W
HEN THE
L
IGHT OF
Y
OUR
N
EGLECTED
B
EAUTY
S
HINES
What my God’s form may be, yourself you should perceive,
Who views himself in God gazes at God indeed.
ANGELUS SILESIUS
EVERYTHING THAT IS, IS IN GOD. THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE GOD. In some haunted yet tender way, God is also the most intimate dimension of every human mind and, in a sense, the most natural thing in the world is God. There is no distance or barrier between us and God. When there are barriers creating distance between us, they are our barriers, not God’s. God is like a light within the heart that nothing can extinguish. We can never lose God because God is twinned eternally to the soul. Once we awaken to the beauty which is God, there is a great sense of homecoming. The mercy of God is subversive affection that sees through our weakness until it illuminates again the reflection of beauty which is our essence. Regardless of who we are or what we have done, we never lose our dignity before God’s eyes. When the gaze of God falls on us, the light of our neglected beauty shines through the mirror of soul.
The beauty of God is the warmth of the divine affection. You did not invent yourself or bring yourself here. In terms of human time, the mystery of your individuality was dreamed for millions of years. Your strange and restless uniqueness is an intimate expression of God and who you are says something of who God is. You cannot divest yourself of your immortal clothing. The two longings deepest in your heart – the longing to love and to be loved – are not merely psychological needs; at a more profound level, they are the stirring of God within you. Your capacity to care is God; it is your beauty. Therefore, divine closeness is the secret of human vulnerability. We are not vulnerable simply because we are childlike adults in an imperfect world. We are vulnerable because we carry in us a deep strain of God’s caring. Our love for our friends and family, our concern for the world and for the earth, our compassion for the pain and desperation of others are not simply the product of an ‘unselfish gene’ within us, they issue from that strain of God in us that prizes above everything the kindness, the compassion and the beauty that love brings. Anywhere: in prayer, family, front line, hospital, brothel or prison, anywhere care comes alive, God is present.
W
E
A
RE
A
LREADY AT THE
F
EAST
For his bounty,
There was no winter in ’t, an autumn ’twas
That grew the more by reaping.
SHAKESPEARE, Antony and Cleopatra
TO PARTICIPATE IN BEAUTY IS TO COME INTO THE PRESENCE OF the Holy. It is we who exile ourselves from God. Everything we feel, think and do is already happening within the divine shelter. To know this is to know one’s real beauty.
Though the human mind is intense with difference and variety it is shadowed by divisions and imbalance. God is pure verb, a permanent event, an eternal surge, a total quickening. Beauty’s diversity only deepens the flow of God’s presence; nothing is held back. This sense of lyrical presence is expressed vividly by the sixteenth-century mystical poet Angelus Silesius. He put many of Meister Eckhart’s insights into poetic form. His little poem ‘The Rose’ captures the grace and simplicity of pure presence and integrity:
The Rose is without why
She blooms because she blooms
She does not care for herself
Asks not if she is seen.
The poem is also a huge vindication of identity, the freedom and clarity of simply being yourself. Nothing else is needed. It is a poem of profound trust in the act of being. This makes for a pure clearance. There is no outside intrusion, no pressure to measure up to outside expectations. Nor is there any sense of inner division. The rose is content to be a rose: she is what she is. At another level the poem can be read as a hymn to the freedom of nature, how it avoids the oppressive clutter of intentionality and concept. And the rose is flourishing; she is at one with herself in the grace of growth. Nature as a whole performs for no man. How vastly different this is to the way we live our lives.
Sometimes the urgency of our hunger blinds us to the fact that we are already at the feast. To accept this can change everything: we are always home, never exiled. Although our minds constantly insist on seeing walls of separation, in reality most of the walls are mere veils. In every moment, everywhere, we are not even inches away from the divine presence.
Spirituality has to do with the transfiguration of distance, to come near to ourselves, to beauty and to God. At the heart of spirituality is the awakening of real presence. You cannot produce or force presence. When you are truly present, you are there as you are: image and pretension are left aside. Real presence is natural. Perhaps the secret of spiritual integrity has to do with an act of acceptance, namely, a recognition that you are always already within the divine embrace.
Rather than trying to set out like some isolated cosmonaut in search of God, maybe the secret is to let God find you. Instead of endeavouring to reach out in order to first find God, you realize you are now within the matrix and the adventure is the discovering of utterly new and unspoken dimensions of the inexhaustible divine; this brings with it a new sense of ease with your self and your solitude. John Keats wrote rapturously about this: ‘Though the most beautiful Creature were waiting for me at the end of a Journey or a Walk, though the carpet were of Silk, the Curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and Sofa stuffed with Cygnet’s down, I should not feel – or rather Happiness would not be so fine as my Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have described, there is sublimity to welcome me home’ (Letter to G. and G. Keats, Oct. 1818).
G
RACE
Treat Things Poetically.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
GRACE IS ONE OF THE MOST MAJESTIC WORDS IN THEOLOGY. IT suggests the sublime spontaneity of the divine which no theory or category could ever capture. Grace has its own elegance. It is above the mechanics of agenda or operation. No-one can set limits to the flow of grace. Its presence and force remain unmeasurable and unpredictable. Grace also suggests how fluent and seamless the divine presence is. There are no compartments, corners or breakages imaginable in the flow of grace. Grace is the permanent climate of divine kindness. It suggests a compassion and understanding for all the ambivalent and contradictory dimensions of the human experience and pain. This climate of kindness nurtures the sore landscape of the human heart and urges torn ground to heal and become fecund. Grace is the perennial infusion of springtime into the winter of bleakness.
Divine grace works without a programme; it does not labour under the leaden intention of a pre-existent, fixed plan. Meister Eckhart states: ‘God has no why, but is the why of everything and to everything’: deus non habet quare sed ipsum est quare omnium et omnibus. This is a subversive and liberating statement. It liberates God from entanglement in the mesh of our needs, speculations and moralistic agenda. This quality of the divine presence should be highlighted especially in a digital culture dominated by the mechanics of function. The claim ‘God has no why’ makes a wonderful clearance in a culture where most objects and modes of presence are either expression or functions of something else. In our times it is quite exceptional for a thing simply to be itself. The same is true of people. A slick politics of presentation and deliberateness now dominates most forms of presence and it is actually quite disarming to hear someone speak from their heart with no eye to the best camera angle. Such direct immediacy seems almost innocent and unsophisticated, yet it is so refreshing and real.