenging things about a mystic approach to faith.

The poem is entitled "Chickpea to Cook," and its focus is a reluctant chickpea, which doesn't want to be part of the stew a cook is preparing. The chickpea has no desire to be eaten, to lose its sense of self and identity. It doesn't particularly want to be cooked, either.

The cook, on the other hand, thinks the chickpea is being selfish. "I'm giving you flavor," he says, "so you can mix with spices and rice and be part of the lovely vitality of a human being."

What Rumi is articulating is a desire that weaves through all of the mystic traditions within each of the world's great faiths. It's the yearning to lose oneself completely in God, to be utterly subsumed into the glory of the divine. As it's expressed in this wee bit of theological whimsy, Rumi articulates our purpose in being as giving God "...something good to eat."

This, I think, is the problem most human beings have with mysticism. There is nothing, nothing, nothing that we cherish in the world more than our own sense of self. We don't want to cease to be as we are. We cling to the unique assemblage of memories that form us, enfleshed in our uniquely patterned organic neural network. It is our existence. It is us. We don't want to let ourselves go.

When we conceptualize heaven, this is why we want it to be a place where we remain eternally as we are. Maybe a bit younger or a bit older, maybe a bit thinner, maybe with a full head of hair, but still us. This has never really appealed to me, or made any sense theologically. Here in creation, our "self" is a complex intermixture of genetic predisposition, experience, and memory. But moving into a direct and unmediated experience of God would seem to be something of a gamechanger for us as persons.

We know that individual experiences or events in our lives can have radically transforming impacts on our sense of self. After that first kiss, you are not the same person. After the first death of a dear, dear friend, you are not the same person. Why would we expect not to be utterly changed by God's presence, which is several orders of magnitude more intense?

If God is, as we faith-folk tend to say, both infinitely good and infinitely loving, why wouldn't we want to lose ourselves in God?