Glimpses of God: And Other Essays

Preface

Interest in anything always leads to epistemology, particularly if that interest is theological. Undertaking the least mental task we always end up agog in the lap of Immanuel Kant. This is so because language scarcely accounts for things, for the flux and mystery of experience. If it did, writers, poets, and theologians could go about their tasks with the aplomb of bricklayers. We know that language itself is a selective abstraction from unknowable flux; the world shades into gradations too fine for speech. More precisely, a writer’s language does not signify things as they are because none of us know things as they are. Instead, a writer’s language does an airtight job of signifying his or her perceptions of things as they are. However imperfectly, a writer’s language seeks to describe the world in order to communicate perceptions adequately.

But what counts as theological knowledge if we cannot state it perfectly? If the object of faith seeking understanding is God, as Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) defined theology, even as theological propositions wind up quitting the bounds of the known and make blurry feints at the unknown, can they truly add to knowledge or understanding? Anselm thought they could and so do I. For although we may never exhaust or locate precisely what the word God specifies, we may nevertheless approximate it. Theological knowledge is symbolically approximate. But all our knowledge is, of course, symbolic, and to go deeply into any field—physics, say or art—is to learn faith in its symbols. At first, we notice that these tools and objects are symbols as we translate them as we go into our own familiar idioms. Later, we learn to trust and release them. We learn to let them relate on their own terms, hadron to hadron, paint surface to paint surface—and only then do we make progress. In this sense, faith is trust, not belief, and is the prerequisite of knowing anything.

Each of the seventeen essays collected in this volume are grounded in the epistemological viewpoints of the preceding two paragraphs. Each is also written by a historian of religions who is simultaneously a working process theologian whose worldview is grounded in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and the process theology of John B. Cobb Jr. Furthermore, while each essay has its own subject, each is interdependent with the other sixteen. Which means that my theological reflections in process at this stage of my life are still in process. I do not think that what I have written is the final word. But it is my hope that these essays will contribute to the ongoing theological reflections of the readers of this volume as they develop their own theological visions.

Portions of some of these essays appeared in Open Horizons, an on-line site devoted to weaving together process philosophy and theology edited by Jay McDaniel, professor emeritus of Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. I wish to express my gratitude to Jay for the opportunity to practice the art of creative writing in my theological reflections. Finally, I wish to dedicate these essays to the good people of Pointe of Grace Lutheran Church in Mukilteo, Washington, a community of Lutheran friends who in the pluralism of their lives comprehend and live what Martin Luther experienced as faith through grace.

1

Writing about Writing about God

I love to write because, as my friend Jack Cady used to say, You don’t know a thing until you write it down. Jack was one of the best contemporary American novelists I have read, although he never got that much attention beyond the Seattle literary scene, at least as far as I know. ¹ Writing forces us to put into words that can never fully capture our experiences of the world, of reality, of God—however you name it—and yet somehow brings these realities into partial conscious awareness. We don’t know what a thing is until we label it with words while, if we are wise, knowing that the words we use for labeling are always symbolic. Symbols are pointers not to be confused with the thing or event to which they point. Cling to a pointer, you only have the pointer; clinging to a pointer covers that to which it points with a verbal shroud of unknowing.

This is particularly true with God talk, but I also suspect it is equally true with scientific talk as well, including mathematical language. It seems that whenever we write or speak we eventually crash headlong into the language of unsaying, as Michael Sells phrased it when he described the paradoxes of mystical theology.² All I know after writing seventeen books and seventy or so essays is that I have never been able to completely say what I wanted to say. We swim in a cloud of unknowing, and maybe that’s the point of entry into the way things really are. The mystics of all religious Ways must be on to something. But I’m still trying to get beyond dog paddling.

I have just finished reading The Eternal Present: Slow Knowledge and the Renewal of Time, by Douglas E. Christie, and I must say that it was a good contemplative read.³ Christie’s argument is that prayer is ultimately an unfolding, palpable sense of divine presence that originates in the realization of what we already know, of what is already within us. This conclusion is consistent with the testimony of male and female recluses that dot the early history of Christianity. It is also a major point of Thomas Merton’s views of contemplative prayer. But we have to give it time, if we really want prayer. We must slow down the tempo of our lives and create time to listen, which great writers actually do. As we develop skill in simply listening—to the sounds of nature, water breaking on a beach, the voices of human beings engaged in conversation, the sounds and movements of a liturgy—we gradually discover that we have never been separated from God, the human beings in our lives, the creatures of the Earth, indeed even the universe itself, which the Prologue to the Gospel of John describes as incarnate within God. So I spend time writing as a contemplative method for figuring out what it all means.

But I must confess that I’ve never come close to this realization even as I would like to. But once on a beach in front of my son-in-law’s family cabin on Fox Spit on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, I think I experienced something of knowing that nothing is ever separated from God as I listened to the waves pushed by the wind into high tide on the beach. My waking sense of separateness from everything gradually melted away (but not completely) and there was only the sound of waves blowing over everything, the sounds of waves lapping on the beach, and moon glow painting everything silver. Prayer, like meditation in Buddhism, is simply focused attention on our experiences, but without the illusion that we own what we experience—a kind of letting go that allows whatever God is or is not to rush into consciousness. And the wonderful thing—we discover that God’s presence, or the Buddha Nature if one is Buddhist, has always been part of who we are. Prayer doesn’t get us what we think we do not have; it allows what we already have to reveal itself to us and perhaps to others in often profoundly unexpected ways.

One of these unexpected ways led to the writing of my book, Living Without a Why.⁴ The phrase living without a why was borrowed with gratitude from Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls.⁵ For writing and circulating this book she was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310. Her crime was heresy, which in her case meant criticizing the male-dominated system of Medieval sacramental and ecclesiastical theology. Living without a why was her way of describing the meaning of grace as a movement initiated by God to live without care or concern about achieving anything through prayer, the sacraments, confession, or monastic disciplines—all of which she regulated to Holy Church the Little that transformed Christians of her day into merchants. According to her way of looking at things, faith is something like Christian actionless action (wu-wei in Daoist tradition). Of course, she was killed by churchmen for heresy, but I think more so because she wrote a book and taught her ideas to anyone who would listen—roles her society reserved for men. Meister Eckhart taught fairly similar ideas, but they were merely condemned. He was not burned at the stake. Living without a why is also fairly similar to what Luther meant by grace, but not identical. I suspect some of Marguerite’s living without a why" got into Luther’s head via Meister Eckhart, whom he encountered during his years as an Augustinian friar. Anyway, her book has become an object of meditation for me.

The upshot of living without a why is that being mindful, meaning totally focused on the present without mental or emotional distractions is incredibly difficult to write about. Particularly when one is one surrounded by blaring television noise turned up to nine located on both sides of my study. Entering the silence, as Thomas Merton described contemplative prayer, is difficult beyond measure.⁶ At least for me. Even when I am engulfed in solitude, the emotional and mental clutter in my mind kicks me back into the distractions of the day: obligations, taking my wife, Gena, to the store and supervising my grandson David, both of whom I love beyond measure—and the conventional list of duties goes on. The problem is me. The sages of all the world’s religious Ways teach that Silence—one of the ninety-nine beautiful names of God in the Qur’an—is incarnated in the midst of the noise of our lives, gracefully creating out of the mess humans make of this world a harmony that is greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes I faintly hear the Silence within the noise of my life, mostly when I stop and pause to reflect how lucky I am to be connected with the persons I love, for whom I perform whatever obligations may interrupt my feeble attempts to be still and attentive, and faintly experience what the Cloud of Unknowing refers to as prayer without ceasing.⁷ But maybe paying attentions to obligations is a form of mindfulness, a form of prayer.

Silence has taught me that Reality—the way things really are as opposed to the way we wish or hope things are—is more than anyone can write about. Reality transcends us, and we do well to be ever mindful of this fact even as we marvel at its richness. Each of us at best has a reach that exceeds our grasp; a partial vision only. This seems to me the case at every level of verbal description: in scientific truth, in prose, in poetry, in scripture, and theological reflection. While alive we can only see through a glass darkly and hope with St. Paul that in some future time, we will be able to see face to face. Many religious people think otherwise because they suppose religious truth, as they know it from doctrinal formulations they have learned, are exempt from the inherently limited nature of human language. But yet it helps to recognize that while reality always transcends our apprehending of it, our apprehending also transcends our ability to express it in words.

This is clearly the conclusion of Catherine Keller’s Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement.⁸ She is one of John B. Cobb’s students, as am I, and a process-feminist theologian who describes apophatic mystical theology—negative theology of unsaying—as a process theology of entanglement within the Unknown. Read through the lenses of Whiteheadian process philosophy, the anonymous English author of the Cloud of Unknowing literally deconstructs all affirmative kataphatic labels for God and all apophatic declarations of unsaying that deconstruct kataphatic labels. The only thing left is that theological ideas, models, statements, symbols, icons—are metaphors that say more about human relationships and our relationships with the entirety of nature than about God.

Which is not to say that theological metaphors are useless or do not sometimes disclose how we are entangled with every thing and event in the world and with God—according to Whitehead’s ontological principle as well as contemporary quantum physics—but never in the same way from moment to moment of space-time. To the degree we do not cling to theological constructions, to that degree we experience interdependence with all things past and present as we anticipate the future. All metaphors point to that which must sooner or later be left unsaid. Metaphors are symbolic pointers. Cling to a pointer, you have the pointer and over time what is pointed at recedes into a Cloud of Unknowing. Which is why theological reflection is a process that can never be completed. There are no finished theological systems, not even systems of fundamentalist certainties to which so many religious persons in all religious Ways cling.

But still, I’ve been thinking a lot about God of late. This is what theologians are supposed to do, but how can one think and write about a reality transcendent to all the limits and boundaries of thought and yet immanent, deeply immanent, within all boundaries, distinctions, and limitations, apart from which there are no boundaries, distinctions, and limitations. John Cobb did me no favors—or perhaps the best favor I have received from any teacher—when he declared some years ago, "Paul, you’re a