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Glimpses of God
And Other Essays
Paul O. Ingram
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eBook - ePub
Glimpses of God
And Other Essays
Paul O. Ingram
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Glimpses of God: And Other Essays is a collection of theological reflections on seventeen interrelated subjects written by a historian of religion inspired by the work of Alfred North Whitehead and the process theological vision of John B. Cobb Jr. Each essay has its own distinctive topic while being interdependent with the other seventeen essays.
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Théologie1
Writing about Writing about God
I love to write because, as my friend Jack Cady used to say, âYou donât know a thing until you write it down.â Jack was one of the best contemporary American novelists I have read, although he never got that much attention beyond the Seattle literary scene, at least as far as I know.1 Writing forces us to put into words that can never fully capture our experiences of the world, of reality, of Godâhowever you name itâand yet somehow brings these realities into partial conscious awareness. We donât know what a thing is until we label it with words while, if we are wise, knowing that the words we use for labeling are always symbolic. Symbols are pointers not to be confused with the thing or event to which they point. Cling to a pointer, you only have the pointer; clinging to a pointer covers that to which it points with a verbal shroud of unknowing.
This is particularly true with God talk, but I also suspect it is equally true with scientific talk as well, including mathematical language. It seems that whenever we write or speak we eventually crash headlong into the âlanguage of unsaying,â as Michael Sells phrased it when he described the paradoxes of mystical theology.2 All I know after writing seventeen books and seventy or so essays is that I have never been able to completely say what I wanted to say. We swim in a âcloud of unknowing,â and maybe thatâs the point of entry into the way things really are. The mystics of all religious Ways must be on to something. But Iâm still trying to get beyond dog paddling.
I have just finished reading âThe Eternal Present: Slow Knowledge and the Renewal of Time,â by Douglas E. Christie, and I must say that it was a good contemplative read.3 Christieâs argument is that prayer is ultimately an unfolding, palpable sense of divine presence that originates in the realization of what we already know, of what is already within us. This conclusion is consistent with the testimony of male and female recluses that dot the early history of Christianity. It is also a major point of Thomas Mertonâs views of contemplative prayer. But we have to give it time, if we really want prayer. We must slow down the tempo of our lives and create time to listen, which great writers actually do. As we develop skill in simply listeningâto the sounds of nature, water breaking on a beach, the voices of human beings engaged in conversation, the sounds and movements of a liturgyâwe gradually discover that we have never been separated from God, the human beings in our lives, the creatures of the Earth, indeed even the universe itself, which the Prologue to the Gospel of John describes as incarnate within God. So I spend time writing as a contemplative method for figuring out what it all means.
But I must confess that Iâve never come close to this realization even as I would like to. But once on a beach in front of my son-in-lawâs family cabin on Fox Spit on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, I think I experienced something of knowing that nothing is ever separated from God as I listened to the waves pushed by the wind into high tide on the beach. My waking sense of separateness from everything gradually melted away (but not completely) and there was only the sound of waves blowing over everything, the sounds of waves lapping on the beach, and moon glow painting everything silver. Prayer, like meditation in Buddhism, is simply focused attention on our experiences, but without the illusion that we own what we experienceâa kind of letting go that allows whatever God is or is not to rush into consciousness. And the wonderful thingâwe discover that Godâs presence, or the Buddha Nature if one is Buddhist, has always been part of who we are. Prayer doesnât get us what we think we do not have; it allows what we already have to reveal itself to us and perhaps to others in often profoundly unexpected ways.
One of these âunexpected waysâ led to the writing of my book, Living Without a Why.4 The phrase âliving without a whyâ was borrowed with gratitude from Marguerite Poreteâs Mirror of Simple Souls.5 For writing and circulating this book she was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310. Her crime was âheresy,â which in her case meant criticizing the male-dominated system of Medieval sacramental and ecclesiastical theology. âLiving without a whyâ was her way of describing the meaning of grace as a movement initiated by God to live without care or concern about achieving anything through prayer, the sacraments, confession, or monastic disciplinesâall of which she regulated to âHoly Church the Littleâ that transformed Christians of her day into âmerchants.â According to her way of looking at things, faith is something like Christian âactionless actionâ (wu-wei in Daoist tradition). Of course, she was killed by âchurchmenâ for âheresy,â but I think more so because she wrote a book and taught her ideas to anyone who would listenâroles her society reserved for men. Meister Eckhart taught fairly similar ideas, but they were merely âcondemned. He was not burned at the stake. âLiving without a whyâ is also fairly similar to what Luther meant by grace, but not identical. I suspect some of Margueriteâs âliving without a whyâ got into Lutherâs head via Meister Eckhart, whom he encountered during his years as an Augustinian friar. Anyway, her book has become an object of meditation for me.
The upshot of âliving without a whyâ is that being mindful, meaning totally focused on the present without mental or emotional distractions is incredibly difficult to write about. Particularly when one is one surrounded by blaring television noise turned up to nine located on both sides of my study. âEntering the silence,â as Thomas Merton described contemplative prayer, is difficult beyond measure.6 At least for me. Even when I am engulfed in solitude, the emotional and mental clutter in my mind kicks me back into the distractions of the day: obligations, taking my wife, Gena, to the store and supervising my grandson David, both of whom I love beyond measureâand the conventional list of duties goes on. The problem is me. The sages of all the worldâs religious Ways teach that âSilenceââone of the âninety-nine beautiful names of Godâ in the Qurâanâis incarnated in the midst of the noise of our lives, gracefully creating out of the mess humans make of this world a harmony that is greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes I faintly hear the Silence within the noise of my life, mostly when I stop and pause to reflect how lucky I am to be connected with the persons I love, for whom I perform whatever obligations may interrupt my feeble attempts to be still and attentive, and faintly experience what the Cloud of Unknowing refers to as âprayer without ceasing.â7 But maybe paying attentions to obligations is a form of mindfulness, a form of prayer.
Silence has taught me that âRealityââthe way things really are as opposed to the way we wish or hope things areâis more than anyone can write about. Reality transcends us, and we do well to be ever mindful of this fact even as we marvel at its richness. Each of us at best has a reach that exceeds our grasp; a partial vision only. This seems to me the case at every level of verbal description: in scientific truth, in prose, in poetry, in scripture, and theological reflection. While alive we can only see through a glass darkly and hope with St. Paul that in some future time, we will be able to see âface to face.â Many religious people think otherwise because they suppose religious truth, as they know it from doctrinal formulations they have learned, are exempt from the inherently limited nature of human language. But yet it helps to recognize that while reality always transcends our apprehending of it, our apprehending also transcends our ability to express it in words.
This is clearly the conclusion of Catherine Kellerâs Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement.8 She is one of John B. Cobbâs students, as am I, and a process-feminist theologian who describes apophatic mystical theologyânegative theology of unsayingâas a process theology of entanglement within the Unknown. Read through the lenses of Whiteheadian process philosophy, the anonymous English author of the Cloud of Unknowing literally âdeconstructsâ all affirmative kataphatic labels for God and all apophatic declarations of unsaying that deconstruct kataphatic labels. The only thing left is that theological ideas, models, statements, symbols, iconsâare metaphors that say more about human relationships and our relationships with the entirety of nature than about God.
Which is not to say that theological metaphors are useless or do not sometimes disclose how we are entangled with every thing and event in the world and with Godâaccording to Whiteheadâs ontological principle as well as contemporary quantum physicsâbut never in the same way from moment to moment of space-time. To the degree we do not cling to theological constructions, to that degree we experience interdependence with all things past and present as we anticipate the future. All metaphors point to that which must sooner or later be left unsaid. Metaphors are symbolic pointers. Cling to a pointer, you have the pointer and over time what is pointed at recedes into a Cloud of Unknowing. Which is why theological reflection is a...