“All goes onward…”

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Walt Whitman

Impermanence is the nature of every thing, and every thought. That we are transient and mortal, frail and temporary, is obvious to the least reflection. What we are is like the print of the wind on the sea, cats-paws on the bright surface of what is, here and gone before we know what we might be. And yet the water remains, shining.

To die is no more than that: the bright isness goes on, simply is. It is all there ever was, anyway, and nothing is lost. If we are the one who has not died, there is the grief, and loneliness; but the dead are not to be pitied. They are not, and what they were will always be, bright as the sea after the gust has passed. The clear ground lies open beneath the farthest stars.

Am I conscious now?

Susan Blackmore (Zen and the Art of Consciousness) asks the question, as a kind of koan, “Am I conscious now?”

It’s a good question. Am I? Have I been?

We must all be familiar with the sensation of listening to a favourite piece of music, and suddenly realising we’ve missed the best bit – the key change we love, the beginning of the bridge, whatever it is. We’ve been listening out for it, anticipating it, but when it comes our mind has wandered off into some fantasy, some memory, or a bird passing the window has caught our attention, and it is gone. Where? Were we aware of it?

Or we are meditating, paying attention to what is happening now, and we become aware (Blackmore uses this example herself, but I have had the identical experience many times) of a sound in the street outside. How long has it been going on? When we notice it, it has not just begun. And yet when we notice it, we are aware that we were aware of it already. It’s been going on for several seconds, quite distinctly, but we didn’t exactly notice. Now we do, and we remember, if that’s the right word, that it was happening already. Were we conscious then?

Here we are. For a moment, our whole attention is on now. Oh, the delicious freshness of it! We’re not remembering: we’re hearing it, feeling it, now! All that is, is now. There is nothing else. What else could there be?

Blackmore mentions Daniel Dennett’s objection to Cartesian dualism (which roughly states that there’s an I, sitting in here looking at a that, which is out there somewhere). But where is this I? There’s nowhere in the physical brain that could correspond to an I, no locus of consciousness, nor is there anywhere an incorporeal self (soul) could plug into the soggy assemblage of neurons between our ears. Dennett suggests rather that consciousness consists of “multiple drafts”. Blackmore writes (ibid.) “Dennett describes the self as a ‘benign user illusion’, and replaces the theatre with his theory of ‘multiple drafts’. According to this theory, the brain processes events in multiple ways, all in parallel and in different versions. None of the drafts is ‘in consciousness’ or ‘outside consciousness’; they appear so only when the system is probed in some way, such as by provoking a response or asking a question. Only then is one of the many drafts taken as what the person must have been conscious of. This is why he claims that ‘There are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of particular probes.’”

This makes more sense. Perhaps the light of attention picks out one or another draft, falls on one or another as the object of attention. But whose attention? Another draft’s attention? It’s all very puzzling.

But that moment. Now! That moment. There there is no sense of a shifting light of attention. There is only now. It has all come together in an instant, literally. This instant, now!

Perhaps we cannot know. Perhaps there is something here not susceptible of analysis. The bright instant is itself, represents no thing. It seems to rest in the ground of being directly, an isness that is only itself. Perhaps it is only light.

Onyng

If the ground of being is no thing, literally not an object – as it must be, being the source and beginning of all that comes to be – then in our closeness to it we find we cannot speak of it, really. JP Williams writes: “Aside from the fact that the Creator of all cannot be any kind of ‘object’, the divine activity of ‘onyng’ [Julian of Norwich] finally removes the ground from under any duality. The soul’s ‘solitude’ is not necessarily a denial of divine presence; when it is united with God, there are not two beings to count. Peace and holiness are ‘held at no remove’, as John [of the Cross] says. In so far as the soul speaks at all there, it stammers, tripping itself up, disrupting its own saying.”

In the ground itself there is no separation, no “God” and “soul”; there is only being. There is no “life” and “death”, as if these were separated, states or places to transition between; there is only isness, beyond time or ending. What we think of as self (which is only a convenient fiction, anyway) is entirely subsumed in light. It is nothing: it has found no thing.

Listening for the Light in the silence

The Quaker way of making decisions, through a listening process often described as looking for the will of God for the group, gives a basis for a shared understanding of what kind of God might be involved. That isn’t automatically anything which is named ‘God’ or would be recognised as the God of another tradition. The Nontheist Friends Network use Quaker business method for their decision making and they are clear that they see the ‘will of God’ as metaphorical language to explain a complex, but not supernatural, phenomenon. There are still things we can say about the Spirit which guides a Quaker meeting for worship for business, though. It can be sensed in a room. It can have a direction and make distinctions: yes this, not that. It is worth trusting.

Rhiannon Grant, Telling the Truth About God: Quaker Approaches to Theology, Quaker Quicks, p.14

During meeting for worship, and even more in our own practice of prayer or contemplation, we can enter a condition analogous to that known in Sōtō Zen as Shikantaza, derived from a Chinese term in Caodong Buddhism, usually translated into English as “Silent Illumination”, or “Serene Reflection”. Merv Fowler, however (in a now out of print book) translates it as “open awareness”, which seems to me a much better, less other-worldly translation. It is this condition which, in my understanding, allows us to listen for the Light in the silence. Meister Eckhart, to put it in a Christian contemplative context, calls it gelassenheit. It is from this place of open awareness that true ministry comes, and in the Quaker decision-making process, is – at least ideally – the source of our discernment.

This practice of quiet listening, together and individually, is what lies at the heart of Quakerism, and is the source of our faith and the root of our practice. We lose sight of it at our peril: without it, an aggressive, politically polarised activism based on “send[ing] our passions on God’s errands” (William Penn) misses the real source of our strength, and loses track of the sure wisdom that rests in silence.

Prayer and presence

Silence is really consent to presence. How we name that presence to ourselves is not really the point at issue; what matters is how we surrender to its presence with us, how open we become to its presence within us and beneath us as the ground of our being, as the ground of there being anything at all. Thomas Keating wrote,

St Thomas Aquinas taught that God is existence and hence is present in everything that exists. If God is present everywhere, it follows that in no circumstances can we ever be separated from him. We may feel that we are; we may think that we are. But in actual fact there is no way that we can ever be apart from God even if we try.

Thomas Keating, On Prayer, Lantern Books (p.8)

Meister Eckhart wrote of God as istigkeit, isness; the ground of being was Paul Tillich’s phrase, but whatever term we use, it is obvious that it is impossible to be apart from existence, otherwise we would cease to exist. Even in the absence of a personal, discrete individual self – an absence revealed in contemplative prayer: “when we look within, there is no entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness—open empty awareness” (Tara Brach) – existence continues. We ourselves, as the transient flecks of self that we are, will die, but the isness that is present within us and beneath us will not.

What has this to do with prayer?

Friends tend to refer to prayer as “holding – someone, some thing or situation – in the light”, in the sense of deliberately being conscious of both the one prayed for and the ground of prayer, God, isness itself. Even when, as in individual practice – meditation, centering prayer, nembutsu or whatever – the process may not take place consciously, nevertheless the compassionate concern that drives prayer remains in the heart, and the heart is open to the presence of God.

I have often written here and elsewhere of contemplative prayer as being present to all we encounter as prayer, rather than needing consciously to say prayers: we are present as aerials, signs, receiving stations merely. Our awareness is all that is needed, all that is possible.

Ground and Network; Life and Death

Nearly two years ago now, Rhiannon Grant published a post on her blog Brigid, Fox and Buddha considering the question of what, if anything, Liberal Quakers think about life after death. Now, Rhiannon is far better qualified than I to say what they may or may not think, and an interesting discussion ensued in her comments section. But the question, when I revisited her blog, set me thinking.

Merlin Sheldrake, in his fascinating book Entangled Life, discusses the all way life, on this planet at least, is underpinned by fungal networks, mycorrhizal webs connecting tree to tree, plant to animal, bacterium to lichen. He remarks, of his research on fungal networks, facilitated as it is by international academic and commercial scientific networks, “It is a recurring theme: look at the network, and it starts to look back at you.” (Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life (p. 240). Random House. Kindle Edition.)

Much of our unthinking outlook on things, even in the twenty-first century, is conditioned by a Cartesian, atomistic outlook inherited from the seventeenth century. This has crept into our religious and spiritual thinking too, so that we tend to understand God as a “thing” over against other things, and we ourselves as separate individual selves who continue, or don’t continue, after death. Perhaps this is as wrong a way of looking at life as was the early Darwinian view of evolution as divergence, separation, of organisms (Sheldrake, op cit., pp. 80-82) rather than as interconnection, often cooperative interconnection, within ecosystems.

For a long time now, Paul Tillich’s understanding of God as “Ground of Being”, beyond being, not to be understood as object vis à vis any subject but preceding the subject-object disjunction (Theology of Culture, p.15) has made perfect sense to me. Tillich somewhere in Systematic Theology refers to God as Ground of Being as “Being-itself” – a concept which has always appeared to me to be pretty much equivalent to Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, “isness“!

If God is indeed the Ground of Being, that which underlies as well as overarches all things, the ground in which, as Christ, “He is before all things, and in [whom] all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17 NIV) then his relation to “things” in creation, human and other beings included, is, at least metaphorically, much more like the relation of a network to its nodes than anything else I can think of. Our own lives, then, are “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3.3) – as Paul says, we have already died; how then can we die? (see Colossians 3.1-4!) But is this an atomistic, separate continuation, a life lived “in Heaven” rather than in Dorchester, merely? That neither seems likely nor accords with my own experience at all. Our true life is lived in God, in the Ground of Being, the isness of God. That goes on – death is consumed in life, darkness by light.

A trackless place…

I have been in a trackless place, recently. Things I thought I knew had become clouded over, old wounds long healed reopened. A mist had rolled in, and instead of hiding the known ways it had wiped them out, long-trodden paths scoured back to loose sand and the entropy of marram…

As I sat in meeting on Sunday morning, wondering how I could have so lost my way, a Friend rose and gave these words as ministry – just these words, without commentary:

All our steps are ordered by the Lord;
how then can we understand our own ways?

(Proverbs 20.24)

The verse struck me like a lightning bolt, as no Scripture had for a long time. It was as though the Friend, or really, through him, God, had spoken directly to me, directly to the confusion and self-doubt, the mirrored memories of pain, the emptiness where not even longing was.

Since then this little isolated verse has grown friends, words in the hollowness where my heart still beat:

These are indeed but the outskirts of his ways;
and how small a whisper do we hear of him!
But the thunder of his power who can understand?’

(Job 26.14)

How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
I try to count them—they are more than the sand;
I come to the end—I am still with you.

(Psalm 139.17-18)

I wrote a few years ago that,

For myself, I have found I cannot find God by looking, or thinking, much as my whole life may seem to have been spent in a search for – or being distracted from a search for – what is true and is the source of all that is. What God is is unknowable. Anything I might say or think about God is partial, incomplete and misleading. God is not to be contained in our understanding, not constrained by time, space or any other dimension. The only way I can know God is by not knowing.

Faith is not so much a way of knowing as it is a way of being known. God is so far beyond the reach of our frail and temporary minds that all we can do is keep silence, and wait. Only in that relinquishment of knowing can we hear God, for much as we cannot seek him out, he will find us, and in that finding will come our own real and lived experience, the presence and Light which is within and beyond us, as it is within and beyond all things. In himself God is No Thing, for what he is is without limit or beginning, and is not dependent; yet within him all things live, and move, and have their being – are loved even, and held in love beyond time and distance.

I think my hope lies in my own littleness. I am so small, so transient and partial, against the scattered glory of the night sky…

O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth! …

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them? (Psalm 8 1,3-4)

[Forgive the pronouns in this post, by the way – without fooling around inventing made-up words, I can only use pronouns that are gendered, or else wilfully ungendered, and it is hard to speak of an it who loves. God is not a person like you or me: not that he is less than a person, but that he is infinitely more.]

From the Map into the Geography

It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. ‘Look out!’ we cry, ‘it’s alive.’ And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back–-I would have done so myself if I could–-and proceed no further with Christianity. An ‘impersonal God’–-well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads–-better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power source that we can tap–-best of all. But God himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband–-that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God!’) suddenly draw back. Suppose we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing he has found us?

CS Lewis, Miracles

The odd thing is that some of us, Friends and others, who are caught at one or another of these stages (often at the “inside our heads” stage) feel that they are actually at a more advanced level, as it were, spiritually or intellectually, than those who take what they may call a more “literalistic” approach to faith. But this passage reminds me forcibly of my own first steps on that path.

From childhood I had had the sense of living on the edge of something – there had been moments, and more than moments, when the curtain across that edge grew thin and tattered, and the unimaginable peeped, almost, through into sunlit orchard behind our house, or called in the hollow song of the foghorn, at night across the sea beyond my bedroom window. As I grew up, I alternated between trying to escape all such considerations into the clean certainties of GCE science, and looking – increasingly – for explanations. As I dabbled in phenomenology, and began to read not only Eastern mystical texts, but a few of the Christian mystics as well, I vividly remember thinking, “This is all very well, but I need a system that lets me remain in charge… I don’t like this continual call to surrender. I’m just beginning to find me – I’m not letting go of that!”

It was not for another nearly ten years that events broke through that self-commitment, and I found I had fallen into the hands of the living God. (cf. Hebrews 10.31!) But I was under no illusion then that I had somehow slipped from an enlightened sophistication into some more primitive state – rather I had the feeling that I had blundered from the map into the geography, and the little painted rivers now thundered over their falls and rapids, and on to a sea that was more than capable of absorbing my cherished me without a trace. The mere spray soaked me to the skin…

The reality of faith indeed a matter of life and death: what then? There is an end to ideas and opinions, and to all our words. One day there will be nothing else than that: for all we have treasured will be rotted through with Light. (Matthew 6:19-21; 1 Corinthians 3.15)

“Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had,” as Richard Rohr writes in his book Immortal Diamond: The search for our true self. And death itself, perhaps, is for that true self the gate to life…

Coinherence

So when we think of mercy, we should be thinking first and foremost of a bond, an infallible link of love that holds the created and uncreated realms together. The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional–always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being. Just like that little fish swimming desperately in search of water, we too–in the words of Psalm 103–‘swim in mercy as in an endless sea.’ Mercy is God’s innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope

I sometimes think of the baptism of Jesus as being in some way related our own call to prayer. Jesus didn’t need to be baptised himself, as John the Baptist was quick to point out (Matthew 3.13-17) – “In his birth the Son enters into our vulnerability and contingent existence. Now in his baptism he joins himself to our hurt and mixed-up spiritual condition. This process of God meeting us in our vulnerability and suffering will culminate on the Cross…” (from the Franciscan blog Praise and Bless, January 12 2008)

In our prayer, if we are praying contemplatively rather than “for” something, we are praying as representative of the whole human race; coming into the very presence of God with, in a sense, all of humanity hard-coded into the very cells of our being. Our prayer then is for Christ’s mercy on all of humanity, all of creation really (Romans 8.19-27); we are literally interceding, standing between God and all that he has made, out there in the wind of the Spirit. This is why the Jesus Prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner, has so long a history as a prayer of intercession as much as of contemplation, and why to think of it as a narrowly personal prayer of individual penitence is to misunderstand its intention.

Paul touches on this in his letter to the Christians at Colossae, also. He writes, “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1.15-17 NIV)

Christ is our mercy – it’s in him that things remain in being, and are loved. Night has long fallen, on this winter’s evening in Dorset, and only a few lights are slipping through the almost leafless trees, confused and mingled with the reflections of the lights in the room. Inward? Outward? Perhaps it’s only in our own minds that there is a distinction. We are little, temporary things, wave-crests lifted for a moment on unquiet waters, and then subsumed. We are eternal, loved and kept and one with the isness of God. Both these things are true, and our love holds all to whom we have made ourselves open in prayer – how could it be otherwise? – in the light of the mercy that is shown to us; and that is enough, all we are called to do, all in the end we can do anyhow. Kyrie eleison.

[Also published on The Mercy Blog]

Fields of Grace

We do not manufacture our own existence. However much we may seek to emulate Frank Sinatra doing it his way, the best we can do with our “one wild and precious life” (Mary Oliver) is to improvise a little over the chords we have been given. We live by grace, by gift.

Satya Robyn writes, “Every day we are provided with oxygen, a place to live, food that has been grown and prepared by strangers, love from our friends and families… ” She goes on to speak of the humility that comes with this realisation: a humility that is “a very realistic appraisal of our conditions and of our [imperfect] nature which leads to a natural sense of contrition. Contrition is the gate through which grace can enter.”

All that exists rests in the ground of being. It cannot be otherwise – that is what being means. At the very root, the fundamental source of what is, we must come to isness itself, Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit. It matters more than we might think how we describe it, as Rhiannon Grant discusses in her recent talk for the Nontheist Friends Network conference at Woodbrooke, and yet as she points out there is behind all our words that which is forever beyond words, and cannot be held by them. I suspect that this is the insight behind the opening of John’s Gospel,

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1.1-5)

When things come into being, then we can encounter them, speak of them, but not before. Perhaps this is why Jesus, the Christ, the anointed of God, could say to Philip – who had asked him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied” – “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14.8-9) It is only in whatever process of coming-to-be is represented by the term “incarnation” that we can encounter God. (A Buddhist might say, in parallel, that it is only in the person of a Buddha that we can encounter the Buddha Field – only in the living encounter with Amitabha in the Nembutsu, say, can we come to the Pure Land.)

But not being able to put into words the ground of being, isness, God, as apophatic theology rightly asserts, doesn’t mean at all that these encounters are not possible; it is only that entirely unmediated encounter is not possible, as Moses found when he could not see God face to face (Exodus 33.17-23). In the silence of meeting for worship, in the stillness between the words of the Jesus Prayer, is the Light. It is within each of us, closer than our own heartbeat, nearer than the beautiful chemistry by which we breathe and live. William Penn saw this so clearly:

If you would know God and worship and serve God as you should do, you must come to the means he has ordained and given for that purpose. Some seek it in books, some in learned men, but what they look for is in themselves, yet they overlook it. The voice is too still, the Seed too small and the Light shineth in darkness. They are abroad and so cannot divide the spoil; but the woman that lost her silver found it at home after she had lighted her candle and swept her house. Do you so too and you shall find what Pilate wanted to know, viz., Truth. The Light of Christ within, who is the Light of the world and so a light to you that tells you the truth of your condition, leads all that take heed unto it out of darkness into God’s marvellous light; for light grows upon the obedient. It is sown for the righteous and their way is a shining light that shines forth more and more to the perfect day.

Qfp 26.44