In Catholic circles the term “hidden life” usually refers to the life of someone like a Carthusian monk or a cloistered nun. Basically these people leave normal social existence and enter into a way of life that is totally oriented to the Divine Reality (at least so it is said), and their life is formally and institutionally supported by the Church. They become “unknown” as it were in the larger social world, only known by their families and maybe some close friends. It can be a profoundly holy life—and I have seen it in the eyes of a Carthusian lay brother who had that smile that Ramana Maharshi had that seemed to emanate from a transcendent place; but that term “hidden” has a lot more packed in it than that.

I find that term “hidden life” very fascinating. It can take on a variety of colorations and a whole panoply of embodiments. However, my point is that, whatever be its concrete “manifestation”(and here we already encounter our first paradox for how can something “hidden” be “manifest”), it is a very important element of anyone’s spiritual life if they are serious about the Reality of God. Truly it can even be said that the “hidden life” is “what it’s all about”!

If we don’t freeze our view of the hidden life on the two institutional figures above, we will see a remarkable range of embodiments of this “hiddenness.” Consider within the Catholic tradition the example of a Joseph Benedict Labre who was rejected by all monastic groups and lived as a beggar in the streets of Rome; consider the Zen master who left his monastery and lived as a tea peddler in the streets of Kyoto; consider the Sufi dervish whose poverty and rags conceals his intimacy with God, or conversely the Sufi who is ensconced in a palace but lets not one possession take hold of his soul. Consider the many stories in Jewish mysticism of the hidden zaddik who might be a butcher or a shoemaker, etc. Consider the unknown hermits who populate various landscapes and are totally unknown by any institution and in fact may not even be able to explain their way of life to anyone. And so on, and so on. Do we detect a certain trajectory and a certain dynamic in this “hiddenness”? Perhaps a few words from Abhishiktananda will help us even more–here he has been discussing the luminous figure of Ramana Maharshi (and someone like St. Francis) whose luminosity is an exception and paradoxically not only not the sign of his holiness but actually hiding the essence of his holinesss; and so this should not fool us into thinking that this is how God works among us and within us:

“Most of the greatest [holy people] he keeps hidden in his ‘secret garden’, allowing no one even to guess the secret of their intimacy with him. An English monk can wander through India ‘in search of a yogi’, going from pilgrimage to pilgrimage, from ashram to ashram, questioning to right and left …then come back home and publicize his disappointment. He will in fact have met only those whose reputations have been blown up by propaganda or who confidently introduce themselves as saviours of mankind. India certainly is not without other souls as great as was Ramana Maharshi, but their greatness generally goes unsuspected, especially when they are met by chance by foreigners or by those who are merely curious. Very often these great souls escape to the outward solitude of forests and mountains in order to conserve the solitude within–always supposing, that is, that they have not chosen to hide themselves more surely still in the midst of the crowd.”

First of all, in order to clarify something that Abhishiktananda mixes up a bit, it is good to distinguish the “hiddenness” that we choose as it were, like entering a monastery or some other choice; and to distinguish that from the “hiddenness” that is simply and totally the work of God in us and around us. Yes, in a real sense these two are “one,” but for the sake of discussion, reflection and clarity, it will help if we keep them separate. And what I want to point to most of all is that “hiddenness” which is the work of God, God’s doing as it were–not our project, not our doing, not something that we planned, not something that we wanted all along, indeed might be something that we really don’t want at all!

There is a beautiful line from Genesis (5:24): “Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, for God took him.” For many this is merely a circumlocution for the fact of Enoch’s death. But for Merton (who loved this line) and for many others this line points to something else. Let’s cut to the heart of this whole thing: the essence of the hidden life is getting lost in the Mystery of God. It is not so much the physical situation but the heart that totally surrenders to the Mystery of God, gets lost in it, and in the process uncovers the abyss and mystery of its own identity as it is found in the Mystery of God.

The Gospel speaks of a treasure hidden, buried in a field. One who is aware of that treasure needs to “give all” to take hold of the field that holds that treasure. This “all” is not a numerical “all”, a sum of things, but the sense of who one is, that “I” that constitutes one’s phenomenal identity of daily life. One has to surrender that to the Mystery of God in order to uncover the mystery of one’s own identity, which is a treasure far beyond anything conceivable in the phenomenal world.

Modern society has as one of its foundational principles a kind of cult of personality. There are many complex factors involved in this development, some of them good, some not so good, others very bad. As an example, the development of the value of the human individual person has been one of the good things. But along with that came an enormous obfuscation of our true identity. In fact, identity itself became problematic. In modern society it is based on “credentials”—something I have discussed previously in various postings. So you go around saying, “I am this person,” or “I am that person,” and so on. So now you are almost no more than the sum of your credentials. Or the person with “more” “valued credentials” is more valued, more happy, more this, more that—ultimately it is their identity. This obscures a person’s true identity to an astonishing degree. The pursuit of credentials becomes the point of life—at times measured by money, power, sex, etc.—even matters of religion can become credentials, and all the more toxic because they are so subtle and so seemingly “right.” All the time a person’s true identity is the hidden secret of their life. It is never something that the person can see or grasp or get hold of in any way for manipulation or “to use it” for some purpose—in other words it CANNOT become another credential. Every person’s secret identity is lost in the abyss of God, and it is only by plunging into THAT abyss that we “become who we are”—to use a modern pop psychology phrase that has so much unintended meaning! This is the real “hidden life” that begins for every person once they have some inkling of their real identity. A person’s real identity is hidden, is a secret that they do not have ready access to unless they are willing to “lose” all their credentials. In fact, in death that is exactly what happens. Then you see who you really are and your oneness with God.

A person’s real identity is so hidden that it is not available to the “brutalities of the will”—a Merton phrase. One cannot “use it”—it will seem like a “nothingness,” like a no-person, like no-thing, etc. If you get the inclination to say, “Ah, there is the ‘hidden life’” — or even worse, “Now I am living the ‘hidden life’”—trust me, that is not it. The “hidden life” is not some generic life that has certain characterisitics. It is either YOUR “hidden life” or it is nothing because it means the essence of YOUR identity which is hidden in the Mystery of God. THAT you will not be able to point to and sit back and admire and turn into another credential. No more than you can do with the very reality of God.

Do not try to name the secret Name that is at the center of your being. There are many things that it is good to try and figure out, but this is not one of them. When Adam the first human encounters all the creatures God has made he is called upon to name them. But it is God himself who names you at the core of your being, calls you by that secret name which is buried in the abyss of that Mystery which we call God. Now the next step is simple: Be that Mystery. You are that Mystery….to echo our Hindu advaitists. The hidden life.

To understand the story of St. Francis entitled, “Perfect Joy,” you need a sense of the meaning of the hidden life. To understand the sayings of the Desert Fathers you need the same. To truly see what the Sermon on the Mount is all about, you need a sense of the hidden life. Otherwise there will be serious distortions.

Again invoking our beloved Sufi friends and that great quote which I have used so many times: It is one thing to know God when the veil is lifted. It is quite another to know God in the veil itself. The hidden life.
God’s life and presence is the most truly hidden life. So the hidden life is an icon of the Presence and Mystery of God. And where else is this hiddenness most manifest than with Jesus on the cross? How can God be more hidden than that? And yet how manifest is God at that moment for those with eyes to see that….

It is summertime and a good moment in which to reacquaint ourselves with some old spiritual friends.  On the monastic path it is often not so much of “going forward” all the time but more of circling around and around certain fundamental truths until it dawns on you what they are saying.  So here’s just a few for consideration.

Lao Tzu

Thus it is said:

The path into the light seems dark,

the path forward seems to go back,

the direct path seems long,

true power seems weak,

true purity seems tarnished,

true steadfastness seems changeable,

true clarity seems obscure,

the greatest art seems unsophisticated,

the greatest love seems indifferent,

the greatest wisdom seems childish.

The Tao is nowhere to be found.

Yet it nourishes and completes all things.

The paradoxes of Taoism are more powerful and more comprehensive than even those of John of the Cross or of the other apophatic mystics. Notice how it all depends on “seems”–a matter of perception.  So who is doing the perceiving?  Thus the ego cannot traverse the path of the Tao—can’t even see it!!  

 It is a shame that Taoism never really develops but deteriorated over the centuries into a kind of  pop magic-religio concoction.  Apart from Lao Tzu (whose historical reality is even doubted–but then somebody wrote this!) and Chuang Tzu and a number of poets and mystics, Taoism at its roots remains a mysterious way–not surprisingly preferring to be nameless most of the time and of help to those who are on the Way without any name themselves.

Another great old friend is the Sufi Master Ibn Arabi.  Here he details the four stages of development in a Sufi:

(as condensed by Nasr)

1. At the level of the law(shariah) there is “yours and mine.”  Individual rights and ethical relations.
2. At the level of the Sufi path (tariqah), “mine is yours and yours is mine.”  Dervishes are brothers and sisters–open their homes, their hearts and  their purses to one another.
3. At the level of Truth (haqiqah), there is “no mine and no yours.”  The advanced Sufis at this level realize that all things are from God, that they are really only caretakers and that they “possess” nothing.  Those who realize Truth have gone beyond attachment to possessions and beyond attachment to externals in general, including fame and position.
4. At the level of Gnosis (marifah), there is “no me and no you.”  At this final level, the Sufi has realized that all is God, that nothing and no one is separate from God.

What can you say?  What can you add?  It is so simple and lucid, and also at the same time beyond any real comprehension.  For it is easy to mouth these words, but quite another to know their reality.  Another thing  note their universality–just as with Lao Tzu there is nothing here that is incompatible with the Gospel; indeed, it seems more like a fulfillment of the Gospel!  I suppose most religiosity operates at Level 1.  One would hope that Christian monasticism can at least bring a person to Level 2, at least to the level of your basic Dervish community!  With Level 3 we are at the more individual, personal level, heart level, and this is the beginning of true mysticism.  Lived rightly (and that’s a big IF!) one would hope that the monastic way would bring a person to that level eventually.  As for Level 4, well, very few make it.  The great modern Sufi master, Shaikh al-‘Alawi, said that only one in ten thousand Sufis get to this level.  Or as Han-shan would put it:  “Try and make it to Cold Mountain!”

From the venerable Ramana Maharshi:

We loosely talk of Self-realization, for lack of a better term.  But how can one real-ize or make real that which alone is real?  All we need to do is to give up our habit of regarding as real that which is unreal.  All religious practices are meant solely to help us do this.  When we stop regarding the unreal as real, then reality alone will remain, and we will be that.

Ah, if only it were that simple!  The “unreal” is not some “ghostly” mirage or delusion.  It is actually our daily world when we see it apart from God—when we see it only from the standpoint of our ego self.  The hurly-burly busy world of our urban centers is truly unreal in that in all that frenetic activity no one realizes that God is right there and that’s all that matters.  If that realization should hit everyone, then all that activity would stop–what’s the point of it?  The basis of civilization and culture would change.  Human beings would spend their time in prayer, contemplation, reflection, adoration of the Real, working just enough to maintain life….the world would be one big monastery!  Not that present monasteries aren’t caught up in the “unreal”! 

And we must never forget Merton:

“I am the utter poverty of God.  I am His emptiness, littleness, nothingness, lostness.  When this is understood, my life in His freedom, the self-emptying of God in me is the fullness of grace.  A love for God that knows no reason because He is the fullness of grace.  A love for God that knows no reason because He is God; a love without measure; a love for God as personal.  The Ishvara appears as personal in order to inspire this love.  Love for all, hatred of none is the fruit and manifestation of love for God–peace and satisfaction.  Forgetfulness of worldly pleasure, selfishness and so on in the love for God, channeling all passion and emotion into the love for God.”

No need for comment here.

Then a very rare, little known figure from the Middle Ages, Marguerite Porete who wrote a thing called “The Mirror of Simple Souls”:

“If that soul had all the knowledge of God ever possessed or to be possessed by any creature, she would deem it nothing compared to what she loves, which never has been and never will be known.  She loves in God that which is in him and has never been imparted more than she loves that which she had already received from him or will ever receive. The soul is not drunk on what she has drunk, but on what she never has drunk and never will drink.  It is the beyond that has intoxicated her.  It is with this that without drinking she is inebriated.  She is free, all-forgetting, all-forgotten, out of herself.”

This is one of Abhishiktananda’s favorite quotes, and he makes that word “beyond” one of his favorite words.  The Abyss of God is fathomless, limitless, infinite; and to plunge into it endlessly, ever being drawn “beyond”, ever deeper into an endless bliss….

Oh yes, by the way, poor Marguerite was burned at the stake as a heretic.  A woman claiming this kind of intimacy with God…could be dangerous.  The fact that she wrote things down  may indicate that she somehow was educated, and some scholars believe she was an influence on Eckhart.

Ancient Greek saying:  “When the gods want to punish us, they grant us our desires.”

“Brother Ancient Greek, you are not far off from Buddhahood.”

And to conclude, to those who are puzzled by enigmatic spiritual sayings and wonder what they mean, here’s a piece of advice:

Concert pianist Vladimir Horowitz tells about the time he played a dissonant contemporary composition at a private gathering.  When he had finished, someone asked, “I just don’t understand what that composition means, Mr. Horowitz.  could you please explain?”  Without a word, Horowitz played the composition again, turned to his questioner, and announced, “That’s what it means!”

                Philip Kapleau

Consider these words from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (2: 2-8):  “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

A classic text in Christianity of what is sometimes called “kenotic spirituality.”  Actually it is a foundational text for all Christian spirituality, and one could really say that kenosis, in one form or another, appears in all true spiritualities.  This self-emptying is an important dynamic in all religious paths even as it may have different nuances, totally incommensurable layers of background text and narrative,  and radically diverse indicators and symbols.  Thus, the Buddha sitting in calm meditation with that inimitable hint of a smile and Christ in agony on the cross are two very different symbols but both lead us into the realm of kenosis, and we won’t speculate about their relationship any more than that.  We will limit ourselves to some random reflections on kenosis as foundation for the Christian spiritual path, but as usual we will keep one eye on our Sufi friends and on Abhishiktananda’s Christian advaita.

Within Christianity, Russian Orthodox spirituality has a very strong “kenotic element.”  The “fools for Christ,” the radical nonviolence of some of its holy people, the strong hermit tradition, a sense of the value of suffering….all these point in that direction.  Paradoxically (at least for some) this spirituality is also known for its beautiful emphasis on the Resurrection and for a strong sense for what might be termed “spiritual beauty.”

Kenosis…what can it possibly mean?  We term it “self-emptying.”  The words from the New Testament quoted above are not at all self-explanatory.  They have been interpreted in some seriously different ways.  But it is obvious that the radical kenosis of Jesus Christ is meant to serve paradigmatically for all human beings.  But also, kenosis is not “something we do,” a project that the ego self can undertake, another spiritual practice among many others, etc.  Rather, with our Sufi friends, all we need do is be attentive to “what is.”  Truly it will take us where we need to be.

Adam, the Biblical prototype, the first human being, is called the “icon” of God (in the image of God, etc.).  Jesus, the so-called new prototype is termed as “in the form of God” (morphe theou).  There are very deep implications on how one reads these two phrases.  Some scholars claim that the two terms are interchangeable; that they basically refer to the same thing.  Others say, no, “morphe” refers to the very essence of God and “icon” obviously does not.  From the standpoint of a mystical spirituality, these kind of arguments are a waste of time, though not without some interest.  From the standpoint of a nondualistic Christian mysticism, like Christian advaita, as in Abhishiktananda’s latest Christology(as opposed to his earlier ruminations), what this phrase would seem to mean is that what God is, Jesus is.  “That thou art,” in a Christian perspective.  Obviously not in his arms and legs, etc., but in what makes Jesus truly Jesus, this is in the morphe theou.  In the Greek thought-world everything has a morphe, a form—so there is the form of a dog, the form of a cat, the form of a rock, etc.  The form is what makes something to be that which it is.  There is form and matter.  Matter is the stuff; form is what makes it to be this particular stuff as opposed to some other stuff.  So that is where this word is coming from, but that does not necessarily mean it has that  precise a meaning.  But we can infer still that somehow this morphe theou means that what the reality of the Ultimate Mystery is, Jesus is truly that.  “That thou art.”  He manifests that Reality in the purest, most translucent way.  There is absolutely nothing in Jesus that obscures that reality—and yet it can be said to be “concealed” on the cross—that most cruel form of execution that only the worst criminal or worst enemy would get.

Abhishiktananda was often fond of pointing out that the meaning of such a text is way beyond any textual/verbal analysis, and it requires a certain spiritual experience to really get at its core.  But this text is very rich and loaded with meaning in almost every word and phrase, and it would be satisfying and interesting and beneficial to do a detailed, word-by-word analysis and reflection, yet  we will skip that for the time being and simply “underline” some key signposts as it were as the text wants to take us to a place we might not be aware of.

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus….”  Abhishiktananda tended toward the end of his life toward a Christology which focused on the awareness within Jesus of his relationship to that Ultimate Reality which he called “abba.”  Abhishiktananda claimed that this was the only way the Semitic mindset could get at the advaitic experience of Jesus–in that experience of “sonship” and in the language of “the kingdom of heaven.” There is much to recommend in that reading, and this text certainly seems to point in that direction.  However, this text also seems to be taking us to a place where no “advaitic experience” seems possible:  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me….”  The kenosis of Jesus on the Cross is a concealment of all religious experience.  At the very end there is only surrender to what seems like utter emptiness—“Into your hands….”

So the text proceeds: Jesus “did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped.”  Indeed.  “Equality”–very loaded word here, but we shall focus on “grasped.”  Whatever you want to make of “equality with God,” it is not something that can be “grasped.”  Why?  Because only the ego self, the phenomenal self “grasps.”  And our God-identity cannot be grasped in any way.  This text should also remind us of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness where in fact his God-identity was presented to him by the Tempter as indeed something to grasp and hold onto as a credential.  So we are invited to follow Jesus in his kenosis where our own God-identity unfolds, not as a “something we grasp” but as pure gift and grace and love..

The Buddha teaches along these lines:  if your house is on fire, you get out of that house.  And your house is on fire, so…..   Jesus in his kenosis opens a door.  In fact he says, “I am the door…”   The whole point of a door is that it is an empty space.  Jesus in his kenosis reveals the Great Emptiness, which is not-empty because it is not a something alongside other somethings, but that which is infinite and unimaginable Love(and this is something radically new in human awareness).  Al-Hallaj was ecstatic as they crucified him….without any ego he proclaimed “I am the Truth.”  “That thou art.”  But let us listen once more to Merton’s remarkable meditation on this “Door”:

“The door of emptiness.  Of no-where.  Of no-place for a self, which cannot be entered by a self.  And therefore is of no use to someone who is going somewhere.  Is it a door at all?  The door of no-door….  The door without sign, without indicator, without information.  Not particularized.  Hence no one can say of it ‘This is it!  This is the door.’  It is not recognizable as a door.  It is not led up to by other things pointing to it:  ‘We are not it, but that is it–the door.  No sign saying, ‘Exit.’  No use looking for indications.  Any door with a sign on it, any door that proclaims itself to be a door is not the door….  The door without wish.  The undesired.  The unplanned door. The door never expected.  Never wanted.  Not desirable as a door.  Not a joke, not a trap door.  Not select.  Not exclusive.  Not for a few.  Not for many.  Not for.  Door without aim.  Door without end.  Does not respond to a key–so do not imagine you have a key.  Do not have your hopes on possession of the key….  When you have asked for a list of all the doors, this one is not on the list.  When you have asked the numbers of all the doors, this one is without a number.  Do not be deceived into thinking this door is merely hard to find and difficult to open.  When sought it fades.  Recedes.  Diminishes.  Is nothing.  There is no threshold.  No footing.  It is not empty space.  It is neither this world nor another.  It is not based on anything.  Because it has no foundation, it is the end of sorrow.  Nothing remains to be done….  Christ said, ‘I am the door.’  The nailed door.  The cross, they nail the door shut with death.  The resurrection: ‘You see, I am not [that kind of] door.’  ‘Why do you look up to heaven?’….  I am the opening, the ‘shewing,’ the revelation, the door of light, the Light itself.  ‘I am the Light,’ and the light is in the world from the beginning.”

St. Francis is perhaps the purest example within Christianity of Christ’s kenotic path.  Read his account of the “Perfect Joy.”  Every time I read it, I get totally flattened—it is so radical.  Easy to misread.  It is not about “trying real hard” to “enjoy” getting insulted, rejected, etc.  Some real bad spirituality abounds in this regard!  No, it is rather living from a very different center than our phenomenal ego self with all its desires and wants and grasping…it  is living from the place of the no-self, the Self of the Upanishads…it is an exemplum of what is said in Luke 17:33(and other similar texts):  “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever will lose his life will preserve it.”  As Abhishiktananda points out, this is at the heart of Christian advaita.  The life of communion, of unity beyond understanding, of unbounded love, of infinite bliss, is not found by expanding the ego self to infinity, but paradoxically through the narrow gate of this kenosis.

A. The recent activity on the part of the Vatican with regard to American women religious is just another dismal chapter in a rather long, sad story, now extending almost 50 years. After 4 years of “study” and investigation, the Vatican issued a document accusing the Leadership Conference of Women Religious of numerous “grave” breaches of doctrine and practice–sounds serious! This group represents about 80% of American Catholic sisters. What happens next, no one knows, but it sure doesn’t bode well for the sisters. What the Vatican’s male authoritarian spirit has done to these sisters over the years is truly wrong, but what these sisters have done to themselves is also unfortunate.

A few facts and some history: With Vatican II there was this call for a renewal of religious life, and our American sisters took to this with a great deal of zeal and energy. This is a complex history with many sides to it, I am sure, and so I will not go into it here in this brief note. Suffice it to say that for all the good things that they did or tried to do, some of their choices were not the wisest, and perhaps their vision got clouded because of the battle with male authoritarian structures. At times this battle seemed to become an end in itself. I still recall the IHMs in Los Angeles and their battle with Cardinal McIntyre(a true dinosaur of a cardinal by the way!)over the wearing of the habit, among other things. This became symbolic of a whole relationship with church authority, and in the course of things they left formal Catholic religious life as a group. Now of course so many other sisters stayed and fought and compromised and adjusted, but truly there was a great change in American religious life for women by the mid 1970s. And the changes were very uneven and often neglecting the real contemplative heart of all religious life. In fact the activism of the ’70s and ’80s was marked by a strong suspicion of “inner spirituality.” I remember very well in my first year at the most progressive seminary in the US and fresh out of the monastery’s environment, being confronted by a modern progressive nun about the validity of “my way of life.” I was taken aback that anyone, much less a nun, would question the validity of contemplative life–it was like she had questioned my breathing!!

But I also recall the four American women religious who were brutally murdered in El Salvador about 1980—I still think of them. Their kind of work for the poor, which was not just a “hand-out of charity” but a challenge to the power of the wealthy, would have been almost inconceivable before Vatican II. In a sense they were also challenging the Church about where it stood in this regard. When they said that the Gospel does not present “neutrality” as an option, they were labelled as “marxists” and you know what they do to those kind of folk…. Anyway, even with this kind of heroic stance and the heroic efforts of so many other sisters in various ministries, no young women were attracted to this life. That is an undeniable fact. What was wrong/what is wrong? It seems that one has only two possible choices: either you can say that the whole culture is so godless, anti-religious, so pervasively enticing with self-fullfillment dynamics that the example and voices of religious life become impossible to see or hear. The secularization of society is so thorough that the religious dimension of life itself becomes almost invisible. Considering our situation today this is a very plausible explanation given some adjustments. However, the other explanatory choice may be that there is something missing in that religious life, that it no longer addresses the heart of the young person who seeks to transcend their stagnant secular self. This is not a pleasant alternative to ponder for the sisters concerned but it is there as a possibility. Maybe it is some combination of both. In any case, consider this: in 1975 there were 135,000 sisters in the American Catholic community. Already many had left after Vatican II, so this seemed like a new foundation for a new beginning. However, in 2011 there were only 56,000 sisters. A huge drop. And this is the most staggering statistic: there are today more sisters over the age of 90 than under the age of 60! Surely this is not what “renewal” was suppose to lead to!

Now some might say that what’s keeping people from coming to these groups is precisely that they are so much under the thumb of male authoritarianism. Again, partly true, but that doesn’t explain why some traditional groups are doing so much better number wise than these so-called more progressive, more renewed groups. It was often said in the ’60s that religious groups had to change in order to attract young people. Well, they changed, and young people stayed away in even larger numbers! Conservative Catholics point to this as a “sign from Heaven.” I can’t speak for other countries, but one does hear about the flourishing of vocations in Third World countries, and these tend to be very traditional kinds of situations. There may be a whole lot of complex reasons for this phenomenon, but suffice it to say that here in the US sisters’ groups that favor such things as habits and traditional communal structures and living together are attracting more young people. These are superficial things on their own, but I think what they really seek in all this is that somehow their lives are oriented toward something “beyond” their social existence. The symbolization and ritual expression of that “beyond” is needed at the beginning especially and yearned for in the heart even in a very inarticulate way. Thus a group that may actually be regressive and reactionary in its ecclesiology and theology and its authority structures and maybe even neurotic in its lived experience, still will find people drifting into it’s circle because it offers some sense of a life that is oriented “toward the beyond.” And guess what, every human heart has that yearning buried deep within. Needless to say there is also that dubious thing of an “unassailable certainty” that these groups offer, and also a feeling of a kind of superiority that is unhealthy but magnetic and able to draw people.

Now what the Vatican has done seems not only petty and vindictive toward these American nuns, but the sad fact is that it was also totally useless and unnecessary. The frank and sad fact is that they are dying out. American religious life for women as represented by the LCWR is not only an “endangered species”–it is for all practical purposes done, finished. But instead of feeling sad we should remember that really these women are a harbinger of some bigger change and movement, that God is the Ultimate Reality behind all this, that what is to come we cannot foresee. And the authoritarian machinery that ground them down over the years, well, that too is a very human fabrication. And recall that other very symbolic human fabrication of recent years, the Berlin Wall, how it somehow when the time came seemed to crumble on its own…..

B. Speaking of religious groups, I have been reading Abhishiktananda’s little essay, “India and the Carmelite Order.” As usual, truly brilliant….but…. And with Abhishiktananda how often that is the case: “truly brilliant….but….” In this case the “but” has to do with his vision of the Carmelite Order. I don’t know what he was seeing in 1964 in India, but the Carmelite Order in the US in 2012 is a mere shadow of what he projects. I suspect it is one of his grand idealizations–more like what he hoped they would be in his vision of that charism that linked Elijah to John of the Cross and thousands of hermits in between. Yes, there are some exceptional individuals in the Carmelite Order, even here in the US, but the Order as a whole leaves a lot to be desired.

C. We all know that Jesus is called “the Word of God,” in the New Testament. Though this is the classic rendering of the original Greek, it nevertheless is actually a very poor translation–even though there is no real alternative. The same is probably true of all the other renderings in all the other modern languages. Jesus is called the Logos of God, and the Gospel of John begins with the echoes of Genesis in the background: In the beginning was the Logos…. Now to translate “logos” as “word” is to seriously impoverish the term. It is not incorrect to translate it as such, but it is also an incredible diminishment of the symbolization and reference power that the word “logos” carries. It is one of the richest words in ancient Greek. Think of that tradition of thought and usage from Heraclitus, through Plato and Aristotle and the Tragedians, and the poets and common usage, all the way to the Gospel of John, a period spanning over seven centuries, think of how much “weight of meaning” that word is by then carrying. If you truly know ancient Greek, you won’t want to translate but simply call Jesus the Logos of God. And then there is the incredible, “and the Logos became sarx…” It reveals a new meaning to the human condition. I wonder if one could say the Logos became maya.… Just wondering…. Adopting and adapting the Sufi saying: It is one thing to know God “beyond” the veil; it is quite another to know God in the veil itself.

But we have something else to consider: Jesus is also the Silence of God. (We are not talking about the so-called “silence of God” that 20th century existentialist thinkers were so focused on.) Abhishiktananda loved this statement, and of course it comes from St. Ignatius of Antioch in one of the earliest Christian documents outside the New Testament. Also, in his letter to the Ephesians, Ignatius says that the one who truly possesses the word of Jesus is also able to hear his silence, “that he may be perfect,” meaning complete, fulfilled, etc. So there is a “beyond” to the words of Jesus, and this we will discover in the “silence of Jesus.” Much to ponder here. On the one hand, there is the Logos bringing a horizon of Silence, indeed also bearing within itself Silence; on the other hand there is also the Logos of Silence itself. Much, much to ponder.

D. There is this remarkable quote by Abhishiktananda in his essay on “India and the Carmelite Order”: “The prophets of Yahweh were the heralds of the Word; the rishis of India, the privileged witnesses of the Silence of God. Had they met, probably neither Elijah the Prophet nor Yasnavalkya, the Rishi, would have recognized or understood each other for, humanly speaking, they were approaching each other from totally opposite slopes of the holy Mountain. Nevertheless both of them were precursors of Christ.”
What a statement! I wonder if Abhishiktananda really has a sense here of the full implications of what he is saying!? Usually it is said that ideally speaking interreligious dialogue should take place on the basis of the true and deep experience of each side. However, who could be said to have a deeper experience of their respective traditions than Elijah or Yasnavalkya; and it seems, from what Abhishiktananda says here, that had they met they wouldn’t have even been able to recognize each other’s religious experience. So what is the real basis, the real ground of all dialogue. Interesting. So something else is needed beside their own individual spiritual experience, or else even the most holy person can get “locked inside” their own tradition. Note that Abhishiktananda says that “both of them were precursors of Christ.” Indeed, but NEITHER of them would know THIS Christ. He is always the “third” in every encounter, in every dialogue, in every movement toward communion. Or perhaps we should say it is the Holy Spirit given by Christ. Isn’t a “third” always there in every communion whether it be in word or in silence?

E. Speaking of silence(!), let me quote again that marvellous poem by Gekka Gensho:

Making the busy streets my home
right down in the heart of things
only one friend shares my poverty
a scrawny wooden staff;
having learned the ways of silence
amidst the noise of urban life
taking things as they come to me
now everywhere I am is true.

Gekka lived in the 1700s in Kyoto. Having been a Zen monk for 40 years, he left and became a layman selling tea and writing poetry. That last line is a direct quote from Lin-chi, from the 9th century. We are invited to “learn the ways of silence.” This is the Zen way of dealing with the “veil.” Now my beloved Han-shan, a hermit from the Tang Dynasty of the 7th century, reversed the process. First, for years he was a busy man, a government bureaucrat, an intellectual, and a practitioner of popular Taoism– until one day he left everything and became a hermit. Here is his own account of it:

In my first thirty years of life,
I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.
Walked by rivers through deep green grass
Entered cities of boiling red dust.
Tried drugs, but couldn’t make Immortal;
Read books and wrote poems on history.
Today I’m back at Cold Mountain:
I’ll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.
(Gary Snyder translation)

Either way is good! Both are True Men of No-Rank. If you look for them by way of credentials and in the world of credentials, you will not find them. Like the monk who asked to see where Anthony was and could not see him, they are there where Anthony is. Amen!

Let us take a look and reflect a bit on the sayings and stories gathered under the name of Anthony. Since he is considered the “patriarch of Christian monks,” these sayings and stories have a certain added authority and significance. (We will ignore the Life of Anthony by Athanasius as this would complicate our task.) But first let us emphasize a few preliminary points:

a.) No one should feel that they must “like” the Desert Father sayings and stories. They are not everyone’s cup of tea, and there is no sense trying to force oneself to like them. But whether you’re not sure about them or whether you feel very much attracted to them, still a certain of amount of work needs to be done to “decode” their language. And then an enormous treasure-house of spiritual wisdom will open up.

b.) In the previous posting, in a kind of introduction to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, I suggested that we look at an image of a bunch of concentric circles–as pictured below:

I suggested that this was the most apt visual representation of what is going on in the Desert Father sayings/stories. A mistake is to read them as “pointers,” as directional signals of some kind, pointing you in the way to go spiritually. Read them that way and you will eventually become disconcerted, puzzled, discouraged, even maybe disgusted with a seeming absurd triviality, and so on. However, these stories/sayings are not meant as formulas, as recipes, as directions, as a “cookbook” for the spiritual life, as “how to” manuals. You do not “line up your spiritual sights” along some seeming straight lines that they give you. Rather consider each story as a kind of circle in a large pattern of concentric circles about a common, mysterious center. The sayings/stories more or less “circle around” that center, some closer to the center, perhaps very close; some far from the center, perhaps very far indeed. With a little bit of spiritual wisdom you will begin to sense which stories/sayings are the close ones and which are the far ones. Now what is interesting is that in one’s growth and deepening and truly having an awakening of the heart, one will eventually be surprised at times to discover that what you thought was close and what was distant at the beginning of your spiritual journey, might now seem a bit different. So there is a kind of personal, subjective element there also. What you see in these stories may partly depend on where you are on the spiritual journey. Things can change! There are such surprises, a few.

c.) One implication of the above is that no story/saying should be isolated and read and interpreted in an isolated way. What is most important is the overall pattern of the sayings, and while one can and should focus on certain sayings, as we shortly will be doing, it is important to keep in mind the overall pattern and its Center.

Let us now plunge into that group of stories gathered under the name of Anthony(using Benedicta Ward’s translations). And let us begin by quoting from a letter that Abhishiktananda wrote to his sister just a few weeks before his ultimately fatal heart attack: “The other day in a Hindu ashram, I met a Christian monk who also lives in total poverty and goes from ashram to ashram, happy all the time, whether he has something to eat or not. Naturally he has no job. He doesn’t even have the formal status of sannyasi, but he is the most authentic Christian Indian monk I have met, though no one knows him. It is solitary monks such as this who will one day bring about the true Indian Christian monasticism….” Such was the journey of Anthony though in some ways the externals of his life were so different.

Consider Saying #38, the very last one: “And he said this, ‘If he is able to, a monk ought to tell his elders confidently how many steps he takes and how many drops of water he drinks in his cell, in case he is in error about it.'” Now a saying like this can really turn people off–on the surface it smacks of absurdity and obsession. And if someone just reading this would try to imitate it, soon he/she would become a thorough neurotic very likely! A saying like this should not bother us or concern us except to note that this is language within the context of a deep spiritual father/guru relationship which calls for a thorough uprooting of “self-possession.” It indicates the seriousness of that relationship as it extends over all one does and all one is–in other words we are not just talking about “spiritual direction” as generally practiced in the modern West. Such language makes sense only within the context of the non-dual guru-disciple relationship, and such a relationship can be very precarious and demanding as other stories illustrate also and there are plenty of warnings about “playing” at this or “pretending it.” Apart from that, though, one should not bother much with such a saying unless the Spirit has led one into such a relationship and then one’s guide will appropriately interpret the implied demands in such a life in an appropriate way for oneself.

Another view of this relationship can be found in Saying #27: “Three Fathers used to go and visit blessed Anthony every year and two of them used to discuss their thoughts and the salvation of their souls with him, but the third always remained silent and did not ask him anything. After a long time, Abba Anthony said to him, ‘You often come here to see me, but you never ask me anything,’ and the other replied, ‘It is enough for me to see you, Father.'” Here we begin to feel that we are “swimming in the depths”! The spiritual father/guru can and often does instruct the person coming to him. He can serve all kinds of functions as a matter of fact, depending on the circumstances and the condition of the person coming to him. Again I refer to that beautiful depiction of Fr. Zosima in Brothers Karamazov. A person may be coming just for some advice, but what they receive is a “taste” of what is at that Center. The authentic spiritual father will break through the duality of that master-disciple relationship not through “chuminess” or pretense but through his own realization of that Center. The same Center that is in the heart of the disciple; the same Center that is in the “in-between” them. And no words, no matter how profound, how learned, how pious can ever convey that Reality. Thus: “It is enough for me to see you, Father.”

Let us now consider Saying #1: “When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert he was beset by accidie, and attacked by many sinful thoughts. He said to God, ‘Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts do no leave me alone; what shall I do in my affliction? How can I be saved?’ A short while afterwards, when he got up to go out, Anthony saw a man like himself sitting at his work, getting up from his work to pray, then sitting down and plaiting a rope, then getting up again to pray. It was an angel of the Lord sent to correct and reassure him. He heard the angel saying to him, ‘Do this and you will be saved.’ At these words Anthony was filled with joy and courage. He did this, and he was saved.” The very first thing we need to underline in this story is the word, “saved.” This is one of those very important words that keeps appearing in the Desert Father sayings, but note the peculiar resonance it has here(and in all the other locations it appears). I mean what kind of “salvation” are we talking about here? Evangelical Christians should feel a bit apprehensive because “salvation” here doesn’t seem to rely on “believing in Jesus,” etc. Yes, there is mention of “sinful thoughts,” but the emphasis is on the mere presence of such thoughts…it is the very flow of such thoughts that seems to be the problem. So the concern here is not so much for a “theological salvation” as for something much more existential, something experienced here and now. So what does that mean? Anthony is trying to live a life totally oriented to God, mind and heart attuned to the Ultimate Unnameable Mystery. There is a vector, a direction for that orientation which remains beyond conceptuality–thus it is not easily graspable by the mind or the emotions. And we are afterall body and mind and psyche and all that implies, filled with mostly unruly feelings, emotions, desires, fears, neurotic tendencies, chaotic responses, etc. etc. All this will tend to scatter our focus. And believe me we will not be successful in merely forcing a kind of imaginary attentiveness. Largely this inner chaos is the result of having a kind of “mistaken identity,” of answering the question “Who am I” in everything we do and say and think in an illusory kind of way. This is one of the points of the Awakening of the Heart, and there is a whole pedagogy that goes with that, some very simple, some not so simple. Thus, for example, the devout Muslim(and Sufi) will face Mecca five times daily in prayer. It is not that God is in Mecca and not right there where the Sufi is, but that his body is learning and reinforcing that “inner directionality” and attentiveness that is called for that leads to the Great Awakening which abides in his prayer. So our story here teaches us first of all that we will be “afflicted” by our inner chaos which will then turn us in all kinds of directions and that slip us deeper and deeper into inner chaos where we are at the mercy of whatever feelings rise up; secondly that we will need to learn how to deal with that; and third that it may involve some very simple, practical steps that lead to this “salvation.”

And here is another story about “being saved”–Saying #19: “The brethren came to the Abba Anthony and said to him, ‘Speak a word; how are we to be saved?’ The old man said to them, ‘You have heard the Scriptures. That should teach you how.’ But they said, ‘We want to hear from you too, Father.’ Then the old man said to them, ‘The Gospel says, ‘if anyone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also.’ They said, ‘We cannot do that.’ The old man said, ‘If you cannot offer the other cheek, at least allow one cheek to be struck.’ ‘We cannot do that either,’ they said. So he said, ‘If you are not able to do that, do not return evil for evil,’ and they said, ‘We cannot do that either.’ Then the old man said to his disciple, ‘Prepare a little brew of corn for these invalids. If you cannot do this, or that, what can I do for you? What you need is prayers.'” What a remarkable story! A whole book could be written on this story alone! I will touch only a few bases here. So we have a few “beginners” in the spiritual life(meaning “us”!!) and they want to know “how to be saved.” The first thing to note is that they seek instruction and direction from a living person, a book will not do, even a holy book: “Speak a word….” Indeed Anthony does something that Evangelicals would largely approve: he still points them in the direction of the Scriptures. Basically he is saying, you have all you need right there in the Holy Book. They don’t deny that assertion; they merely say: we want to hear from you TOO! The words of the Book have to pass through the lens of a true life in order for us to see what they really mean. There are words, and then there are words! We want to know what “you” made of those words…. (By reference, note again the earlier story where we had the visitor say to Anthony he didn’t even need his words, all he had to do was to see him!—guess which story is closer to that mysterious Center?!!) Now comes a difficult point to make: ideally speaking the spiritual life is best learned from another human being who has made that journey and is well on the way. But for most of us such figures are simply not available. We get along with a little bit of help from our friends, perhaps with a bit of help from someone more experienced than ourselves. Very, very few have an “Anthony figure” in their life. Does that mean that they are cut off from the depths of the spiritual life. Hardly. Let me use a Hasidic story told by Martin Buber to make a point: Long time ago there was a deeply mystical Hasidic Zaddik who, whenever his community was in peril, would go to a certain spot in the woods and pray some kind of mystical prayer and the community was always saved. Long after his death, when that community was again threatened, his disciples would go to the same spot in the woods to pray that prayer but somehow they forgot the exact words but it was enough that they went there and the community was saved. Still many years later, again in a time of danger, the disciples of the disciples decided that they would seek Heavenly help in the same manner. However, they not only forgot the words of the prayer but they also forgot the place in the woods. They stayed home and simply repeated the old story, and the narrative concludes, “And it was enough.” The community was saved. Something similar holds for us. We very likely do not have contact with a living example of “Anthony,” but if we “repeat” his story it will be enough! Such is the importance of these stories and the value of penetrating their meaning. Now the next thing we can note is exactly what Anthony gives them. Truly he does not veer from the Scriptures; he does not speak on his own authority, but note what he chooses from the Gospel. Nothing about belief or faith, but a very concrete existential demand about turning the other cheek–from the Sermon on the Mount. So Anthony is truly evangelical but in a way that many miss. Here it all depends on how you read the Sermon on the Mount. If you read the Sermon as a container of idealized ethical norms or a depiction of some far-off goal of human behavior that might be achieveable with heroic effort, you will miss what Anthony is getting at. If however, the Sermon is a depiction of a humanity that is “God-filled” and totally God-oriented and one with God, then this will be an existential sign of such a humanity. Or what theologians might call i: the Risen Life. Or as Paul put it: I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me. So this is a concrete manifestation of that life.

Now note that the newcomers do not really understand what Anthony is presenting to them, and their reply is on the level of ethical behavior and the quest for sufficient willpower to do something “hard.” They are at least very realistic and honest about their condition. So Anthony takes them by the hand as it were and leads them down this path of “effort” until they fully recognize that on their own they have no resources for such a life. At that point he is ready to start instructing them in that which will bring them into the heart of the Gospel. He says, “Lets eat, and then I will tell you about this reality of prayer.” That last phrase which is a summons to the reality of prayer can be read in a superficial way as a kind of plea/petition for God’s help in living the life, but I think there is something much more profound going on. The prayer that Anthony is pointing to is not just saying words to God but that life and communion with God which ends in being lost in the Mystery of God–and that life which manifests itself in “turning the other cheek.” And there’s so much more to this story but we will proceed on.

Consider now Saying #28: “They said that a certain old man asked God to let him see the Fathers and he saw them all except Abba Anthony. So he asked his guide, ‘Where is Abba Anthony?’ He told him in reply that in the place where God is, there Anthony would be.'” I hesitate even to touch this story, so profound it is. Just a few notes. First of all this story should not be taken as putting Anthony on a pedestal in comparison to the other Fathers of the Desert. It is merely that he is the model, the paradigmatic one, and so really what we indicate through him and his behavior and his words is “the point of it all.” Truly each of us is meant for that “place” where Anthony is, “where God is.” Note now that there is a kind of “invisibility” about all that. If you look for this place by way of names and credentials, you will see nothing. Recall that Scripture tells us that “God is a consuming fire, and none can behold God and live.” This does not refer to the simple biological life of the flesh, but what is consumed by that fire is that selfhood which we think we are, that “I” that we think and pronounce throughout the day. The Awakening to God in the depths of our being brings about a very real apophaticism of identity then, the true self is a no-self, the hidden unnameable Self lost in the Absolute Unnameable Mystery(recall that unknown Christian monk Abhishiktananda mentions in the quote above).

Now consider Saying #15: “The brothers praised a monk before Abba Anthony. When the monk came to see him, Anthony wanted to know how he would bear insults; and seeing that he could not bear them at all, he said to him, ‘You are like a village magnificently decorated on the outside, but destroyed from within by robbers.'” A seemingly very mundane saying. But an astute principle of spiritual discernment and one of amazing universality. I have read very similar observations by Gandhi, by a Tibetan lama, by a Zen master…. They all tend to point to the fact that the most important person in your life may be your so-called “enemy,” the person who gives you the hardest time, the one who really dislikes you, the one who hurts you, etc. It is this person, or rather your real response to this person that actually gauges your spiritual state—certainly more so than any heaped up praises or adulations of friends. And there are numerous other Desert Father stories and sayings that illustrate this same point. And they all basically point to one thing: once you have a handle on that question, Who am I?, once your answer is attuned to the Real, then neither praise nor insult will throw one off balance.

And just one more story for our reflection—Saying #24: “It was revealed to Abba Anthony in his desert that there was one who was his equal in the city. He was a doctor by profession and whatever he had beyond his needs he gave to the poor, and every day he sang the Sanctus with the angels.” A truly remarkable saying! I have already mentioned this saying in an earlier posting where I commented on Fr. Tiso’s reflections on monasticism, interreligious dialogue and Panikkar. This story is so good and so important it deserves a fuller visit here, and we will take it word by word, phrase by phrase(and really most of these sayings deserve such attention but I have just barely indicated some passing points and reflections). First of all, “It was revealed to Abba Anthony….” The point the story is going to make is not something that Anthony, as holy and clairvoyant and insightful as he is, can figure out on his own. It is not only not obvious to be sure; but especially it needs “revealing” because it is a reality “of God.” And “the message” coming directly from God renders it even more authoritative as if even having the name of Anthony attached to it was not enough, so important it is.

The next thing to note is Anthony is “in the desert” and there is this doctor “in the city.” A kind of line is drawn, a distinction is made; two different places are indicated. To be sure the difference geographically speaking may have been very small, or it may have been very great. No matter. What matters more is that these two places indicate certain ways of life with certain characteristics. The so-called desert is already the established place of people called monks. Lets remind ourselves that we are not talking about formal religious orders, cloisters, even rules and customs. And the city is the place of “non-monks.” The story presents this distinction, and then deconstructs it. The story says the doctor in the city was “equal” to Anthony in the desert. What an astonishing thing to say in the context of this literature! (There’s a few professional monks living today who could use that kind of illumination!)

Note now that the story does not directly name in what way the two were “equal.” It is a bit more subtle because it is pointing at a profound reality. First of all it tells us that this person is a doctor, meaning he has a profession, a place in that society and economy. People know him as a doctor; he has a social identity. In that regard he is not like Anthony who is out there in the desert, supposedly lost to human view(as the myth would have it). The contrast is implicit and part of the equation. The difference is real and undeniable. The story does NOT say that Anthony should come into the city and be like the doctor; or the doctor leave his practice and go out into the desert. Their unity and their “equality” is at a much deeper level–a much bigger point is being made. Next to note is that this doctor is not acclaimed for his austerity or asceticism. When you look at the whole text of sayings you see that austerity, asceticism, renunciation, etc. play a fairly large role in the identity of these people. It’s almost astonishing how “easy” this guy’s life is! Some of the hardened old guys of the desert would consider this doctor a real slacker and not give him much hope. That’s why a “revelation” was needed to see the true reality! Anyway, all the story says is that this doctor “whatever he had beyond his needs he gave to the poor.” His divestment is very modest indeed; it is not the radical renunciation of a sannyasi. He meets his basic needs, and then he gives the rest to the poor–we hear at this point a resonance of the Gospel with its call concerning the poor. Now we come to the climactic point: “and every day he sang the Sanctus with the angels.” If you think this is merely a liturgical reference you really have missed the point of this story! Rather, these words refer to that which makes these two men “equal.”

Now this is an “every day” matter—these words are not merely “throw-away” words, as in “every day I drink juice,” kind of indicating frequency. No, these words are more like saying “all the time,” as in “continual prayer,” as in abiding in the Presence. The Biblical image of the angels and the Sanctus is limiting only if we are crude literalists or lack any sensitivity to poetic language. Otherwise this language points us in the direction of Abhishiktananda’s advaita, the Further Shore, the Ultimate Mystery. Or rather, as I indicated at the beginning of this blog, the language circles around that Mysterious Center which is the Source of all we are and do.

Now to illustrate further the significance of this story, we will have recourse to another important story outside the Anthony collection: “Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do? Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become all fire.'” This story is a classic treatment of the perennial question of “what does it mean to be a monk?” It is an incredible treasure trove of spiritual insights, but the only thing I want to point out here is that it points us in the same direction (or circles around at the same level!) as the Anthony story but with different Biblical symbolism. What makes the Anthony story more remarkable is that it deconstructs that line we draw between “monks” and “non-monks,” that line between those two mythical places, the city and the desert, and it focuses us on the ultimate point of it all, the Absolute Mystery at the Center of our hearts where we sing with the angels, “Holy, Holy, Holy…”

Foundations & Fundamentals, Part V: The Mercy & The Compassion
by A Monk
Ok, this one is real hard also!  Extra hard!  But for quite another reason than the previous postings in the Foundations Series.  The problem is the words are “nice”; everyone likes these kind of words, and everyone thinks they understand what these words mean and imply and what they point to.  There is a psychological and social component here that everyone, or almost everyone, connects with and believes in and leaves it at that.  However the deeper realms, what is properly called mysticism or the contemplative vision of this, remains largely unexplored.  Just speaking for the majority of Christians!  And that is a sad story when in fact every single human being has this knowledge in their heart.  But what the Desert Fathers called “the world” tends to distract and preoccupy us.  However, when “the heart” awakens it opens up on these infinite vistas which we normally call “Mercy” and “Compassion”–again I capitalized and used the article “the” because I am not referring simply to a “fellow-feeling” here but an aspect of that Ultimate Mystery which we call God.

So let us begin in an odd place–thousands of miles away as it were.  In a Japanese Zen monastery, of the Rinzai School, during one of their sesshins.  A sesshin is a retreat of sorts, a very intense period of practice where the monks and lay guests do walking and sitting meditation for more than 12 hours a day.  Gary Snyder relates one such sesshin that he participated in when he was a student in Japan.  It was at Shokoku-ji in Kyoto during the 1960s.  He tells of how intense the experience was and describes one striking feature of the practice: during the long hours of meditation, the head monk, the Jikijitsu, paces up and down the rows of meditators with a wooden paddle.  If anyone’s posture is slipping up or if they start nodding off, the Jikijitsu will whack them on the back with the paddle, some more, some less, but a real whack, enough to knock one off one’s cushion and depending on what was wrong.  Snyder concludes his story:

“The sesshin ends at dawn on the eighth day.  All who have

participated gather in the Jikijitsu’s room and drink powdered

green tea and eat cakes.  They talk easily, it’s over.  The Jikijitsu,

who has whacked  or knocked them all during the week, is their

great friend now—compassion takes many forms.”

Indeed.  A little parable perhaps!  But by no means is this story to be taken as an endorsement of causing someone suffering.  As a matter of fact the compassion and mercy we really want to think about and which is primary is not what we “do to our neighbor” but really the Mercy and Compassion of God.  And here we have to enlist our Sufi friends again for here also they have gone the deepest.  Their whole theology and spirituality is built on this foundation, and we can learn much from them.

Recall the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching:

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.”

For those of us in the theistic traditions this is a perfect summary of one aspect of that reality which we call God.  It is the Absolute Mystery of God, totally transcendent, absolutely unknowable in its essence, totally nameless, beyond all knowledge.  And yet we also affirm that this Reality manifests itself, and as it is truly the only Reality for there is nothing else real “next to it” or compared to it, thus it truly manifests itself  only to itself; and within this manifestation our semblance of being arises.  Our being has reality only because it is grounded in Reality and apart from that we have no reality, and so we are part of that manifestation and  our purpose is to be a witness to this manifestation in all its aspects.  Thus the gift of intelligence and freedom, and so we are able to respond to every manifestation in that classic triad of “to know, love and serve God.”  This is the fundamental point of human beingness as even our catechism puts it.

But now we can push this further.  So the Sufis (and we) affirm that absolutely everything is a manifestation of this Absolute Mystery: the drop of rain, the hawk circling in the sky, the smile on a child, the laughter of friends, the lovemaking of husband and wife, a kind word of a stranger, the snowflakes falling, the Black Hole at the center of our galaxy,  a blade of grass, a delicious meal, the coolness of water, etc. etc.  In a sense these are obvious, but what about the really bad and evil things.  Someone like Abhishiktananda said toward the end of his life that he did not believe anymore in evil or suffering.  I am not so sure about that as a solution–that is a kind of gnostic solution to the problem of evil where it simply vanishes when you arrive at a certain state of awareness.  Dostoyevesky in Brothers Karamazov provides the definitive challenge to any gnostic solution to the problem of evil.  The Sufis have their own way of dealing with this, but it does not mean denying the reality of suffering or evil.  Simply that for the “person who knows” yes, he will see God even there–but you don’t preach that to people as if evil did not exist–it lies beyond our ability to explain the mystery of evil and suffering but for the Sufi “who knows the score” he will see God even there.   As Good Friday approaches we may see the point of what they intend.  At the crucifixion, Jesus says to the thief crucified next to him and who turns to him, “This day you will be with me in Paradise.”

In any case, the key thing for the Sufis is that “What Is” is a manifestation of that Absolute Mystery which we call God (Allah), but it is not a manifestation of His essence which remains totally transcendent, but a manifestation of His Love.  The Sufis have this expression, “the straight path.”  To be on “the straight path” is to be in harmony with “what is” as it comes from the Love of God.  This does not mean negative passivity but knowing how to respond to every thing and every situation in a way that witnesses to the manifestation of God and attests to God’s Self-communication and Self-manifestation in every moment and in every situation and in every thing.  This requires “purity of heart”–thus the importance of that expression for the early monks and mystics.  What we all want to be is on the Straight Path with purity of heart!

Now we come to our two key words: “Mercy” & “Compassion.”  Both are aspects of that one reality, Love, which manifests the Reality: God.  Indeed, in the New Testament God is defined as Love.  For most of us these words kind of blend into one sense or meaning, kind of interchangeable if you will.  However for the Sufis these two words have a serious differentiation which is worth paying attention to.   Muslims begin every invocation with the Basmalah, which can be found at the opening of the Quran,  “In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate..”(Different editions have various translations but this is what is meant).  They are not just being repetitious!  “Mercy” is the ground of all that we call reality.  It is the fundamental ground of every person and every thing.  God’s Mercy is the fabric of all time and all creation.  God Himself as the ground of all being is Mercy itself.  This Absolute Mystery chooses to manifest His Presence as Mercy always and everywhere, and our task is to “know” that with an awakened heart, to serve that Reality in total surrender, to walk the “Straight Path,” and so to respond as a witness of that Manifestation.  Now “Compassion” is a word saved for particular actions of God within historical time. The Compassion of God is in events.  It shows itself in His intervention in particular events here and there.  When Jesus cures a leper or opens the eyes of a blind person, these would be considered examples of God’s Compassion.  Some such acts might be great and very public; others very small and in secret.  But the Compassion of God is at work within history.  Thus to walk “the Straight Path” means also to be in harmony with the Compassion of God, but recall that especially God’s “compassion takes on many forms.”

Now let us listen to Merton as he talks about this topic:

“So that is why it is important to know that God Who is Manifest

in creatures is manifest primarily as Mercy….  The Muslims place

an enormous amount of importance to the Names of God.  See they’ve

got the idea that these Names are in God clamoring to the invisible,

unknown, absolute abyss of God for manifestation.  And God breathes

on them and they are manifested in creatures.  All creatures are not

manifestations of the Hidden Essence of God; they are manifestations

of Names of God.  And the Name of God which is the top of the

pyramid (other than Allah) and which includes every other Name is

Merciful.  God the Merciful.  Allah the Merciful.  And therefore one

seeks to ascend to the knowledge of God as Merciful in everything.

The Mercy of God in everything.  And of course one of the chief

Christian Sufis of the last hundred years is Saint Therese.  The Little

Way of St. Therese is Sufism.  It’s a form of Christian Sufism, and it

is based on this particular attitude toward God, this idea of God.”

Ibn Arabi:  ” If it were not for this Love, the world would never have appeared in its concrete existence.”  Merton again:  “In this sense, the movement of the world toward existence was a movement of love which brought it into existence.  And not only the movement of the world into existence, the coming of everything into existence is an act of love, the development of everything is an act of love.  Everything that happens is love and is mercy.  Not that it always appears to be that way, very often it appears to be just the opposite.  But everything that happens is love.  And of course the ones in Islam who emphasize this the most are the Sufis, because the great thing in Sufism is Love…the Mercy of God in everything , but you have to know how to see it.”

And this is a particularly hard thing to discuss or reflect on, this “seeing.”  A number of very deep spiritual concepts converge at this point: the awakened heart, purity of heart, prayer of the heart even, Mercy as the ground of all, and walking the Straight Path.  This last one alone needs much more reflection in another posting because it doesn’t sound familiar to our religious discourse. In that regard it suffers the same kinds of distortions as Buddhist “detachment” used to suffer so much among Western commentators, who took it as this grossly negative, passive mode of being.  Surely more words will not explain it or remove the difficulties, but at least some misconceptions can be spared and the significance of the Straight Path in relation to God’s Mercy can be indicated.   Suffice it to say that it holds the key to “bringing it all together,” and perhaps as an example we could point to the Rule of St. Benedict as one methodology of walking the Straight Path.  Certainly the Sufis prefer non-institutional approaches but at least it can be interpreted along these lines.  Finally, the problems associated with walking the Straight Path and seeing the Mercy of God in everything are similar to the ones we encountered in reflecting on the self and the heart.  Basically it is that very common illusion of ourselves as this solid entity which is separate from God and in charge of our own lives as it were.  It is what Abhishiktananda (and others) called “dualism” but it has all kinds of ramifications.  Let us listen to Merton again:

“And so the great sign of Mercy is that a person is able to see

the good in everything that is and go along with it…. To see that in

Everything That Is is the Mercy of God, and therefore to prefer

nothing else…that is the approach….  The average person who stands

outside the will of God…and looks in,…he does not understand that

really everything is willed by God and he makes choices, and…he

makes his own plans, and he submits them to God.  His idea of the

the Mercy of God is that, he makes his plans, and then God, being

merciful to him helps him so that it pans out the way he wants…that’s

kind of a common thing….  The only basic thing that the Sufis say

about it is that a man who lives in that realm doesn’t really know

what’s cooking.  He has the wrong idea of how things are set up.  In

other words, he thinks that he is able to stand outside of all this, and

make plans, and size things up, and then submit them to God, and

then he and God are going to work things out on basis of appeal….”

But as Ibn Arabi says:  “Those who are veiled from the truth ask the Absolute to show mercy upon them each in his own particular way.”

Merton continues speaking of such a “veiling”:  [It]….”is the underlying of a basically insufficient concept of who we are and of how we function in relation to God, and this insufficient concept is the concept that we all have [my emphasis].  It is the basic assumption that we all start from.  That we are all somehow or other completely a little world by ourselves and in the center of this little world of our own is our own mind down in there figuring things out.  And if you stop and think, we consider ourselves more or less like sort of a turtle in a shell…there’s your turtle and inside this little shell, this little metaphysical shell, which is the self, inside there is the living being, hidden from everything, figuring things out.  And we think that this living center, which is within the center of ourselves, is kind of walled off from everything else.  And here we are, because this is what we experience, this is the only thing that we experience directly as reality, and we take this to be reality.  We take the turtle inside our shell, which is there, the self, which down in there, we experience this as reality and we start from there.  And we judge everything in reference to that, and everything that we see that we experience through the senses, immediately,…is the outside, and then way up behind the whole thing somewhere is God.  And we say, ‘now look God, here’s me and here’s them, now fix it so that everything works out.’  But that’s not the way it is.  It is not like that.  It’s quite a different proposition…”

The actuality is that the ground of everything is within me and it is the Absolute, the Ultimate Mystery, God; and it is within everybody also.  And there is one ground for everybody, and this ground is the Divine Mercy.  Those “in the know” ask for the Divine Mercy to subsist in them and it does.  Merton again: “This is a totally different outlook.  It is the outlook whereby the Mercy of God is not arranged on the outside in events for me…but it is subsisting in me all the time.  Therefore what happens is that if the Mercy of God is subsisting in me—and that goes to say if I am…completely united with the will of God in love [adding to Merton: meaning that I am “on the Straight Path”]–it doesn’t matter what happens outside, because everything that is going on outside that makes any sense is grounded in the same ground in which I am grounded.  The opposition between me and everything else ceases, and what remains in terms of opposition is purely accidental and it doesn’t matter.  And this is…a basic perspective in all…the highest religions.”

Now I grant you that this stuff is not easy to digest, may not make sense, and can be expressed in other ways perhaps.  Like I mentioned before it is susceptible to the kinds of misunderstandings that Buddhist detachment and the Tao of Taoism underwent at the hands of Western thinkers and Christian apologists.  It would be easier to write about methods of meditation and prayer, the role of poverty and humility, the value of ritual, etc.; but, alas, we are attempting to put something down on “Foundations & Fundamentals” and trying to find those elements which might be shared by more than one tradition.  If this stuff doesn’t connect with you, no problem, set it aside, but don’t abandon it, and maybe one day it will light up in your heart.  That too is being on the Straight Path; that too is an Awakening of the Heart; that too is grounded in Mercy.  Better than pretending to understand some words….   Let us conclude with some more Merton:

“…and incidentally, these are the kind of perspectives that today are

not very much in fashion.  This isn’t the sort of stuff that people are

getting wildly excited about, but it’s something fundamental.  If a

person has a grasp of this kind of thing, he has the sort of thing that

religions exist to give  to man and the sort of thing that we ask from

religion, because it gives a person an inner strength which nothing

can assail, a strength which is not based on some gimmick or other, it

is based on God.  It helps the person to break through to the realm in

which he is in fact immediately united with God.  And in which he is

directly supported by God, I mean, in which God cannot fail him.

The Sufis are the fellows who try to get down to this real basic level,

and one of the things that they claim about themselves is that they are

seeking purity of heart..the purity of heart of a Sufi is non-preference,

not preferring anything to What Is, taking What Is straight, without

adding onto it any other preference, without substituting something

for it….  The perfect Sufi [and the perfect monk: my addition] is lost

in God.  He that is absorbed in the Beloved and has abandoned all else

is a Sufi [and a true monk].”

To illustrate Merton’s words let me end as I began, on a Zen note (though there is a Desert Father story which is almost an exact equivalent!):

A Zen monk was living as a hermit outside a small town.  A young woman who got pregnant outside marriage tried to cover up her situation by accusing the monk of fathering the child.  The townsfolk cursed him, and when the child was born they brought the baby to the monk and told him this was his and he should take care of it.  All he said was, “Is that so?  He took the child and took care of it with affection and compassion.  Some time passed and the girl felt guilty and confessed that the monk was innocent.  So the townspeople came to the monk and told him it was all a mistake, the child was not his, he need not care for it and can turn the child over to the mother.  The only thing the monk said is, “Is that so?” and handed the child back to the mother.

There are unsuspected depths to these stories!  Truly this monk was on the Straight Path!

 A.   A Kind of Personal Inventory.  It’s good to do this every once in a while–  to list the authors who have helped, who have influenced, who have shaped you the most in your spiritual journey, and who have had the greatest impact on your vision of the spiritual path.  I see that I really need three lists!

The first list is as described, and I will limit myself to the “top ten”:

1. Merton  —  certainly at the top of my list and probably so for a lot of other people.
2. The Desert Fathers, and the men & women of the desert tradition however named or unnamed — for me the sine qua non of Christian monastic life
3.  The author of the Gospel of John
4.  Al-Hallaj
5.  Dostoievesky and his creation Fr. Zosima
6.  Eckhart
7.  Abhishiktananda
8.  Han Shan
9.  Ibn ‘Arabi
10. The authors of the Philokalia

So that is my “top ten” list!  I think this covers a lot of bases, and it is interesting to see the differences here.  I mean there are the “loquacious ones” who speak volumes about mysticism, like Eckhart and Ibn Arabi; and then there are the silent, terse ones, who are very down to earth, like the Desert Fathers and Han Shan.  But I feel I don’t do justice to a whole bunch of other people who have been very helpful to me, and if I don’t put them on some list also it just won’t feel right!!  So I have a “2^nd team” as it were, a back-up group who pinch-hit whenever needed, and here are they:

11.Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu
12. Plato and his whole tradition
13. Karl Rahner
14. Rabia
15.  Gandhi
16.  Andre Louf
17.  Thoreau and Edward Abbey
18.  The rest of the New Testament
19. Kallistos Ware

By the way, I do not impute any significance to the numbering—there is no ranking implied except in the case of Merton, who would be #1 on my list.  Now, a third list is more like a “to do” list—of people, of books, of lines of thought that I need to  “hang out” with more than I have in the past.  They are calling to me for a little more attention!  And here is that list:

II.      Hui-Neng

III.     St. Isaac the Syrian

IV.     John of the Cross

V.      Titus Burckhardt and Martin Lings on Sufism

VI.     Chinese and Japanese hermits and poets

VII.   Tauler and Ruysbroeck

VIII.  Russian theology and spirituality

IX.     Hadewijch and Hildegard

X.      A. Coomarswamy

So be it. Surely there have been all kinds of other authors that have inspired or informed me, but these are the ones I connect with the most.  So much for the inventory.  Needless to say this list will change in a year or so!

B.    The recent news from Afghanistan has been exceedingly sad.  That soldier that went bezerk and shot up all those people, killing 9 children and 3 women among his victims, what an enormous tragedy.  The root cause of this kind of thing is not one man’s mental state but a whole state of war.  War will create these kinds of things.  There is no such thing as a “nice war,” where atrocities do not happen.  The US is very adept at pretending that it can unleash the violence of war and still somehow “control” it or contain it.  It’s all part of the high-tech gadgetry we now use to kill people.  President Obama is relying more on these Predator Drones to kill “our enemies” from the air, from way up there, so our hands our seemingly clean even as we say, “Ooops, sorry, we got the wrong house!”  Or we kill American citizens without due process of law, like a trial where they could defend themselves.  But of course this is small stuff compared to the fire bombing of a German city in WWII when we incinerated thousands of civilians, men, women and children. Or the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima.  The message is “if you attack us, somebody pays for it 10x, 100x, 1000x.” Today we try to sanitize the violence of war through our mass media, but then something like this happens and it is impossible to disguise.  Needless to say even the burning of the Quran a few weeks ago was a hideous act, a sacrilege indeed.  Already an indication how unraveling it all is over there.

So what are we doing over there?  What is the point of this war—any war really?  Both Democrats and Republicans are implicated in this war.  Afghanistan is extremely rich in its hidden resources, but it is one of the poorest countries in the world today.  Consider this:  right now we are spending close to 10 billion dollars a month on this war alone.  And only a couple of months of the war costs more than the whole GDP of Afghanistan for a year.  Also, the cost of this war is hurting our own country real bad.  Of that 10 billion, 40%, or 4 billion each month is borrowed money, adding to our debt.  Just think what that kind of money could do for education or health care costs…..

President Obama says that he will be bringing the troops home…soon.  Not soon enough.  And the Predator Drones will keep flying….and trust me we will have a large military base in Afghanistan like we do in Iraq now and in dozens of other countries.  The American Empire continues to grow no matter who is president….because ultimately we are run by the multinational corporations and do their bidding.

In another direction, but in the same vein, please read this account of Sister Dianna Ortiz:

http://www.truthout.org/shackled-memory-torture/1331589695

C.   Mysticism.  I have used that word a lot in recent postings, so I felt I should post an advisory about its various meanings or uses.  It is not an unambiguous term, nor is it free of some dubious associations.  First of all, the word has been appropriated by the New Age Movement, and there it has taken on meanings almost at complete variance from its original meaning.  This is especially true of Sufi materials that have been lifted from their traditional matrix by New Agers and turned into something quite different, a real distortion.  Even in general usuage the word has taken on colorations never really there in the beginning.  Titus Burckhardt, a Sufi and a scholar, has this to say:  “Scientific works commonly define Sufism as ‘Muslim mysticism’ and we too would readily adopt the epithet ‘mystical’ to designate that which distinguishes Sufism from the simply religious aspect of Islam if that word still bore the meaning given it by the Greek Fathers of the early Christian Church and those who followed their spiritual line: they used it to designate what is related to knowledge of ‘the mysteries.'”  And the greatest of “the mysteries” is the “union of God and the human person,” or to put it another way, “the Presence of God in the Heart.”  And there are other ways of putting it.

In any case, what must not be confused with mysticism in this proper sense is the panoply of phenomena which might be delusional, psychic, paranormal or just a kind of physical trick.  There are people in all traditions who are engrossed with these kind of phenomena.  Just like the good old word, “metaphysics” has been degraded in pop culture to weird things, so has mysticism.

There is one more bit of confusion to clear up.  Often, especially in Christian circles, mysticism is connected with a kind of ecstatic devotional love whereas a cool intellectual demeanor is looked upon as “not mystical.”  Let us borrow a few terms from our Hindu friends to help us out.  The Hindus have this sharp differentiation between religious paths that are “jnana,” the path of knowledge; “bhakti,” the path of love and devotion; and they have a third which we won’t touch here, “karma,” the way of action and service(Gandhi would be a key example of this one).  Now both Sufis and Christian contemplatives have similar differentiations except they are not so clearly or distinctly marked out–the lines can get quite blurred.  So St. Francis would be a bhakti; while Eckhart and John of the Cross, a jnani.  And among the Sufis Rumi, Rabia, and al-Hallaj would be in the bhakti camp while Ibn Arabi in the jnani camp.  However all this is a bit facile, and actually the Sufis truly have a good understanding how both knowledge and love relate and interweave in any healthy mysticism.  In fact they have a very deep theology about all that.  It is never simply one or the other, and both are present to varying degrees and varying temperments.  The important thing to note is that mysticism is never of “one color.”

D.  This poem was brought to my attention by a friend.  It comes from an 18^th Century Japanese Zen monk/layman, Gekka Gensho.  He lived in a monastery for about 40 years, then left and lived in Kyoto as a layman:

     Making the busy streets my home

right down in the heart of things

only one friend shares my poverty

a scrawny wooden staff;

having learned the ways of silence

amidst the noise of urban life

taking things as they come to me

now everywhere I am is true.

Truly profound.  Beautiful.  Right at the heart of what it means to be a monk, but not clothed with the credentials of monasticism.  Now we can push this a bit further and ask:  why “everywhere I am is true”?  Why indeed?  Each tradition, including the Zen one from which this poem emanates, has its own way of dealing with such a question, but I think my Sufi friends have the deepest insight(insight=”seeing into…).  Simply put they live and breathe every breath with the knowledge that the ground of every place and every moment is Mercy and Compassion.  This is not a matter of sentimentality; nor is it really an easy thing to say–in fact it can be in certain circumstances an outrageous thing to say.  But for those who “know”….   But much more about that in our next Foundations Series!

In our “Foundations” series this is easily my favorite topic–and quite difficult as it engages the previous three parts in new depths. Thus we will be revisiting them as we go along. Let us review where we have touched base: Part I, The Real; Part II, The Mystery & The Knowing; and Part III, The Self. One thing to note immediately: the use of the word “The” in front of each noun is not just a stylistic move. We are not talking about just any “mystery,” but the mystery, the Ultimate Mystery, God. In each and every case the underlying reality is the Divine Reality. Or as Abhishiktananda once whimsically whispered to his dear close friend Murray Rogers, “Mooory, perhaps there is only God!” Already we are swimming in deep waters! So what do you want to awaken to? This question describes the essence of the spiritual journey.

Let us begin in an unusual place– with two religious women of the modern era whom popular piety has made into extraordinary role models: Therese of Lisieux and Mother Teresa of India. We are not going to look at their extraordinary lives or example, but at something quite different: both shared deeply in an experience that was termed by John of the Cross as the “dark night.” It is well documented through their letters, through their writings and through what people close to them heard from them, that Mother Teresa during a period of over 2 decades and Therese for the last year of her life suffered incredible interior desolation. This is not just a case of feeling lost or having made mistakes or dejected by failure, etc. This is a desolation beyond any description. It is a case of a deeply and intensely religious person losing all sense of God, and even more the very idea of the existence of God and faith itself seeming as a mirage—like a person dying of thirst in the desert and grabbing for a handful of sand…. This could be crushing to a person’s psyche no matter how short such an experience (and indeed some psyches do break down and succumb to drink or some other relief and our age is very tolerant and plentiful of such “reliefs”), but imagine Mother Teresa having to endure this for decades and still continue in her work. And it appears that even on her deathbed she never came out of that tunnel in this life.

Whether such experience is a prerequisite to all mystical journeys is not clear. Western Christian mysticism is replete with such accounts(even with poets like T. S. Eliot), and Sufi masters also report many such similar experiences. In fact it was once thought that John of the Cross “stole” some of his ideas and language from some great Sufi mystics, but now we recognize that both sides have their own version with its own integrity. Now someone like Abhishiktananda who drew so much from the Advaitic mysticism of Hinduism seems to be totally free of such experience, but then we don’t really know what would have happened if he had lived longer. In any case, not all journeys are the same and one has to take that into account. And we have to avoid at all costs the kinds of evaluations, comparisons and “rankings” that make one prefer this tradition of mysticism to that one. Trust me, when you are real, there is no choosing, no “shopping” for a spiritual way, no copying of another’s way. It’s either real with you or it isn’t, no matter what anyone says in any book. And incidentally Eastern Christians also tend to deny that such experiences are part of their mysticism, but I wouldn’t be so hasty. Recall that other spiritual giant of the 20th Century, Staretz Silouan of Mt. Athos, or now St. Silouan. His mysterious words, those words which he heard in his heart: “Keep your mind in hell and despair not”—these words may be interpreted precisely as a harbinger of that “dark night” for indeed what is “hell” but the very absence of God. Silouan, that great hesychast, entered the great dark emptiness and made his home there night after night in prayer because…..

Ah, but let us not jump too far ahead of ourselves. So what does all this have to do with our topic, the heart and the awakening? Here Merton (in speaking of Sufi mysticism) will help us out:

“The basic thing in Sufism then is…the awakening to total awareness and to a real deep sense of the Reality of God. Not…a sense of God as object, not a sense of God as thing…not that we see God over there or out there or up there…and it is even to a great extent beyond this I/Thou dichotomy, because I would say that one of the characteristic things that affects mystical awareness of God is that it is somehow subjective. That is to say, an awareness of God as Subject, an awareness that God is within my own subjectivity, that He is the root of my own personality so that I do not see Him as somebody else entirely and yet He is Totally Other.” Now the really important part for us at this moment is the first half of his statement. What happens to people who have a very strong religious will that has been educated to focus on God and to “please” God is that inevitably they place God somewhere “out there.” The Reality of God is another object in the world of objects that vies for their attention, albeit through religious language and symbolism and involving a very sincere and heartfelt piety, that vies for their attention among all the other objects of what seems like reality. So God “becomes” their friend, their brother, their lover, their liberator, etc, but truly they do not yet know and love God as He calls them to an unspeakable intimacy beyond all intellectual distinctions and symbols. These metaphors and images are good and serve a useful purpose in a life of piety and service, but the true seeker is called to something far beyond–to a knowledge and a love that will entail a kind of death. The Sufis call it “fana,” extinction!

So at some point for the prayerful and true “seeker of God,” who already feels the “gravitational pull” of the Presence, it may happen that the “gushing spring” of their piety suddenly dries up. Their religious life that has been under the control of their ego self, even unconsciously and unbeknownst to them as they are probably very used to speaking the language of renunciation and spirituality and maybe monasticism, that religious life has to die; or perhaps to put it better, it has to be liberated from the ego self, from its grasp and control. But something even more important will also be taking place at this time. All notions of the reality of God will vanish and seem unreal. What is happening then is that the senses and the intellect are being weaned away from those “mirages” of God’s Presence which we so ably construct, even subconsciously and sometimes with much feeling and thought and energy and will-power. What is happening is, in Eckhart-like language: we are “losing God” in order to “gain God.” What is happening is that what is truly Real, what is the Ultimate Mystery, is now our sole reality; and because it can never be limited or fully symbolized or ever be simply an object out there, even as a friend, as another “Thou” somewhere “out there,” everything in us and about us will feel an unspeakable emptiness–and maybe for a long time. Because truly there is nothing, (or as some would put it) no-thing, “out there”—meaning that which is of ultimate concern to us is not a “something” or even a “someone” somewhere out there, and that means even within our own intellect and psychology and its feelings and emotions. What is happening is the person discovering his/her true heart and its awakening, a truly different reality–which is not possible as long as we objectify “our heart,” our relationship to God, and God Himself. But the darkness of the awakening is only the paradoxical emergence of a “Wholly Other” Light that is still somehow our light but which cannot be objectified.

So finally we have come to our topic: the heart! The best sources for understanding this topic come from the Christian Hesychasts and the Islamic Sufis with a hefty portion of Abhishiktananda’s Advaitic mysticism thrown in. To be sure there are examples and insights in other traditions that may run very deep and true, but we are already in danger of being too scattered! So what is the meaning of any discourse about this reality of “the heart”? Let us listen to the hesychast scholar and bishop-monk, Kallistos Ware: “It means that the human person is a profound mystery, that I understand only a very small part of myself, that my conscious ego-awareness is far from exhausting the total reality of my authentic Self. But it signifies more than that. It implies that in the innermost depths of my heart I transcend the bounds of my created personhood and discover within myself the direct unmediated presence of the living God. Entry into the deep heart means that I experience myself as God-sourced, God-enfolded, God-transfigured.”

And Merton again: “Sufism looks at the human person as a heart and a spirit and a secret, and the secret is the deepest part. The secret of man is God’s secret; therefore, it is in God. My secret is God’s innermost knowledge of me, which He alone possesses. It is God’s secret knowledge of myself in Him, which is a beautiful concept. The heart is the faculty by which man knows God….” And so here we add the notion of self-knowledge. An Arabic word that often stands for “Sufism” in the texts is ma’rifah which simply means “knowledge” or “recognition”—but this is a very deep and special knowledge, not one gained from books or just the intellect. This kind of knowledge that both the Sufis and the Hesychasts talk about demands knowing one’s innermost deep self, and this so-called self-knowledge is a prerequisite for knowing God. Here again, it will not be a simple knowledge of subject-object which makes up the world of the ego self. However, a direct knowledge of self and God will flow freely when there is purity of heart. “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” And so what you awaken to can also be expressed in another metaphor as in Eckhart’s words: “The eye [of the Heart] with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” End of duality! Indeed, and actually then you see all of reality that is truly “out there” very differently. Consider the following words of a modern Sufi master, the Moroccan Shaikh ad-Darqawi, who relates this experience during one of his prayer sessions:

“I was in a state of remembrance and my eyes were lowered and I heard a voice say: ‘He is the First and the Last and the Outwardly Manifest and the Inwardly Hidden.’ I remained silent, and the voice repeated it a second time, and then a third, whereupon I said: ‘As to the First, I understand, and as to the Last, I understand, and as to the Inwardly Hidden, I understand, but as to the Outwardly Manifest, I see nothing but created things.’ Then the voice said: ‘If there were any outwardly manifest other than Himself, I should have told thee.'” [emphasis mine] Recall Abhishiktananda’s words to “Mooory.”

But let us take a few steps back now. Kallistos Ware, commenting on a Macarian Homily: “‘There [the Heart] also is God’: the heart is the place where created personhood becomes transparent to the Divine, where God the Holy Trinity is at work within me. ‘All things are there’: the heart is all-inclusive, all-embracing, a symbol of wholeness, integration, and totality, signifying the human person as an ‘undivided’ unity.” Thus the whole spiritual life and the very meaning of so-called mysticism rests on this “awakening of the Heart.” But listen to Eckhart:

“A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don’t know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox’s or bear’s, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.” And almost every tradition has something similar to say, and we will have to discuss this in another blog posting. But the Sufis put it most profoundly, I think, when they say that we need to “break all the idols” that we carry within ourselves. This is part of the function of a “dark night” experience. (It is not the experience of intense ecstasy or any other physical manifestation that insures the truth of what is going on within ourselves or measures what we might call “progress”; and any attempt to detour self-knowledge is delusional) It is only then that we awaken to the Divine Indwelling in the Heart.

So the Heart has to do with truly knowing and loving God through a very deep and profound self-knowledge. One can and must say that also and at the same time one can only know one’s true self in the light of God. So the two are concurrent, and this is part of the Awakening. As Merton put it in the quote in the beginning, the Awakened Heart will no longer know God as object or even as “another Thou”, but for the Awakened Heart the Reality will spring up from within one’s own “I am.” The “I AM” of God will be within the “I am” of my own subjectivity. Recall Augustine’s famous words:

“God is closer to me than I am to my own self”; and St. Paul’s, “I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me.” These point us in the right direction of what is at stake in the Awakening of the Heart. An additional point: And the Sufis are real strong on this–that the God whom we find in unspeakable communion with our being is not just some “generic God,” but precisely because we find Him in the depths of our own subjective being, there is something very deeply personal about this relationship. Sounds even odd to speak that way, but that’s why those evangelicals who speak of a need to “have a personal relationship with Jesus” are really not far off; they are on the right track, only they have Him too far away as it were and too locked into an image of a friend, a brother, etc. I don’t know how to relate all this to the Upanishadic vision or to Zen; and people who tend to follow those routes, like Abhishiktananda, are not real strong in this regard. We shall discuss this another time. Anyway, for the Sufis and the Hesychasts what is important here is that each and every person (and indeed every being) is called by God by a name known only to God, and our whole life and our whole being, our whole existence is a saying of “Here I am.” And each and every creature is saying that as it exists, and because it is being called into existence by Love, so each and every person’s proper way of responding, “Here I am,” is by love–and here again we shall discuss this later. Now at the same time, in the depths of our Heart, we have an infinitely unique name for God by which we call Him. It is the Name by which he has become “My God,” not just a generic ruler of the universe! And the marvel is of course that He himself has placed that Name in my Heart, and the name by which He calls me and the Name by which I call Him become one Name in Love, and this constitutes my truest and deepest uniqueness. Merton again: “The desire of God is tied up in our hearts with this deep sense, the deepest thing in our nature, not that He is a god, not that He is God or the Supreme Being, but that he is Our God, that He is My God. When Jesus says on the cross, “My God why has thou forsaken me?” it isn’t just God, it is “My God.” Sufism is a particular way of realizing that “Yes” in a total love, a total surrender of ourselves to God.” And in another place, Merton again: “…the Sufis have this beautiful development of what this secret really is: it is the word ‘yes’ or the act of ‘yes.’ It is the secret affirmation which God places in my heart, a ‘yes’ to Him. And that is God’s secret. he knows my ‘yes’ even when I am not saying it.” This is that “Here am I” that I was referring to. And in a sense this is the key to what the Hesychasts call Prayer of the Heart, but about that also another time.

So it must be emphasized that it is in the very ground of one’s own being and subjectivity, one’s deepest sense of “I am,” that it is in this true nothingness we become the very ground of God’s Presence and Manifestation and Love–again, like Moses’s Burning Bush, or the Desert Father “becoming all fire.” This requires a deep plunge into the depths of one’s self because we are not speaking here of the ego self’s “I am” that we broadcast to the world with all its credentials–but it is true also that the deep self is always there at our fingertips as it were, as we are washing the dishes or taking a walk or bandaging someone’s wounds, etc.–we are always grounded in Ultimate Mystery, surrounded by Ultimate Mystery, facing Ultimate Mystery, and without any need for any words or formulas. That’s why I think there are some very deep mystics among us who don’t even realize what their sensitivity means, but that’s ok. Abhishiktananda summed up the whole spiritual journey in one phrase: the total surrender of the peripheral ego to Absolute Mystery. Another of his profound contributions in this area is his criticism of any spirituality that would “superimpose” the Reality of God on the rest of life, which was extremely common for the religious of his time and even now. With the Awakened Heart there is nothing that we do that is not the ground of realization and mysticism. Abhishiktananda said that the most contemplative religious he ever knew was that busy nursing sister, Mother Theophane, who was his friend at Indore and who took care of him as he was dying.

Let us conclude this mere introduction to our topic with the words of a great modern Sufi scholar, Seyyed Hossein Nasr:

Through quintessential prayer, within the framework of an orthodox tradition, one reaches the inner heart, where God as the All-Merciful resides, and by penetration into the heart-center, man moves beyond the realm of outwardness and the domain of individual existence to reach the abode of inwardness and the universal order. In that state his heart becomes the eye with which he sees God and also the eye with which God sees him. In that presence he is nothing in himself, as separate existence. He is but a mirror whose surface is nothing, and yet reflects everything. In the heart, the spiritual man lives in intimacy with God, with the Origin of all those theophanies whose outward manifestations constitute all the beauty that is reflected in the world around us. He lives in that inner garden, that inner paradise, constantly aware of the ubiquitous Gardener. On the highest level of realization, man becomes aware that all theophanies are nothing but the Source of those theophanies, that the house itself is nothing but the reflection of the Master of the house, that there is in fact but one Reality which , through its infinite manifestations and reflections upon the mirrors of cosmic existence, has brought about all that appears to us as multiplicity and otherness, and all the apparent distinctions between I and thou, he and they, we and you. At the center of the heart, there resides but one Reality above and beyond all forms. It was to this Reality, far beyond all individual manifestations, that Mansur al-Hallaj was referring when he sang:

I saw my Lord with the eyes of my heart; I asked Him, Who are Thou? He said, Thou.

Amen!

Recently on the CNN website there was an interesting little reflection on the Bible. The author was trying to illustrate the “messiness” of the Bible and how there is a religious culture out there that has been too successful in “sanitizing” the language and the ideas in that remarkable book. The author is Steven James, and here is the link to the reflection:

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/25/my-take-stop-sugarcoating-the-bible/?hpt=hp_c1

Very well put, but I don’t think the author goes far enough or deep enough. Certainly it is worthwhile to bring to the fore the rough edges of the people of the Bible and the fact that they are not “prayer-card saints.” But the author only hints at a much deeper problem and dilemma for the true believer, if only he/she opens their eyes or perhaps we should say open their ears for the Word of God is meant to be heard.

All of us in the Christian tradition consider the Bible the “Word of God,” but what we exactly mean by that can vary quite a bit and what authority we attribute to this text can also vary. I am not going to discuss all that, but what I want to point at is a problem regardless of your place within the Christian tradition or how much you rely on the Bible as the “Word of God.” There is this little problem that in the Bible God seems to condone, indeed even orders, some “unsocial behavior,” like pillaging and stealing, like genocide and murder, and a host of other rather nasty actions. Consider the following: If the parents of a son find his behavior reprehensible and find him disobedient, they can bring him to the elders of the town and say: “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard. Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death.” (Dt 21:20-21). No unruly teenagers then!! “Tommy if you don’t clean up your room we are going to take a walk to see the elders!” Sorry, couldn’t resist that one….. Now the real problem here is that this is presented as the Law of God, as the law given to Israel by God. Conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists who believe that every word in the Bible was actually dictated by God should have a real problem with this kind of passage—except that they usually don’t; they just ignore it because it would create anxiety about their “theory of inspiration.” Liberal Protestants and most Catholics who have a more nuanced idea of divine inspiration say that you need to read such passages within a larger context in order to understand what is really going on. In other words, don’t get lost in minute details that may in fact have very human limitations, but look at the larger story of God’s call and promise, etc., etc. Ok, that sounds nice, but it leaves me wondering. There are just too many such passages, and I can’t get over that the Book PRESENTS God in that way. Another example: “A man or a woman who is a medium or a wizard shall be put to death; they shall be stoned to death….” (Lev 20: 27). Just an aside: God is presented as very liberal with the death penalty. “When the daughter of a priest profanes herself through prostitution, she profanes her father; she shall be burned to death” (Lev21: 9). And then this: “When the Israelites were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the sabbath day. Those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses, Aaron, and to the whole congregation. They put him in custody, because it was not clear what should be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him outside the camp'” (Numbers 15: 33-35).

Now all the above pertains to so-called God-given laws concerning individual actions. But there are even more troubling things yet! When the Israelites are liberated by God from Egypt, they are directed again by God to enter this particular land and make it their own. Only one little problem: there are people there already. Not to worry, just listen to the Lord: “But the Lord said to Moses, ‘Do not be afraid of him; for I have given him into your hand, with all his people, and all his land. You shall do to him as you did to Sihon of the Amorites….’ So they killed him, his sons, and all his people, until there was no survivor left; and they took possession of the land”(Numbers 21: 34-35). And then there is this lovely moment in salvation history: “The Lord said to me, ‘See, I have begun to give Sihon and his land over to you. Begin now to take possession of his land.’ So when Sihon came out against us, he and all his people for battle at Jahaz, the Lord our God gave him over to us; and we struck him down, along with his offspring and all his people. At that time we captured all his towns, and in each town we utterly destroyed men, women, and children. We left not a single survivor. Only the livestock we kept as spoil for ourselves, as well as the plunder of the towns that we had captured”(Dt 2: 31-35). But then we reach a kind of crescendo of “justified” genocide in this remarkable passage: “When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace. If it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you in forced labor. If it does not submit to you peacefully, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all males to the sword. You may, however, take as your booty the women, the children, livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil…. Thus shall you treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not towns of the nations here. But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them–the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and Jebusites–just as the Lord your God has commanded….”(Dt 20: 10-17).

Enough of these wretched passages! Now some may be saying that I am totally ignoring the New Testament; that’s where the “good stuff,” the “real stuff” is…. Fair enough, but has anyone recently read the Book of Revelation. A very violent text, and it seems written by someone on a bad acid trip or having ingested some bad peyote! Educated Christians will tell you that this language has to be read symbolically. (And indeed there are problematic texts in all the major world religions and something similar is usually deployed in order to “save the text”.) Not bad for an answer, but you have to admit there is something jarring about this language that makes it not seem in accord with the major thrust of the New Testament. Of course that is so true of such a large part of the Old Testament as we have indicated above. And so the Christian tradition has developed various strategies for dealing with this, and one of them is the “spiritualizing,” the “allegorizing,” the “symbolizing” of the problematic texts. The Church Fathers and the medieval monks were especially masters in this art. I mean you had to be if you were a monk and had to chant all those psalms every day, more so than we do today, and deal with all that violent language that seemed so much against the grain of the Gospels. So you turned that language into a message about something else.

This kind of strategy works up to a point, but there is one serious flaw that people tend to overlook. That kind of language tends to infiltrate one’s subconscious, one’s heart and mind, one’s worldview, etc. And it lives there alongside the language of the Gospel, not displaced by it. Inevitably it rears its ugly head in various ways through the centuries. There is a famous speech by (St.) Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian monastic leader, rallying French Christians to one of the crusades, and the language and spirit is right out of that early Biblical world. He urges them to slaughter the Moslems and liberate Jerusalem. And that language was already used against the Albigensians even earlier, living right there in France. And just think of all those heretics which the Church led to torture and burning, thousands upon thousands. And Protestents who think that was a “Catholic problem,” please take a look at Protestent Switzerland and the Puritans in colonial America and Oliver Cromwell, etc. And then there were the Serb Christians who massacred their own Moslem neighbors just a few decades ago. I suggest it is that language and imagery lurking in the Christian subconscious mind that at least assists and empowers such evils. Incidentally, the genocide of Native Americans started in colonial America, both in the Protestant Puritan colonies and in Catholic Spanish areas, and how the early accounts are couched in religious terms! Even our secular spirit of “American exceptionalism” as our leaders like to term it, which seems to give us immunity to commit war crimes and wage wars, has its roots in that old Biblical blindness.

Needless to say this Biblical problem is not unique to people of faith. Genocide, violence, etc. can be found quite easily in secular ideologies like communism or fascism to an almost unimaginable degree; and its manifestations are also present in all the major world religions. So it is, first and foremost, a human problem; but it is very important to see how the Bible is implicated and ensnared in this. Now let us see how we can pry open a door just a little bit to maybe get a glimpse of a way out of this dilemma without trashing the Book.

We have already mentioned the “spiritualizing” approach and its serious limitations, but there were some earlier attempts also–that failed also.

One attempted way out was proposed in early Christianity, as already many Christians felt uneasy with some of these elements in the Bible. It was proposed that you simply separate the Old Testament from the New Testament in a rigid way and simply reject the Old Testament as a mistake or failure of sorts. You dumped the Old Testament in the trash can. This was deemed a heresy by the early Church. You simply can’t do that because the writings of the New Testament depend on the Old Testament, are connected to them, and see themselves as grounded in the Old Testament. But even more importantly the very person of Jesus did not reject the Old Testament. And here we come to a crucial point. It is actually in the very person of Jesus that we find a way to transcend our dilemma. Jesus arises out of the whole messy and bloody context of the Old Testament, and he is totally and culturally connected with it and its language and its history, but the amazing thing is that even given all that he subverts that history and language, deconstructs its dark messages, and overthrows all notions of God that are limited and colored by that history and language. He does all that from within its own parameters, without as it were “cleaning the slate and starting fresh”–which would have indicated him as a kind of “outsider” to the human condition.

Consider the following: In the Gospel of Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is presented as a new lawgiver, in the mode of Moses. Read it carefully and you will see that while the framing of the discourse is well within the “Moses tradition,” the “Moses language” is being turned inside out, emptied out, vacuumed out, washed out, and then something wholly new is put back in its place with an amazing feel of real continuity with the old stuff. When you get to the end of the Sermon, you sense that something new has taken place here, replacing the old. It is labelled a sermon, and Jesus is presented as a teacher with authority–he is not just spinning ideas from the top of his head but this is coming from somewhere deep within him. Recall that this Sermon takes place immediately after the Baptism narrative and the period of trial in the desert. As we have said in earlier blog postings, Jesus comes out of these experiences with his new found sense of identity as “Son of God,” as one with Yahweh in an unimaginable intimacy. Thus he speaks with authority, but the authority is used in a very interesting way—certainly not to lord it over people but actually to be divinely subversive. I recall when I was teaching school in the early 1970s that one of my favorite books on education theory was a book with a title something like: Teaching As A Subversive Activity. The idea was that at the bottom of it all the teacher’s main job was to empower his students to unmask the various ideologies that impoverished their hearts, their minds, their lives. In this sense we can say that Jesus was practicing “Preaching as a subversive activity”!! And this is only one example. No wonder they put him to death! After this sermon, if you really take it in, you cannot read the Old Testament the same way, not even its nice passages. Even when the Law reads nicely, the very idea of the Law has been deconstructed and “re-visioned” so that a whole new dynamic is present. Yet Jesus is still presented as a traditional law-giver–so both continuity and discontinuity are present in Jesus.

Another example: Consider in the Gospel of John, chapter 8, 1-11, the woman caught in adultery. What an amazing scene! The woman has been caught in adultery, and the law of the Old Testament is very clear that she should be stoned to death. The Taliban, among others, still practice such things today. In any case, note how Jesus does not argue with the accusers—he is NOT a lawyer! He is not trying to get her “off.” He does not reject the law or its context or its history. Neither is he attacking the law itself or any interpretation of the law. This is so remarkable! Again, a sense of something new emerges, something new unfolding, a new reality. It is so amazing that it makes the old law impotent. The accusers cannot act. The old law has been subverted, deconstructed, replaced in such a quiet way that you don’t even realize it. Don’t get fooled by the simplicity of Jesus’s words—they are not simple, and there is so, so much buried in them.

Now what is going on in these kinds of passages, what is really at stake here: it is our very image of God, our vision of the Mystery of God, our very sense of God is being redefined from within the tradition. Nothing less than that. And the climax of all that is of course Jesus on the cross. Those of us in the Christian tradition believe in the ultimate value of this vision and what it reveals about God. (Incidentally that’s why I believe the crucifix as religious symbol is so far superior than just the cross.) So, so striking that Jesus is crucified for blasphemy. The Law would have had him “only” stoned, but the Romans added their touch. So this is the ultimate subversion of that Law— when we see Jesus on the cross we see where THAT can take us. Jesus on the cross throws us into a world “beyond Law,” and it reveals all law in its human limitations (and thus also the Book, which contains the Law, and thus also the Church which claims the Book.)

The Jerusalem religious elite turned this Jewish man over to the Romans because in their historical situation only the Romans could do what the law demanded: execution. (Incidentally, there is something eerie about the parallelism here because the Church authorities during the Inquisition never executed any heretics–they always turned them over to the state authorities for that unpleasant job–so some church apologists want to excuse the church from the horrors of the Inquisition.) Thus veneration of the Cross on Good Friday is especially significant ( and so subversive)–gaze on it with your heart’s eyes. But there is even something more remarkable if we consider this moment “from God’s side” as it were. In Jesus on the cross, God comes to join ALL the victims of the Law! Recall that old Black Spiritual, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” In Jesus on the cross, God says YES I was there when they tortured and burned each and every one of those children of mine deemed as heretics; Yes, I was there with my Moslem children as they were slaughtered by the Christians; Yes, I was there when the Native Americans were being massacred. And so on. And so on. No need to make a catalog of nightmares. And if you still want an explanation for all that, I will simply refer you to the most unusual spiritual master, Dostoyevsky in Brothers Karamazov, for he understood Christianity and the human heart better than all our church leaders ever did. So at the end of this tunnel lies Good Friday. And a vision of that Ultimate Mystery which we call God that in Jesus on the cross makes us transcend all our laws, all our books, all our ideas. Beyond that is a silent waiting for something even yet more astounding, but here only real silence is possible. And maybe pancakes!