Two weeks ago[1], I offered some thoughts which might assist us in this wintry season of faith. Several of you appreciated Karl Rahner’s observation that “agnosticism which knows it doesn’t know ... is the way God is experienced today”; others of you found compelling Rahner’s suggestion that our struggle against atheism is foremost and of necessity a struggle against the inadequacy of our own understandings of God. Although some may have experienced discomfort with the tenor of that sermon – no-one spoke to me about that. In all the feedback I received – and there was more than usual after a Sunday morning sermon – the common thread was an interest and energy to enter this less travelled path as we explore what it means to be people of faith in this wintry season. Theologies of certitude, regulation and restriction just don’t work for the majority of us today. We are more persuaded by open, inclusive and invitational engagement with the Holy Other, the mystery beyond ourselves, whom we call God.
However, when we enter that less defined place, concerns can – and do – arise. Is there nothing we can say about God? What happens to the strength, security and bedrock of our faith, when we are invited into the place of unknowing, into which we are called to surrender? Can we risk the terror of letting go and letting God?
Rahner suggests a fruitful starting point to be the dynamic orientation found in each and every human being – a condition every one of us possesses – that condition of yearning for something more. This innate questioning, thirsting for life, love and meaning, known as self-transcendence is found in atheists, agnostics and believers alike. It’s the way we understand and explain this questing-yearning that defines whether or not we are people of faith.
“In mid-[20th] century Europe” Elizabeth Johnson writes, “an interesting debate broke out about what [self-transcendence] might mean. Existential philosophers with a fierce commitment to atheism ... concluded that life is absurd. The universe with its empty heaven endlessly frustrates human questing. Since there is no ultimate fulfilment to our self-transcending, all our desires come to naught. Held for a few brief moments over the void, human beings with all our strivings are the butt of a great cosmic joke. Religious thinkers, to the contrary, contended that life is meaningful because an infinite holy God, who is the surrounding horizon of human questing, intends to be our fulfilment.” What is interesting is that “both sides agreed on the dynamic structure of human experience, which is oriented always to the ‘more’.”[2]
People of faith, have made the choice – not by proof, not by rational argument – we have taken on faith, that there is a goal for our yearning, longing selves – and it is to that goal we orient ourselves and our lives. “Working within the context of modern culture, [Rahner] is trying to relocate the question of God. He is moving it from a question about a Supreme Being ‘out there’ to a question about what supports [this] dynamic orientation of human nature. If God exists, he argues, it is no accident that we find ourselves so open and so yearning. The Creator would have made us this way in order to be, as infinite Truth and holy Love, the fulfilment of our questioning, loving, thirsty-for-life selves.
“To appreciate this, we must get away from the conventional picture that the very word ‘God’ conjures up, which too easily leads to inadequate misunderstanding.”[3]
Johnson proposes the archaic term Whither as a replacement for the word God (for a time anyway) as we attempt to shift from that understanding of God as Supreme, out-there Being. “Whither”, she suggests, “refers to a point of arrival, a destination, as in the question “Whither goest thou?” The Whither of our self-transcendence is that toward which we are journeying, the goal toward which our self-transcending minds and hearts are forever reaching.”[4] This Whither, the horizon beyond our being, is what our restless hearts yearn for – the Holy Mystery to which our lives are oriented.
“Mystery here is not meant in the spooky sense of something weird or ghostly. Nor does it have the mundane meaning of a puzzle that has yet to be solved, as in a literary murder mystery. Rather, mystery here [suggests] that the Holy is so radically different from the world, so wholly other, that human beings can never form an adequate idea nor arrive at total possession.
“The Whither of human self-transcendence is and must remain [totally] incomprehensible ... We will never reach the end of exploring having figured it all out. It is something like parallel train tracks that appear to meet at a point in the distance, but when you get to that point the tracks have opened up to another distant point. It is something like the horizon one sees when flying in an airplane; no matter how fast the jet goes, it never catches the horizon, which remains still farther beyond the window. It is something like being in love and finding your beloved endlessly interesting and beautiful. There is always more.”[5]
Taking this path towards God means we will never master the mystery. We will turn away from the path that “think[s] of God as an element within a larger world, as a part of the whole of reality. Holy mystery cannot be situated within our system of coordinates but escapes all categories. Hence, to think rightly of God we must give up the drive to intellectual mastery and open up to the Whither of our spirit’s hungry orientation” – letting ourselves “be grasped by the mystery which is present yet ever distant.”[6]
Over this winter period, we are attempting to do this in our contemplative and meditative evening worship – allowing images, music and candlelight, prayer, communion and readings to provide a vehicle for our yearning souls to open up to the horizons of Holy Mystery – that is, the basis of our being; that which people call God.
Understanding God in this way ... “even if we were eventually to know every blessed truth there is to know in the entire universe; even if we were to have our fill of loving pressed down and running over; even if we were to experience all dimensions of life in abundance – there would still be more, the Whither, calling forth and sustaining our spirit. When we become aware of this and lucidly allow ourselves to be encompassed by God so understood, then our not knowing God who is boundless mystery ‘is not pure negation, not simply an empty absence, but a positive characteristic of a relationship between one subject and another.””[7]
“For some people struggling with faith amid modern culture, the idea of God as incomprehensible mystery comes as an enormous relief. It liberates them from cramped, confined notions of theism and places their spirit into a relationship where they can soar.... [here] the human person glimpses the mystery of God not as absence, but as overabundance.” [8]
In the minute of silence that follows the sermon, I invite you to read the words of the hymn[9] we will sing after the Affirmation of Faith. Ponder these words in the light of God as horizon of our self-transcendent longing. Take time in the silence to allow these words assist you to engage with and respond to the Whither of the human spirit.
But, before we go there, a word of warning:
While some enter into the liberty and freedom of relating to God in this way, “this glimpse makes other people dizzy and disoriented; they experience such boundlessness as a loss of connection to the domesticated, even if authoritarian, God of theism they were used to. Still others become fearful because the nameless, ineffable Whither seems so distant and aloof. All need to recognize, however, that at this point in the argument the idea of God as holy mystery is only half-finished.”[10]
Later sermons will pick up that second half of how Holy Mystery, does not remain remote, but comes into radical closeness, so that we can experience this goal of all our longing, not only as beyond all that we can ever know, but also nearer than our breathing. But that’s for another time... For now, I invite you to enter the agnostic space - that space of knowing we cannot (and must not) define God – and open ourselves within this cloud of unknowing to a way of experiencing God, which nurtures growth in this wintry season. And may we know the leap of recognition in our souls as we encounter the ultimate Whither of our very beings - beyond even “the reach of mystery”.
[1] This sermon (the second in a series) continues to rely on and quote extensively from Elizabeth A. Johnson, Quest for the Living God 2008.
[2] Johnson, p.34-35.
[3] Johnson, p.35.
[4] Johnson, p.35.
[5] Johnson, p.36
[6] Johnson, quoting Rahner p.36
[7] Johnson, p.37-38.
[8] Elizabeth Johnson, quoting Jeannine Hill Fletcher, p.38.
[9] “Eternal God beyond the reach of mystery”, Colin Gibson Hope is Our Song
[10] Johnson. p.39.
No comments:
Post a Comment