Punctum Saliens

That’s the hakuna mattata way of thinking. No worries because God’s gonna save our asses before things get real bad. So all these environmental, racial, terrorism, educational, political, &c. issues are God’s problem, not ours. He’ll clean them all up before his 1000 year reign and he’ll have 7 long years to do it — piece of cake for the great omnipotent one.

Ah, t’would be easier, t’wouldn’t it!

But back on the sane planet Earth, I’m watching a show about the biggest science discoveries of 2007 and one of them was that we lost an amount of ice in the Arctic equal in surface area to half of the U.S.A.! They didn’t expect that amount of loss for another 30 years but it happened this year! Talk about ahead of schedule.

So, I’m watching this show and imagining cities under domes to protect them from the poisonous atmosphere and scorching temperatures; and cave dwelling, marauding hordes of starving, bear-skin-wearing pirates; and underground cities where the temperature is cool enough to sustain life but it’s completely dark so the people mutate into walking, talking mole-people. And I’m imagining all this happening in the next 20 years or so because it’s getting serious out there, folks. It’s all rather depressing.

Then I ran across “On Hopelessness” at Sacred Awe. Fitting title, I thought, for my mood. One of the excellent points made in this meditation is that of “committed action, non-attachment to outcome.” This comes from Buddhism but I think it can be equally stated as “love your neighbor as yourself, do not worry about tomorrow.” You know, maybe it’s because I grew up with the “Christian version” and I heard the words so often that I became almost numb to them, but a simple rephrasing in different words makes the difficulty in carrying it out much more clear. Non-attachment to outcome: it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. Non-attachment to outcome: don’t lie awake at night worrying about all the changes that are raining into your life like fire and brimstone, just do what you have to do right now. Non-attachment to outcome: don’t worry about being annihilated but don’t expect God to save your ass, either.

Something else from the mediation was part of a poem by Patricia Lay-Dorsay:

But it’s OK if sometimes we’re out of balance because the Universe goes on whether we’re along for the ride or not. Nothing humanity can do will disrupt the perfect balance of the Universe. We are not that powerful. Even though our choices can throw certain elements like climate species survival land and water ecology out of whack nothing we can do will throw off the beauty of the Universe itself.

I appreciate the motivation behind this poem but, honestly, my first reaction was: knowing the Universe will outlast our globally-warmed, nuclear-weapon-destroyed, raped-to-the-point-of-sterility little planet is not a whole lot of comfort. Maybe I just need to get out and look at the stars more often but I live in a city and it was snowing all day so there weren’t any to see. But maybe there is more here . . .

I’m not really sure it is relevant, but the first thing I thought of was the following from Alan Watts’ Myth and Religion where he is talking about the Hindu and Buddhist concept that “everybody is a manifestation of the divine, playing this game and that game. Your not knowing it, if you do not know it, is part of the game. It makes it all the more fun.” Watts says:

I would say to those among you who are the most ignorant, unspiritual, and stuffy, Congratulations! You are so lost in the game you do not even know where you stand, and are taking a gorgeous risk. Because of you we might even blow up the planet, and how close are we going to get with that one? In the same way as that car racer watches the speedometer needle going up, up, and up, there are people feeling more and more self-righteously determined that good shall prevail in the world, all the while watching that needle of world tension go up. It is getting hotter and hotter and hotter, and finally we may all go out in a blaze of glory. When the dust settles they will say, “That was quite a dream we have just woken up from. What shall we do next?”

Talk about non-attachment to outcome! But how do you get there??? That seems to be the question I’m asking a lot these days. I can see — off in the distance, across the chasm — an alternative viewpoint, one that seems like it will actually work for me (unlike Fundamental Christianity) but the bridge is out, my GPS is broken and it’s the longest, moonless night of the year. So, for now, I’m walking around in circles waiting for sunrise.

According to the psychological standpoint man cannot get outside his own psyche. All experience is therefore psychic experience. This means that it is impossible, experientially, to distinguish between God and the God-image in the psyche.

Edward F. Edinger
The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man

The Bible, it seems to me, (and especially the O.T.) is all about how God relates to people. And it was recorded by those people to whom God was relating. So, we end up with several layers of mediation: God — absolute truth, unchanging, eternal — interacts with people who mediate this interaction through their psyches — including all their biases, prejudices, preconceptions — and then record this interaction. We then have other people (like you and me) reading about those interactions but we are mediating what we read through our own psyches — including all our biases, prejudices, preconceptions — to arrive at “God” which is really just the God-image in our own psyches (reflected from the God-image in the Biblical writer’s psyches). And some people have the nerve to say that this IS God.

Suppose my daughter, in a few years, starts writing about me in a journal. Then, 20 years later, you read this journal. How close will the picture you have of me be to the “real” me? Now think about someone reading this journal in 2000 or 4000 years! Unlike you, they will have almost nothing in common with my daughter — culturally, socially, technologically. How close will their picture of me be to the “real” me? For them to say that they know me, in any definition of the word, seems almost ludicrous.

Polarized sunglasses work by letting through light that is aligned in only one direction. This acts to reduce the number of photons getting through and therefore reduce the intensity of the light. Polarized sunglasses work very well to reduce the intensity of light being reflected off (and therefore polarized by) a lake or highway. Polarized sunglasses also work very well to reduce the intensity of God and that’s exactly what religion does. As Carl Jung said, “One of the main functions of formalized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.” After all, Moses could only see the fleeting arse end of God without being instantly killed and just that tiny peek was enough to make him glow.

Another interesting aspect of this analogy is the effect of holding two polarized lenses with one in front of the other and then rotate one of them 90°. What happens? Everything goes black! This is because the first lens is letting light through that is only vertically polarized whereas the second is letting light through that is only horizontally polarized (or vice-versa). The result is nothing gets past them both — they are mutually exclusive. Kind of like Christianity and Islam, for example. The trick is to realize that they are both looking at the same sun but have selected different aspects of that sun while the other aspects have been removed for our own protection.

Just a thought …

I was watching The Incredibles (again) and after Bob Parr throws his boss through several walls (at least they were “modern” drywall — and poorly made at that because the studs appear to be on 10 foot centers or so — and not the plaster and lathe or, worse, the plaster and metal mesh that we had to deal with in our home) he talks to Rick Dicker at the hospital.

Bob: I’m fired, aren’t I.
Rick: Oh, do you think?
Bob: What can I say, Rick?
Rick: Nothing you haven’t said before.
Bob: Someone was in trouble.
Rick: Someone’s always in trouble.
Bob: I had to do something.
Rick: Yeah. Every time you say those words it means a month and a half of trouble for me, Bob. It means hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars.

As Mr. Incredible, Bob could not help but help those in need. Even when that meant someone else could/would get hurt. It seems that the only criteria was who was in more immediate danger. For example, when Incrediboy was leaving the bank with the bomb on his cape, Mr Incredible allowed Bomb Voyage to escape in order to save Incrediboy even though allowing Bomb Voyage to escape would most likely result in more danger to the public. But there really was no “right” answer; in either case, someone gets hurt.

Perhaps this is the same quandary in which God is embroiled? Perhaps God is acting — all over the place and in many situations — for the good. But there are some situations where someone is going to get hurt no matter what God does. And those situations are the “evil” we see in the world. Now, this is just a thought and not fully-reasoned and I may change my mind tomorrow. It just struck me as a similar situation.

We can cite countless situations where there are multiple possible actions to take but we don’t see a single one in which someone does not get hurt. And so we pick one or the other based on some reasoning or other. And people get hurt and we get blamed. This is so common that we often don’t even notice it. There must be some implied (at least I’ve never heard anyone say it) idea that God would be able to take some action in which no one gets hurt. But is that really so rational? I don’t think so. Perhaps, if God miraculously intervened with his uber-human omnipotence then there may be solutions to some of these situations. But I think a more rational approach is to realize there are no-win situations, no matter how incredible you are!

But, like I said … Just a thought.

One of my daughter’s favorite movies is The Incredibles. Since I work at home and watch her most of the time, it’s very convenient that I, too, enjoy this movie because we watch it over and over and over. I’ve started paying attention to some of the dialog and there are some very good lines. One is when Helen Parr, aka Elastigirl, visits Edna to see the new supersuits she made. Helen is unaware of everything which precipitated Edna’s making the suits and so is totally lost as Edna starts talking about them. Edna then says:

Yes, words are useless! Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. Too much of it, darling. Too much. That is why I show you my work. That is why you are here.

Thomas Merton, talks about the same thing in Echoing Silence:

True communication on the deepest level is more than a simple sharing of ideas, of conceptual knowledge, or formulated truth. The kind of communication that is necessary on this deep level must also be “communion” beyond the level of words, a communion in authentic experience which is shared not only on a “preverbal” level but also on a “post-verbal” level.

The “preverbal” level is that of the unspoken and indefinable “preparation,” “the predisposition” of the mind and heart, necessary for all “monastic” experience whatever.

Now, perhaps I’m stretching the point, but I would consider some religious experiences — the Eucharist, for example — to be “monastic” experiences since these are reflective, contemplative, personal, yet shared and participatory. Merton continues (with emphasis added):

This demands among other things a “freedom from automatisms and routines,” and candid liberation from external social dictates, from conventions, limitations, and mechanisms which restrict understanding and inhibit experience of the new, the unexpected. The monk who is to communicate on the level that interests us here must be not merely a punctilious observer of external traditions, but a living example of traditional and interior realization. He must be wide open to life and to new experience because he has fully utilized his own tradition and gone beyond it. This will permit him to meet a [disciple] of another, apparently remote and alien tradition, and find a common ground of verbal understanding with him. The “post-verbal” level will then, at least ideally, be that on which they both meet beyond their own words and their own understanding in the silence of an ultimate experience which might conceivably not have occurred if they had not met and spoken. This I would call “communion.” I think it is something that the deepest ground of our being cries out for, and it is something for which a lifetime of striving would not be enough.

Language is limiting. Language is controlling. Edna was unable to describe to Helen the experience and wonder of making the supersuits because there was no common ground of understanding. Helen might as well have been talking a different language altogether. Her biases and assumptions did not allow her to understand. It didn’t fit into her mental model of the world. But that does not mean that Edna’s experiences were invalid or wrong or false. There was no language that could bridge the two world-views. But the experience itself could.

And this is exactly where the trouble lies in religions. Looking at the words, it may seem, for example, Islam and Christianity are mutually exclusive. And so we use these incompatible words as dividers between the two. We demand that they say the right words about their experiences of their God. That they describe their God with just the right adjectives — the same adjectives that we use to describe our God: “God cannot be God unless God is a Triune God, eternally existing in three persons …” Only then, is their experience of their God “correct.” Furthermore, if they don’t use the correct verbiage then they are heretics and eternally damned and sometimes worse.

But let’s take the very trite example of two people witnessing an event taking place in this physical world. You will get different stories, different explanations, different emphasis. In short, incompatible, mutually exclusive words. In fact, this very idea is often used to defend the Gospels. Just look at the resurrection story and see how many “different” accounts there are and how these “different” accounts for merged.

So, if we cannot agree on the words to describe an event in this physical world, how much less can we agree on the words to describe the ineffable, numinous experience of God?? And how can we hold others at fault for using their own words which make sense to them but not us? The key is to go beyond our own traditions and meet in non-verbal communion.

Thomas Merton, in Echoing Silence, writes:

Naturally, while sometimes you are very quiet and happy because God is very obviously with you, with a presence & blessedness you never imagined possible, at other times this is not so. Then you try to pray or think of Christ and your mind instead of filling with peace, fills with slogans, He-she jokes, movies so bad you had forgotten them by the self-protective work of your own subconscious mind. You think of million dollar advertising ideas, and this makes you very ashamed, and bored, & disgusted. This is a trial common to our life, & has good effects, one of the principal of which is to make you love God not only for His obvious gifts, but realizing clearly, by His apparent absence, how infinitely preferable He is to everything else. That this absence is only apparent is clear from St. John of the Cross, and all the others, & everybody here knows it perfectly well, and really, you feel bad some days, but it is nothing to the bad days you had outside, in the world.

This really stopped in my tracks when I read this: “how infinitely preferable He is to everything else.” According to Merton it’s not a tough decision with God coming in at 51%. It’s a hands down victory. God is infinitely preferable to everything else!! How many of us can say that? I can’t. If we saw God as infinitely preferable to a satisfying job, fashion, a new romance, football, financial security, sex, coffee, the latest high-tech gadget, then Jesus’ call to sell our possessions, leave our families, and suffer injury & injustice would be a no-brainer.

Then Merton says that the bad days when God seems absent are “nothing to the bad days you had outside, in the world.” That’s another tough one. If I think about the worst days of my life, I’m not sure that the days I was pining for God would make the list. Now, I had bad days where God was absent. Believe you me. I remember begging God, pleading with him to make himself known to me. He didn’t and eventually I served him with divorce papers. But were those the worst days I’ve experienced? I don’t think so.

Then Merton continues:

Also, as soon as this is done with, your mind unexpectedly fills up with the presence of God twice as real and twice as holy as before. For another result of these temptations is to make you very docile, very detached from your own opinions and judgments & way of doing things, and then you rely on God for the smallest things, for every thing. And this is peace, because God gives everybody everything, & the only reason each person doesn’t have more is that he gets in God’s way, trying to get things with our own dumb will.

Docile and detached from our own opinions and judgments. Hmmmmm. In how many people do I see this? It seems to me that the greatest self-proclaimed Christians are some of the most opinionated and judgmental people around. And how many of us rely on God for every thing? I know I don’t. Hell, if I relied on God for every thing I’d quit my job and blog 16 hours a day. Instead we got to get up and make the donuts. Money doesn’t grow on trees. The car ain’t gonna fix itself.

But can you imagine relying on God for every thing? Just think about that. That’s got to be like being a kid on summer vacation again. Mom makes your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No job. No school. Dad buys your clothes. You get driven everywhere. All you have to do is play and watch TV. If that’s not peace, I don’t know what is. But the trick is really and truly relying on someone else. For every thing. For most of us, our control-freak nature takes over and tries to do God’s job. Then all we end up doing is worrying and all that ends up doing us giving us heartburn, insomnia, and ulcers.

Oh, to have faith. Life would be so much easier!

… unless we’re already there and just don’t know it.

It seems to me that there is a disconnect in salvation. If we are totally depraved and can do nothing good without God then how can we receive the gift of God’s son? How can we, as sinners, bring ourselves to realize that we even need God let alone bring ourselves to find God? Through the urging of the Holy Spirit? I think not because the Holy Spirit needs to appeal to something in us which can know God and we in our sinful state cannot.

By way of (obviously imperfect, as all examples are) example, let’s say that I am trying to get Joe, who has been blind from birth, to understand the color red. He has been separated from color all his life (born color-depraved, so to speak) and so has nothing within himself with which he can begin to understand color. No matter how hard I press and explain and urge him to understand the color red, it isn’t going to happen. Any understanding of the color red at which Joe does arrive will, obviously and necessarily, be extremely different from the understanding that I have.

Isn’t that the predicament we are in? If we are 100% separated from God and always have been (and I’m talking about each person and not “man” and “woman” as created by God) then there is no way we are going to understand anything about God no matter how hard the Holy Spirit urges. Unless there us a bit of God in us — a seed or a kernel — then there is no way we can understand our need of God’s salvation and no way we can receive it. This reminds me of something C.G. Jung said:

For it is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.

We all have a “divine life” in us. We all have the image of God within. Sometimes that image is buried quite deeply and we have absolutely no recollection of it but it’s there. It has to be there in order for the Holy Spirit to work. So we are not given the image of God when we are “saved” but that (perhaps tiny) part of us that already is the image of God is brought to our attention.

Of all the miracles in the gospels, there are only six where Jesus says “Your faith has made you well” (or something like that). What did Jesus mean by this rarely spoken phrase? Something about the people involved in these miracles was special, different from the rest.

I can imagine that the attitude of most of the people whom Jesus healed was similar to my attitude when I take Excedrin for a headache. It worked last time and the time before that and the time before that. It’ll work this time, too. I mean, when you see a man healing person after person of affliction after affliction day after day, how hard is it to believe that if you ask him to heal you he will be able to? Most of the people were in it for the physical healing and that’s it. They simply believed that this man called Jesus was able to heal. Now, that’s not to say that this type of healing is not life-altering. If I had been blind since birth or if I had just died and Jesus healed me, I’d be fairly likely to follow him around town as a convert to whatever he was teaching. Healing can be life changing, no doubt. But of the people whose faith was instrumental in their healing, not one of them is on record as becoming a devoted follower of Jesus.

The one miracle of the six that I find most interesting was also found most interesting by 75% of the gospel writers. (I also find it very interesting that John does not record any of these six miracles nor does he record Jesus ever saying “Your faith has made you well.”) The miracle to which I refer is the healing of the woman with the hemorrhage (Matthew 9:20-22, Mark 5:24-34, Luke 8:42-48). To paraphrase, a woman who has been afflicted with an incurable hemorrhage for 12 years gets it into her head that if she merely touches Jesus’ clothes that she would be healed. I find this fascinating because this was not Jesus’ regular modus operandi. The laying on of hands was the usual healing method. Furthermore, this woman was not going to ask Jesus if she could touch his clothes — she was just going to do it. Now, the moment she decides to put her plan into action seems a most inopportune time. A crowd is around Jesus, pressing against him, so much so that no could figure out who it was that had touched him. So, imagine a woman who was most likely rather frail from being sick for 12 years pushing her way through a crowd, getting stepped on, elbowed in the ribs, pushed and bumped, all in order to do something she had never seen done before but which she is convinced will heal her. Why did she not just ask Jesus to heal her? Why did she choose that particular time? Who knows. All we know is that it worked!

But let’s look at how it worked. Jesus did not touch her. Jesus did not give his healing power to her. Instead, he felt that his power had gone out of him. Jesus didn’t give — she took — his power. Jesus, in this case, was more of a medium than a source of power. This woman transformed herself with God’s power and used Jesus as the conduit or medium to take that power. I think this particular miracle is the most illustrative of the phrase “your faith has made you well.” This was all her. Jesus was more of a bystander in this one. Yes, of course, it was his power that healed her and it was her touching his clothes that healed her and he knew all along who had touched him. But she did this with no precedent for her method and no sane reason to think it would work.

And so, I think this is what Jesus meant by faith. It’s not believing that something you’ve seen happen before will happen again. It’s not believing that Jesus has the power to heal physical afflictions — of course he does. It’s not believing that Jesus can use that power to heal — of course he can. That’s all belief and not faith — I believe that Excedrin will help my headaches. Faith is knowing that the power Jesus had is available to you for the taking and can transform your life.

This woman was constantly bleeding — her life-force had been ebbing away for 12 years. She needed to be transformed in order regain her life and her vitality and she knew exactly how to effect that transformation. This woman was going to touch Jesus’ clothes, be healed, and leave! She wasn’t planning on sticking around. Jesus, himself, was not what was important to her. The power of Jesus was what she wanted. The faith that made her well was not faith in Jesus but the faith that this transformation was possible; the faith that this mundane, life-force-sucking world is not all there is.

Does a single-ended eternity make sense? Our soul is eternal but from here on out. That’s not really eternal, is it?

Now, I’ve never heard anyone preach on where, exactly, our souls come from, but I would guess that most would say that God gives us our soul at conception or birth or sometime in there. That’s what makes us “human.” But where did God get that soul to give to us? Did he create it for me as I was being conceived or born or sometime in there?

Now, this soul of mine — as long as I’m on the “right” side of the fence and the “right” side of Jesus’ body at the Great J-Day — will live forever in God’s presence. But every single thing God has created — plants, animals, stars, galaxies, etc. — dies. Every single thing that does not die on its own will be destroyed when God creates the new heaven and new earth. So, if our souls were created for us, why will they not also be destroyed?

What if, as Eckhart says, our souls — or whatever you want to call our essential essence or being — has always and always will exist?

… whereby man may come most closely to God and wherein he may once more become like the original image as he was in God when there was yet no distinction between God and himself before God produced creatures.

Blessed are the pure in heart who leave everything to God now as they did before ever they existed.

God has no before nor after. God is neither this nor that.God is perfect simplicity. Prior to creatures, in the eternal now, I have played before the Father in his eternal stillness.

That is the real effect of original sin — separating us from God. But if I was born in sin and my soul was created when I was born then “I” have never known anything but separation from God. So, why do I have the urge to repair that separation? Why do I crave something I’ve never had and could never possibly understand?

Being born in sin means that my soul, which was and always had been with God, is now separated from God. And that’s why the Holy Spirit (as I talked about in my previous post) can work in us and remind us of what it was like being not separated from God. We can only be reminded of something we once new.

Found a quote from The Orthodox Faith by John of Damascus on The Fire and the Rose:

The Son is image of the Father, and image of the Son is the Spirit, through whom the Christ dwelling in man gives it to him to be to the image of God.

So, we can’t become the image of God without the Holy Spirit? But I thought we were created in the image of God. There’s no becoming involved.

Genesis 1:27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Genesis 9:6: Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.

In Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, D.T. Suzuki writes:

Indeed, we are all apt to forget that every one of us is Buddha himself. In the Christian way of saying, this means that we are all made in the likeness of God, or in Eckhart’s words, that “God’s is-ness is my is-ness and neither more nor less.”

We already are the image of God so what does the Holy Spirit have to do? The Holy Spirit is the reminder of things we’ve forgotten because (again from Mysticism)

… the sense of opposites is dominating your consciousness. The idea of participation or empathy is an intellectual interpretation of the primary experience, while as far as the experience itself is concerned, there is no room for any sort of dichotomy. The intellect, however, obtrudes itself and breaks up the experience in order to make it amenable to intellectual treatment, which means a discrimination or bifurcation. The original feeling of identity is then lost and intellect is allowed to have its characteristic way of creaking up reality into pieces. Participation or empathy is the result of inellectualization.

. . .

It is our eating the forbidden fruit of knowledge which has resulted in our constant habit of intellectualizing. But we have never forgotten, mythologically speaking, the original abode of innocence: that is to say, even when we are given over to intellection and to the abstract way of thinking, we are always conscious, however dimly, of something left behind and not appearing on the chart of well-schematized analysis. This “something” is no other than the primary experience of reality in its suchness or is-ness …

The Holy Spirit does not enable us to become the image of God but, rather, is the constant reminder that we already are the image of God. If we allow the Holy Spirit to work in our lives, then we can realize this a-rational identity. A-rational because it does not come from our intellect. We cannot think our way into the image of God. We must experience it in a raw, unprocessed manner.