The journey begins...

When I was very little, I tugged at my mother’s sleeve and asked her to watch me jump. “Look,” I said excitedly, “I am leaving the planet!” “Yes, dear,” she replied, without much interest. I can still remember my feeling of frustration that I could not make her see what I had seen. Of course, I was not intending to go far, but to jump six inches off the earth and be pulled back by gravity is still to leave the surface. All that is needed is to extend the distance some more, and I could be walking among the stars.

At the age of fourteen, the philosophical part of my brain took another leap. In amongst all the other dawning realizations, at the heart of my search for “something worthy of belief”, was a discovery that completely blew the ground from under materialism. What is consciousness? I don’t mean, what causes it, but what is it made of? It obviously isn’t made of matter. Once again, I simply could not get anyone else to see this fact the way I saw it. “Oh yes,” they might say politely, humouring me; “of course.” But if they had truly understood what I was saying the world would have been transformed for them, as it had been for me. The point is this. Normally we take consciousness for granted, and we do our thinking about the stuff that is in our consciousness, the stuff we are conscious of. The world is out there: it is what is revealed to us by our senses. But try to stop thinking that way for a minute. That very awareness, the experience itself, whether we are awake or dreaming, whether we are seeing clearly or not, is itself a thing. True, it is a strange kind of thing, because it is that in which everything else is located for us. But it is just as real as everything else, if not more so.

I was like a fish discovering the ocean, an eyeball looking into itself, a mirror face-to-face with another mirror. Materialism could not be true, because it had missed the most important and obvious thing, the one thing that could not be doubted. Then I opened the books of the mystics….


Picture: "Trampoline" by Rose-Marie Caldecott

The Unknown God

Pope Benedict XVI recently announced a new kind of religious dialogue. “Today, in addition to interreligious dialogue,” he said, “there should be a dialogue with those to whom religion is something foreign, to whom God is unknown and who nevertheless do not want to be left merely godless, but rather to draw near to him, albeit as the Unknown.” 

One might also and equally speak of the “Unknown Self”, for we do not know ourselves, and the two Unknowns go hand in hand. It has been said that “Unless you know yourself you cannot know God” – and there is an article by Dom Sylvester Houedard which explores this point in detail. Not that God is the self. As G.K. Chesterton wrote in chapter 5 of Orthodoxy, “Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within…. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.” 

Brahman may be Atman, but Atman is not what we normally call the “self”. The true self is something very different. But the true self is in God, and this means we can only discover them together. When we know God with God’s own knowledge of himself, then we shall also know ourselves. “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor 13:9-12). 

Who am I?

I might spend a lifetime trying to find out who I am. But if I simply look inside myself, I am looking in the wrong place.

“By comparison with God, man’s identity is not simply in himself but outside himself, which is why he can only attain it by ‘transcendence’. The Christian believer discovers his true identity in him who, as ‘the firstborn of all creation’, holds all things together (Col. 1:15ff), with the result that we can say that our life is hidden with him in God (Col. 3:3). Through identification with Christ I discover my own entirely personal identity.” –Joseph Ratzinger, The Feast of Faith (Ignatius Press, 1986, p. 29).

But then how do I discover Christ? Didn’t he die many years ago and go back to heaven? Do I have to rely on biblical scholars and archaeologists to work out which passages in the Gospels are most authentic? Ratzinger replies: “We cannot reach Christ through historical reconstruction. It may be helpful, but it is not sufficient and, on its own, becomes mere necrophilia. We encounter him as a living Person only in the foretaste of his presence which is called ‘Church’.” 

And this provides an unexpected bridge to the spiritualities of Asia – of Buddhism and Hinduism – that understand God as the “ground of all being”. Ratzinger goes on: “At this point we begin to see how it may be possible to purify and accept the inheritance of Asia. The latter is correct in refusing to see individual identity as an encapsulated ‘I’ over against a similarly encapsulated ‘Thou’ of God, ignoring the existence of other ‘I’s which are themselves related individually and separately to this divine Thou.” This ill-conceived personalism “deprives God of his infinity and excludes each individual ‘I’ from the unity of being.”

Illustration: "The Light of the World", by William Holman Hunt, 1854.

Unity in the soul

I said the key to the religious quest is unity, which is how we become fully real, and that this unification can only be brought about by love.

That makes sense of the idea of sin - viewed not as the breaking of some arbitrary rule, but as an obstacle to our own spiritual progress. The modern world doesn’t like to talk of sin, but it still views hypocrisy as a great evil, and seems to admire integrity. Sin is that which divides us. It is that which divides us from ourselves, from God, and from each other.

Charles Williams defined sin as “the preference of an immediately satisfying experience of things to the believed pattern of the universe”. For example, each time I do something in private that is inconsistent with what I profess to be and believe in public, or which would make others think less of me if it were discovered, I am dividing myself, and therefore committing a sin.

The root of sin is a conflict of desires, since it is desire that leads me to act inconsistently. But this conflict only exists at the level where we have many desires. In the end, at the deepest level, we desire only one thing, and that is union with the Infinite, with God. Human desires are insatiable, because we are built to desire the Infinite, and we cannot find the Infinite in the realm of the finite. The purpose of a religious practice is to discover our true self, which is also the discovery of our desire for the Infinite. Everything else is either a distraction from that, or a sacrament of it. Everything else is “intermediate”.

This is precisely why the Eucharist is so powerful and necessary for us, if we can receive it in faith. It feeds our body-soul-spirit unity. Swallowing the Host, knowing what it is, we take into ourselves a kind of “magnet” that helps to draw our divided selves together into one Self.

More on the dynamics of the Eucharist another time.

Purity of heart

Our human “problem” was defined very neatly by Father Vincent Nagel, a Palestinian Christian, in a meditation printed in Magnificat for the 9th of March, looking at the reasons people have for acting as they do. “The problem is that we only have one heart, and in the end it can be attached only to one thing.” Most of us behave well and act piously merely so that others will think well of us. We are not really attached to God, but to our own image. “We have had our reward,” then, in this world, and cannot receive it in the next. That is why Jesus tells us to pray in secret, so that people cannot see us, but “your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6). 

Jesus also tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that only the “pure in heart” will see God, which is how we describe the ultimate achievement of our life’s purpose in perfect happiness. But what is purity of heart? According to Soren Kierkegaard, “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing”. If we investigate this notion a bit further, we find it provides the key to understanding the religious impulse. In The One and the Many, W. Norris Clarke SJ writes of Unity “as a positive energy by which each being actively coheres within itself holding its parts together – if it has any – in a dynamic, self-unifying act” (p. 63). This goes for atoms, it goes for living organisms, it goes for people. It even goes for God, where the “active divine energy of love that is the bond of unity between Father and Son” is the Holy Spirit. 

Here is the lesson we can draw from this rather abstract idea: “to be anything real it is necessary to be one, integrated.” Religion is the striving for unity in the soul. This enables us to see the grain of truth in Gurdjieff’s teaching, because as Clarke says, “the unity of what is called our psychological ‘personality’ is not given to us ready-made. It is something we must work at and achieve by our own conscious action.” The transformation we are seeking is a unification of ourselves, such that we are no longer composed of bits pulling in different directions (Romans 7: “the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do”). Achieving such an integrated personality seems impossible. To this, Jesus replies, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew19:26). Clarke answers that we must be unified by “one great love”. 

Unity; “one-pointedness”; integrity; purity of heart; being “true” to ourselves. All these words and phrases refer to the same thing. Buddhism speaks of “mindfulness”. We can only become happy by becoming real, and we become real by becoming one. The missing element is “grace”. That is the thing or force that enables us to be transformed, to become real. We call it “becoming holy” or becoming a saint. Grace is “gift”, the help of the “Higher Power” as AA puts it. Grace is everywhere available from a loving God to anyone who opens himself or herself to receive it. That is the point of the sacraments – not that they automatically make us holy, but that through them, if we are receptive, we can obtain the grace we need.

Illustration: "Prayer Without End" by Nicholas Maes (1656), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.