The Harried Mystic

Does God exist?

This question is asked incessantly and treated as if it demands a clear and definitive response in our technocentric and scientific culture. Problem is: It is the wrong question. It betrays on its face a binary or two-dimensional thought process unworthy of the cognitive sophistication reached in the evolution of mind. To posit the binary is to engage an either/or thought process: the answer requested must be either yes or no.

The question is tantamount to my asking: Does love exist? Does hope exist? Does infinity exist? Yes or no?

The premise in each case is that one should marshal the evidence before us to make an argument one way or the other. Such a premise arrogantly dismisses the more complex universe of human experience, the intuitive function of Mind, and the exquisite entanglements and uncertainties of Being. So, what is a better question more worthy of the evolved human capacity to wonder and advance a constructive inquiry?

What is God? What is love? What is infinity and how is it that we can opine about it as we ourselves are bounded by finite sensory experience? Alternatively, we might ask: Why is it that we muse about such extraordinary things that depart from our tangible experience base, or the mundane, where we can draw a clear line of sight between knowing and human evolutionary advantage?

First Thoughts

Jesus said: “Be again as little children.” He didn’t say: Be childish! So, I ask – what is it that young children possess before going to school that emerges from them innately? It is wonder. A child from the ages of four years on asks: why? She asks it to the point of frustrated parents who are unable and/or unwilling to be similarly inspired. In fact, this is the birth of the scientific and theological mindset. It emerges without prompting.

Cognitive scientists have amassed considerable evidence, in fact, that children are intuitive theists. In having conversations with imaginary friends, they demonstrate a capacity for abstraction. Early on, they see the world as full of inspired wonder; they sense the presence of first causes and actively hypothesize. They are mythmakers and derive joy from doing so.

This intuitive function transcends evolutionary value. It marks the human condition as innately “theistic”; sensing a sacred dimension, a dimension of high “magic,” ultimate explanation, and source of Being and meaningfulness.

Young children are also teleological. This function looks to end explanations with a penchant for infinite regress; pealing each layer back, again and again, to reveal ever more wonder to explore. So, in looking at the question, “what is God,” we arrive at the heart of the matter. It is in the nature of being human to be teleological: to seek meaning, to know (episteme), to explore. This is the pursuit, however, of more than simple analytic knowledge.

We thirst for wisdom: seeing beyond what our faculties allow us to clearly see. The march of science is a testament to this uniquely human function. We advance methods to see ever more deeply: to go ever farther in reaching into the universes of the very large and the very small. We are undeterred by our own sensory limitations. We invent and press on and dive many fathoms deep only to reveal fathoms deeper we have yet to reach.

Egyptian mythmakers posited a divine realm and populated it with constructs: dressed it up so that the ineffable was accessible to imagination. At the same time, they invented mathematics. So, too, did the Mayans, the ancient Greeks, and the House of Islam (the first source of Algebra). Mathematics has been often referred to as inexplicably useful and prescient. From the squiggles on a page there repeatedly arose hypothesized realities that decades later are found experimentally to exist. How is it that the human imagination can access such truths?

God is alpha and omega, the beginning and endpoints of a journey into the realms of the infinite in search of the ultimate telos: wisdom and fulfilled meaning. We are generators of meaning and the dress we give it surely is cultural and wholly cognitive-emotional. Our sense of Spirit nonetheless represents a transcendent function that is also built into our wiring.

All cultures, without exception, have a different construct set to define “the sacred” and rites and rituals that are designed to cause us to open our minds and hearts to infinite wonder and a grander scheme of meaningfulness. All children, also without exception, unless they are somehow neuro-compromised, project onto the natural world the operations of the transcendent function.

So, what is God? A lifetime of poetry would not exhaust the meaning yet, at its center, God is the living experience of and yearning for transcendent love.

As persons, we can only experience personally. Objectivity is, in fact, an illusion. Even the physicist acknowledges that how we look at things and study them changes the phenomena we study. So, similarly, we adorn the experience of the sacred with our constructs and we engage the mysteries through devotion, reason and intuition.

We open ourselves to the infinite around us and come to recognize that it is in us as much as around us. As the ancient alchemists expressed it: “As above, so it is below.” In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, we read: “When you make the two one and the inner as the outer and the above as the below, and replace and eye with an eye, then you will know.”

For children, God is dressed in stories suited to their age. As we grow older, we may still cling to these stories as a means of simplifying and comforting ourselves, or we may dispense with them altogether. Either way, it does nothing to change the subject of our musings. We feel a tug toward transcendence as we navigate the world where the immanent, the now, is oppressively smothering: information teems around us like a swarm of mosquitoes biting us and distracting us from the transcendent. We have quickly grown accustomed to “googling it” or “asking Siri”, or “ Alexa,” and then getting an instant reply. For this reason, the mystery is, in essence, cruciform: we attend to the right and the left (i.e., the horizontal, here and now) while needing to balance that with attention to the vertical (the there and then): i.e., immanence in transcendence.

In mystical Christianity, all constructs fall away at the zenith. We are left then with raw transcendence – unadorned, unfiltered. This represents the stage of spiritual practice called “Unification”. Contemplation precedes it and most of us never reach this last stage. We are, after all, wired for language and imagery. Therefore, use of language and imagery is the path we must follow to truly enter the advanced stages in the spiritual life. Yes, we may reach an honorable point in the evolution of our own consciousness when we can dispense with all constructs, but we must necessarily return to them to reflect on our experience, memorialize it, and share it with others.

The naked, construct-free experience is like the difference between “falling in love” and the experience of a mature and abiding love. When first we meet a partner to whom we are drawn, we feel excitement. It is so very special. It crowds out all other things. Nothing is as important. We may even forget to eat.

Then, after years of being in a relationship, that first passion and that sensorial high wane and we settle back into a rhythm. We then choose to continue, hopefully over the course of a lifetime together, to plumb the depths of one another’s being. Assuming we reach the depths of authentic loving, we then give voice to it at times and we find ourselves resorting to poetic language and metaphor. The heart aroused breaks into psalmody.

We reach a point where our myths about one another fall away and are replaced instead with celebration of each other’s presence that surcharges our lives and defines them in new ways. Or, we long so for the titillations of those early days and cheat on one another or decide to separate. One cannot force this evolution and there is no pretending.

Just so is our relationship with the “sacred” and the transcendent. It cannot be faked, forced, or accelerated without doing the work; a discipline that brings one often to the threshold between finite and infinite, immanent and transcendent, Self-attending and Self-emptying only to be followed with regression to the “I-It” objectifying state, referred to by Martin Buber, in a repeating cycle.

Debates about God’s existence, then, miss the point entirely. More often than not, these debates revolve around one person’s beliefs in God dressed up in a particular, idiosyncratic way and another person’s sense that this belief is a throw- back to primitive thinking, rejecting the metaphors and the constructs and, way too often, the entire person. Such is the very basis for hate crimes and conflict and fears of the other made even more pronounce when the “other” looks different as well.

Indeed, some religiosity is neurotically inspired and accepts the metaphor as the actual reality.  People project constantly and our fears drive us to make certain assumptions and dress up that which we do not understand in ways that make it easier to navigate our discomfort with uncertainties. These needs are to be respected. Having said that, we can appreciate, at the same time, that doing battle over different symbolic representations and metaphorical systems is like rejecting a book because its cover repulses us.

These endless atheist-theist confrontations are worth sociological study as responses to fear and anxiety and the pressing need to have ostensibly simple answers, but they are theologically uninteresting and fail to really look seriously and respectfully at the transcendent function in Man.  Science and theology have more in common than they are different.

Science asks why, and so does Theology. Science develops new tools for measuring phenomenon,  and so does theology (though the tools are categorically different and, in the case of Theology, phenomenological). Science seeks wisdom (i.e. more than knowledge of this and that, but understanding the relationships between this and that: the whole system) and so does theology.

Science is wonder supported by technology-mediated imagination and empirical methods. Theology is wonder supported by hermeneutically-mediated imagination and contemplative/experiential exercises and rituals. Both are teleological and Aristotelian in character,  seeking to understand being and becoming at the deepest levels. Both are also true, at their best,  to the intuitive theism of all children: the transcendent function for which there is ample evidence.

That evidence and the thinking that is emerging from the vibrant dialogue between science and theology are the adventures in consciousness that the following musings explore. Let us embrace the wonder and celebrate it by what humans do so well.

Let us ask what and why and focus on that which all systems of thought are designed to intimate and reveal: wisdom. For me, this is the meaning of “prayerful scholarship”: a scholarship that does not devolve into an arrogance of methods and constructs but seeks the truth that lies within, among and,certainly, well beyond them. This is mature, post-modern theism and, exactly in the same way, it is mature post-modern science. The gift for doing so, learning to live in the question rather than desperately searching for the one simple answer, is what Aristotle called  “ eudemonia”: true happiness, joy and contentment.

© Br. Anton, TSSF  & The Harried Mystic, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.