The Ground of Faith

CHRISTIAN WORSHIP IN A WORLD OF DYING AND EMERGING IMAGES OF GOD.

William Livingstone Wallace (Bill)

I take as my starting point the assumption that the deepest desire of human beings is to be at one with someone or something else.

Our experiences of ecstasy occur when the boundaries dissolve between us and the sunset, the plant, the animal, another human being or God. The paradox of these experiences is that in losing our sense of having a separate self we encounter a deeper experience of ultimate reality. It is I believe this experience which lies at the heart of the human quest an experience which Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy calls the numinous.

There are three identifiable levels of this process: religion, spirituality and mysticism. In a world of interconnectedness there are no absolutely self contained boxes, but we can speak of levels of the same process. Religion is both humankind’s greatest treasure and greatest curse. At its best it can enhance individual lives, create community and enable people to celebrate life. At its worst it can be utilized in the cause of oppression, injustice and destruction. So, bearing in mind all these limitations let us seek to indicate something of the nature of these three strands of the human journey.

Broadly speaking we can say, as this amended quote from the Encyclopedia of Spirituality by Timothy Freke says,

“Religion is concerned with social cohesion,

Spirituality is concerned with personal transformation,

Mysticism is concerned with transpersonal enlightenment.

And that

Religion is concerned with knowing about God,

Spirituality is concerned with personally experiencing God,

Mysticism is concerned with being one with God.

Spirituality then is the essence of religion while

Mysticism is the essence of spirituality. “

Note: The word God could be replaced with “The Divine”.

Of course as these are not self contained boxes you can find spirituality within religion and mysticism within spirituality. But it is also true that sometimes religion is conspicuously lacking in spirituality and that there are forms of spirituality which make little attempt to access mysticism

Today we are at the threshold of a new stage in the development of human beings, which the German theologian Bonhoeffer called “human beings coming of age”. Until comparatively recently the majority of human beings accepted the idea that human life of necessity had a hierarchical structure. This was embodied in the now deleted verse of the hymn ‘All things bright and beautiful', “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate, God made them both and ordered their estate.” Very few people questioned the contention of St Paul that ‘the powers that be are ordained by God.’ From this perspective Christianity was literally a God-send for the rich and powerful as a mechanism for controlling the rest of the human race. Today, philosophers such as Ken Wilbur in A Theory of Everything are saying that life consists of a holarchy of nests within nests. In nature the ingredients of hierarchies are holons i.e. parts of another whole. Each atom is part of a molecule, each molecule is part of a cell, each cell is part of an organism. So, a hierarchy in nature consists of wholes which are part of other wholes, everything is interrelated and interdependent. Similarly, human beings no longer need to imagine that dependency is the best form of relationship but can increasingly move from dependency to independence and then on to interdependence as in natural hierarchies (holarchies).

This revolution in thinking has tremendous implications for theology. In the past human beings conceived of their relationship with God as primarily one of dependency on an intervening God who lived in a far off place “above the bright blue sky”. Today in the West fewer and fewer people seek to pray to such a God. What is changing is the demise of the belief that our relationship with God is with a Lord of whom we are servants to the understanding which St Paul described as one of being co-workers with God – in other words a change from dependency to interdependency. I have attempted to reflect this change in two of my hymns:

AT THE START OF LIFE’S GREAT JOURNEY

At the start of life’s great journey

Nestled safely in the womb,

We depend upon our mother

For our nurture and our home.

From dependency our travels

Take us on to find the Self

As we claim our independence

And affirm our inner wealth.

But beyond these ways of being

Lies the goal for which we long

Living based on mutual sharing –

Power that makes each person strong.

Come proclaim life’s interweaving -

Cast dependency aside –

Let love’s sharing gift its blessing –

Join the hymn of love’s full tide.

SELAH Publishing

WHEN I PRAY TO YOU FOR HELP

1. When I pray to you for help, O God

Do I hope that you will intervene,

Treating me as powerless as a child

Who can do no more than kick or scream?

As a human being come of age

Help me work with you to earth each dream.

2. We can work together with your power

As we trust the Christ who dwells within

Every human being’s deepest self

And in whom all life is kith and kin –

For the energy that moves the stars

Is the same that breathes within our skin.

3 You are neither ill disposed or deaf

Yet we think we need to change your mind,

Urging you to listen to our prayers

Though our hearts are careless and unkind.

Help us change our rigid ways of thought

And embrace what each of us can find.

4. In the flow of life’s great cosmic stream

We can find the loving which transforms.

As dependencies release their hold

We emerge from thinking which deforms

To discern your just and loving peace,

Peace and growth for life in all its forms.

From The Mystery Telling, vol. 2

A second major change that has occurred has been the gradual demise of the dualistic concept of reality being divided into a physical world and a metaphysical world. While this distinction stretches back as far as Plato it has in recent centuries become a weapon in the armory of theologians who sought to affirm the existence of God in a world which was increasingly being subject to a scientific analysis which left little room for spirit and mystery. If all this could not exist in the realm of science then it must exist, or so the argument goes, in another realm, a metaphysical world which literally means “after” but in practice is used to indicate what is “beyond” the physical world. Unfortunately, the strategy proved to be self-defeating because as belief in another world out there faded, so God became marginalized or even redundant.

This demise of the dualistic notion of two worlds is part of a paradigm shift from belief in a dualistic “either/or” way of thinking to acceptance of the oneness of reality, that is to say to a “both/and” way of thought. There is then a growing awareness that the simplistic dualistic notions can no longer neither explain the complex interweaving realities of the human psyche nor of the cosmos as a whole. We should note however that although the old setting of the so-called metaphysical realities may no longer be tenable, this does not mean that the realities contained within this paradigm have no validity. It also means that the concept of a physical world without spiritual realities is also collapsing. As Dag Hammarskjold said in his book ‘Markings’, “God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance , renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.”

The final proof of spiritual realities lies in experiencing them existentially, that is to say, in our bones and in our gut, rather than exclusively theorizing about them in our head. Nevertheless, without appropriate reference to reason we simply fall back into another dualism. So, in my opinion the most helpful mystics to turn to are ones like Meister Eckhart 1260-1329 who state clearly that there is no two-ness in God and who consequently hold together experience and interpretation, and also head, heart and gut. The consequence of this inclusiveness by most mystics and their emphasis on direct experience of God is that they have often been on a collision course with established religious institutions. This is because these organizations draw much of their power over their adherents through asserting that they control access to God through the wisdom of the hierarchy, through the Scriptures and through the use of authorized liturgies.

At the present moment we stand at the crossroads of belief in God. The old image of a mythic God has already passed its use-by date for an increasing proportion in the Western world. This combined with the growing distaste for the masculine, hierarchical institutions of the church has led to a situation where a recent survey in the UK discovered that while 76% of the participants were interested in spirituality, only about 7% remained committed to regular church attendance (quoted in ‘The Spirituality Revolution, the emergence of contemporary spirituality’ by David Tacey, page l6).

If it is not God who has died but merely an image of God how can we proceed to discover new images of the divine and what would these images look like? Accepting change is not something that comes easily to most human beings. We appear to have a built-in resistance to accepting the reality that life is a process. Consequently, we often exhibit a propensity for attempting to turn what are essentially transitory realities into the fixed and the static. This is nowhere more apparent than in the area of religion; after all religion is usually an objectification of our central attitudes to life.

In order to move more easily from one image to another we need to be clear that the image is never exactly the same thing as the reality which it purports to represent. Since God is the mystery beyond all mysteries, by definition all images of God become idolatrous when we assume that they are an definitive portrayals of the nature of God. As St Paul said “we now see through a glass darkly.” From this it also follows that no religious system contains all the truth about the mystery of God. In fact the more a religion claims to be exclusively true, the less likely it is to embrace the wholeness of God. The divine is far greater than any word cage we can create.

I have attempted to include these thoughts in the following two hymns:

O GOD HOW CAN THERE BE ONE WORLD.

1 O God how can there be one world

When there are many ways

Of morals and of politics,

Of dogma and of praise?

2. Must we forever judge all views

As either right or wrong

Or are there diverse ways to sing

The pilgrim’s wistful song?

3. If we but look inside our depths

We find a complex world

Where multitudes of shadows dance

And images unfold.

4. Beyond this space of many forms

Your mystery, God, we meet

A flame seen through a darkened glass,

A light for travellers’ feet.

5. O Wisdom far beyond the known

Your heart is tender grace,

The grace which helps us glimpse with love

Your presence in each face.

©The Mystery Telling, vol.2

COME LET US DWELL IN THAT PLACE

1. Come let us dwell in that place of great wonder

Housing the pictures of God which we own,

Meeting again both their beauty and anguish,

Choosing the ones where our love feels at home.

2. Pictures on walls can be stored or discarded –

Living requires that our images change

Tracing the growth of new insights and wisdom,

Holding as one the familiar and strange.

3. God give us eyes to discern what is dying:

God give us strength to release what is dead:

Help us to enter your imageless mystery,

Dancing beyond where the pictures have led.

The pictureless space is very frightening to many Western Christians but it is a space familiar to both Eastern and Western mystics. It is often described as nothingness .In the common Western usage nothingness is a synonym for nihilism. Perhaps the distinction can be grasped more easily if we think of the mystical usage as in part meaning no-thingness. If there is only nihilism behind the things of this world the thought of living without them can seem terrifying. If on the other hand the deepest realities of life lie behind the world of things then nothingness can be accepted as a way to access the divine. Indeed it can be said “If you want to find all things enter the nothingness and they will find you.” (Quote from unpublished book “Pathways”)

There are two major forms of spiritual pilgrimage. The first, which is also adopted by psychiatry, is a winding pilgrimage through the various levels and experiences of the human psyche until at last the central core of its nature is reached. The second is the path of apophatic mysticism i.e. that which is obtained by negation. It is the path of Eckhart and of the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and is appropriate for what many people see as the wilderness of this current age.

Eckhart said, “Think of the soul as a vortex or a whirlpool and you will understand how we are to sink eternally from negation to negation into the One,... and how we are to sink eternally from letting go to letting go into God.”

Eckhart also said “God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction. .... Love God as God is, a not-God, a not-mind, a not-person, a not-image. More than this love God as God is, a pure, clear One who is separate from all two-ness.”

(Meditations with Meister Eckhart by Matthew Fox, Bear and Co.)

I have tried to put something of this thought into a type of Christian mantra.

IN THE LETTING GO

In the letting go we find life

For deeper than the striving is the flowing

Deeper than the searching is the knowing

And deeper than the grieving is the mystery

In which darkness and light are one.

©The Mystery Telling, vol.2

This letting go is not something in the past or in the future but is in that space between our thoughts, the place of the paradise of the moment and the experience of full immersion into God.

BETWEEN OUR THOUGHTS

Between our thoughts there lives a space

Where paradise can dwell:

Beyond our ever-turning mind,

Beyond our strangest hell.

There in the quietude of love

The ways of silence reign

The shackles of division break

And we are one again.

With gentleness we take control

Of all that we distort

Until the mind that was in Christ* *Ref: Philippians 2/5

Imbues our every thought.

God of all that brings us peace

Your silence is our rest

Beyond our words the stillness comes

And makes our mind its guest.

But this immersion is into a God who ever seeks to become incarnate into the hurly-burly of life as a force for justice and peace, community and wholeness and who cares for all of the interwoven web of creation. We can then begin to see something of God in all things and in all people.

ALL THINGS OF EARTH

All things of earth are holy,

All things are one in you.

This Earth is filled with your beauty, God,

Charged with your love.

This is not pantheism, that is to say belief that everything is God but panentheism i.e. belief that there is something of God in everything. It is as Nicholas of Cusa said “divinity is in the enfolding of the universe and the universe is the unfolding of divinity.”

Let us now return to the question of what new images there can be of God. The first thing to note is that new images of God are not usually created by committees nor by academic theologians but by poets, artists, and mystics, for these images do not come from the surface level of the rational mind but from the depth of the human psyche. It is not yet clear exactly what all these images will be for many of them have not yet emerged. What is certain is that they will be about a holistic God who is mystery and who is in process. This God will be one who calls us to be co-workers and who is to be found not only in sacred books and traditional liturgies nor even in sacred institutions. Instead it will be a God whose presence can be discerned throughout the world. It will involve a rediscovery of the omnipresent God which the Church has at times apparently denied by its call for him/her to be present.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO COME O GOD

You do not need to come O God

You are already here

You do not need to go O God

You are already there.

It is our minds that need to be aware

It is our hearts O God that need to care.

We are your hands and feet O God

The presence all can see

We are the body and the blood

The Christ in you and me.

It is our minds that need to be aware

It is our hearts O God that need to care.

You do not need to go O God

You are already there.

You do not need to come O God

You are already here.

It is our minds that need to be aware

It is our hearts O God that need to care.

The locus for the initial encounter with this omnipresent God is changing from an out there location to an inner one. It will enable each one of us to affirm the Christ Within whether we call ourselves Christians or not. It will also lead to each of us being able to say that this Inner Christ is The Way, The Truth, The Life, The Bread, The Vine, The Door etc.(See “Deep Within Me”no.40 The Mystery Telling Vol.1) In saying this we are of course in danger of claiming that we are the Christ, which is not the case. We are a holon, a part of a larger whole which traditionally has been described as The Body of Christ. This community of Christ is part of a larger holon, the Community of Humankind and that community is part of the Cosmic community of all that is.

The next change of image of God arises from the emergence of a more complex understanding of the human psyche. If there is ‘that of God’ in each of us then the core of our being has an element of divinity in it. This means that all of us are essentially good but that this goodness can become distorted or even almost totally denied. The affirmation that is frequently made in some Christian circles that the self is basically evil and needs to be redeemed by divine intervention is based on a confused understanding of the self. In this misunderstanding the self is equated with the ego, that part of the human psyche which is concerned with the preservation of the individual, namely with its need for food, shelter and reproduction. While a controlled ego is an essential tool for the survival of the human race, its excesses such as can be present in rampant capitalistic materialism can be immensely destructive.

The self is something quite different, for it is the point of interconnectedness with all that is, including the incomparable mystery. It is the point of contact with the experience of the numinous previously referred to. Consequently it is psychologically destructive to pray to God for the denial or eradication of the self or to suggest that we should not love our self. The word selfishness really means preoccupation with the ego and not preoccupation with the self. While nurture of the self involves compassion for oneself it also involves compassion for all other selves bearing in mind the dictum of the prayer of St Francis. As verse four of this hymn HELP US, O CHRIST says

For through forgiving we shall be transformed

Through ‘letting go’ create the space for play,

The play that frees our mind from pointless fears

To join the vibrant dance of Easter Day.

Indeed the deeper one moves into oneself the more unselfish one becomes. So the God of this type of theology is the God of the forgiving father in the parable of the prodigal son rather than one who delights in separating the black sheep from the rest of the fold. This also means that the petition of the Kyrie needs to be replaced by or at least paralleled with affirmative words such as

God has mercy on us all, Alleluia,

Christ has mercy on us all, Amen,

God has mercy on us all,

God has mercy on us all, Alleluia.

The God of this image is a God of unlimited forgiveness which can however only be accessed by human beings who themselves are forgiving. As Jesus prayed “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”. The emphasis then changes from urging God to forgive us to ourselves practising the art of forgiveness. As the refrain says

Forgiveness is our most precious gift

The last changed image of God which I would like to suggest is a change in emphasis from the Christ to the Spirit. In saying this I am not suggesting that we should dispose of the Trinity. Rather we should reaffirm what the Athanasian Creed says, namely that all of the members of the Trinity are consubstantial and coeternal, i.e. sharing an eternal oneness. However, we do need to free ourselves from the notion that each of these three dimensions of divinity are only to be thought of in anthropomorphic terms i.e. as some sort of super human beings.

Just as the notion that the earth was the centre of the planetary system was replaced by the knowledge that it was the sun that all the planets revolved around so today we are discovering that the ecosystem does not depend on the presence of human beings for its existence. Indeed in many cases it is far better off without the presence of people. With this realization comes a paradigm shift from an anthropocentric view of life to an eco-centric perspective, one in which the Cosmos is more primary than people. Human beings may be the most advanced form of life on this planet but it does not follow that we have to conceive of God in purely human terms with all the limitations which that entails. In my opinion it is better to think of the Trinity as three aspects of the divine life-force which pervades the universe. The father then represents the creative dimension of the divine life-force, the son the liberating aspect and the spirit the empowering one. Prior to the coming of Christ religion was primarily focused on the Creator. With the coming of Christ humankind had its divinity affirmed and now we are entering an age of Cosmic Spirit as recent surveys show.

For numbers of Christians the Spirit is wrongly conceived of as a gift from Jesus as if the Spirit was created by Jesus. But in traditional Christian theology the Spirit always was in existence and always will be. I believe that we have misinterpreted the teaching of Jesus in failing to give a proper place to Spirit in the wider sense. In this understanding Spirit is not only the spirit of love and compassion but it is also the spirit of breaking and pouring, i.e. the Eucharist placed in a Cosmic setting. So we may say that it is the Spirit of eternal recycling.

“Of spilt blood

Smashed atoms

Exploding stars

Dying trees

Wilting flowers

Devoured animals

Human flesh dissolved into the elements

And wine poured as sign of death and destruction

Gathered up within the flow of the endless river of life.”

Here is a verse from a hymn which also reflects this theme

SPIRIT FELT IN RAGING WATERS

Spirit felt in raging waters

Spirit of the placid lake

Spirit seen in snow-clad mountains

Spirit of each storm and quake

We embrace you, we embrace you

Such an understanding finds that Spirit throughout the whole of the Cosmos and in all of its processes is a manifestation of an interconnectedness of which divine love is the supreme expression.

As a final word let me point to the difficulty of creating worship for a congregation which has within its ranks people with a wide range of images of God. It seems to me that it is only by adopting a mystical approach which sees behind the images that we can hold together all of these complexities. On this issue I am in total agreement with the Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner who says “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he or she will not exist at all.”

If this became our common stance, we would no longer be engaged in theological warfare over the rightness of this or that image of God. Instead, adopting the perspective of a ‘nothingness’ approach with a mixture of wonder and incredulity we would acknowledge that in the final analysis all images of God are only masks of divinity. All this worship will, I believe, need to be expressed within an ecological setting in which doxology is the predominant note. So, I leave with you this hymn from ‘Sacred Energy – Mass of the Universe’

TO GOD THE PROCESS

Gloria, Gloria.

To God the process, God the life,

To God compassion’s spring

To God the boundless Way of Love,

To God in everything,

To God the inner Christ of faith

To God the wine and bread

To God the sacred energy,

The fabric and the thread.

To you, O God, we sing our praise

We join the cosmic song,

We walk the path that Jesus walked,

We turn our thoughts from wrong.

For you delight in each of us,

And we delight in you,

With hearts on fire, we live your praise,

In all we think and do.

Amen, Amen, Amen, O God,

To you be endless praise.

Shalom, Shalom, Shalom, O God,

Our hearts to you we raise.

For you empower and you fulfil

Our latent energy –

The universe within our lives

Shall dance your liturgy.

Gloria.