A God without a why is a God who is lyrical and full of grace, a God who has no other intention than simply ‘to be’. To learn that art of being is to become free of the burden of strategy, purpose and self-consciousness. God dwells totally in fluency of presence.
A large amount of human seriousness constructs itself around the question why? Answering this question often brings us into the labyrinth of psychological motivation, judgement, adulation or blame. A God without a ‘why’ sounds delightfully light and light-hearted, a God of humour without all the mental armour of deliberateness, caginess or expectation. There is that famous phrase in Exodus in response to the query of who God might be. God replies: ‘I am who am.’ The ‘I-am-ness’ of God is everything in God. Without a why God is never a self-target of Descartes’s ultra-self-conscious: ‘I think, therefore, I am’. The ‘I-am-ness’ is its own witness and vindication.
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HE
I
NCONCEIVABLE
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ADE
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NTIMATE
God created us for the limitless alone.
MARSILIO FICINO
EACH HEART HOLDS A DIFFERENT WORLD AND OFTEN ITS NET OF desires is entangled and confused. At other times, things clarify and the God of beauty makes everything luminous. Most of the time, however, God remains a question. And within its private silence, each heart follows the question across landscapes no-one else sees.
From the earliest religions onwards the divine has been imaged in terms of mythic or ancestral stories. It is interesting here that the divine is never seen as a purely abstract force, like energy for instance. The divine is always portrayed with human qualities naturally writ large on an epic scale. Greek mythology is a wonder-world of epic portraits. The Gods combine power and personality as they stretch within the chains of necessity. The transition then to philosophical reflection considers God as abstract. As Christianity awakens out of Judaism, it emerges into a vibrant world of imaginative thought that inherits both traditions and somehow manages to think them together. Indeed, this concept of God is one of the finest achievements of Christian thought. Over centuries, in conversation with the greatest minds of medieval and classical antiquity, Christian thought developed a notion of God as person and stayed faithful to both mythological and philosophical thinking. God is not an invisible, anonymous abstract force. Poetry and philosophy are one here.
N
OT
‘W
HAT
I
S
B
EAUTY
?’
BUT
‘W
HO
I
S
B
EAUTY
?’
THE SENSE OF GOD AS A PERSON HAS DIMINISHED CONSIDERABLY IN the Western Christian tradition. New Age spirituality, fundamentalism and mainstream religions all speak of God as a force; either a soft benevolent force, a hard force or a moral force. And yet, perhaps, the sense of divine intimacy and warmth, the sense of divine imagination and the suggestion of the numinous depths of God then become empty. God could become a nameless, bland energy. The beauty of the notion of person is the way it gathers the horizontal and the vertical into one form or centre. This is the way we picture the infinite. It ranges from the deepest depths to the highest summit and it extends on every side, endlessly. When we imagine God as person, it gives all this infinity personality, warmth and intimacy. The cosmos seems no longer anonymous or echoless. The Christian tradition has been very careful to nuance the concept of person in relation to God. When we acknowledge God as person, we sense an actual someone to whom we can relate. Given that one of the most beautiful things about being human is the ability to encounter another person, it is natural that we should want that experience with the deepest source of everything also to be intimate and personal. The notion of an infinite person who is pure love means we are using the term ‘person’ in a transfigured sense; there is no control or despotic power here, rather a sublime quickening of our every potential for passion, creativity, compassion and freedom.
Our exploration of beauty has considered many of the forms in which beauty appears. These forms included places, things, events and experiences. However, when we speak of God as beauty, we are speaking of the beauty of who-ness. The who question is the most numinous and mysterious of questions. The self is unlike any other thing in the world: though it appears in time and space, it is beyond them. The who-ness of someone can never be finally named, known, claimed, controlled or predicted. The who is beyond all frames and frontiers and dwells in the mystery of its own reflexivity and infinity. Who has no map. When we claim that God is beauty, we are claiming for beauty all the adventure, mystery, infinity and autonomy of divine who-ness. Beauty is the inconceivable made so intimate that it illuminates our hearts.
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HE
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PACE
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ETWEEN
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PIRIT
THE NOTION OF THE DIVINE PERSON ALSO GROUNDS THE DEPTH and intimacy of human affection. If you listen to your affection or attraction to someone, you can sense that there is more than the two of you there. There is also present a third force – the affection itself as a threshold where your two lives meet and engage each other. This finds primal expression in the notion of the Trinity. The affection between Son and Father is so utterly alive as to be not merely a bond but an other person, the Holy Spirit. That constant, passionate spill-over of pure affection is the Spirit. This is the Spirit of affection in which we live and move in each moment and it is at the heart of the Christian notion of God. The Holy Spirit holds the tension of God, and is both the abyss and summit of the knowing between Father and Son. The Son is the first Other in the universe. The Spirit is that secret path of affinity that holds the kinship warm even in the coldest, most negative spaces between Self and Other. What is utterly alien to you can eventually yield a glimpse of affinity with you. Between every separate thing, beneath the slow time-film that rolls forth each day and night, in the cold unknown between strangers, in the limbo land of numbed indifference and even in the vast distance between centuries and their lost memory, there exists another world, an invisible world where all this separation and distance is embraced. The Holy Spirit presides there, holding together that vast terrain of the ‘between’. It can be somewhat misleading to overemphasize the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the meaning might emerge more clearly if we occasionally referred to all that space between simply as holy Spirit. The space between seems empty to the eye; yet to the imagination it is vibrant with pathways towards beauty. Divine space has a latent grandeur. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of primal Eros, the between that is forever quickening, the source of all the gifts that turn up in our lives.
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ROVIDENCE
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ORE
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BRIGHTENS
O
UR
P
ATH
Our love is
a sister of the light;
deftly, she unwinds
our shadowed nets.
THE GIFT COMES FROM THIS IN-BETWEEN WORLD THAT KNOWS and holds much of the geography of our destiny, a secret climate of profound kindness that sends us bouquets of light and colour when we experience forlorn times. The attentive wisdom of this in-between world is what we call providence. It is a foreknowing that is always at work, watching out for us. Providence is the power of latent blessing that fore-brightens our pathway. The providence that shelters and guides us knows infinitely more than we can about who we are, where we are going and what we require in order to become who we were dreamed to become. It is only when we look back that we can discern how we were being secretly minded; we discern the meaning in something that was opaque and difficult and we begin to see how it deepened our sensibility and refined our spirit. Providence shelters our hearts and blesses our lives with beauty.