Jesus Cannot Be Known Second-Hand (Pt 2)
the second part of a dialog with Bradley Jersak on mystical experience and intimacy with God
Part 1
B: I want to shift back now to the second question I raised at the beginning of this conversation. The saints have said we have a part to play in our fellowship with the Son. If they’re right, and I believe we can trust that they are, there’s an intentionality required of us in the turning (or tuning) of our heart lovingly toward Love. The Sikh gurus, Bhakti Hindus, Sufi Muslims and Christian mystics all agree: “Just turn toward the Beloved and you will experience grace.” Exactly as the younger prodigal does. Turning toward our home in God, we find the Father already rushing our way.
C: Yes. Absolutely. And you know what’s incredible? In the aftermath, we inevitably learn that our turning to God, precisely at the moment that it was most truly ours, was actually a move God made. Grace is a dance, a jazz performance. And what Herbie Hancock said of Miles Davis is true of our relation with Jesus: there are no mistakes when you’re dancing or playing with him. He can always move so that our mis-steps are eventually choreographed into a beautiful sequence. Inexhaustibly patient, endlessly creative, he just keeps putting himself where we can’t help but bump into him—until we are synced with him, flowing with the same virtuosity, the same ease.
B: When I was a youth pastor in my 30s, I desired “revival” but wondered what baptism of the Spirit could’ve meant to people prior to Azusa Street and the rise of the modern Pentecostal movement. I ran into a copy of Andrew Murray’s Holiest of All commentary on Hebrews, and I found that he defined the fruit of the baptism of the Spirit as “a constant conscious awareness of the presence of God,” made available through the torn veil. I began to ask for that every day, which was itself already a new kind of awareness. Around that same time, I read John Paul II’s statement somewhere that the chief evidence of the baptism of the Spirit is the divine hug.
C: That last reminds me of the language in John 14: “I go to prepare a place for you.” I was taught to read that as a promise of heaven—as if it were a place, some far-flung planet in some as-yet unknown galaxy (“at the edge of the universe,” one preacher said). But no, the only “place” that holds Jesus, the Uncontainable, is God. At the very end of the Gospel’s prologue we’re told that explicitly: “No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (Jn 1:18). Jesus, the mission finished, “returned” (without ever having left, of course) to prepare a place for us there, in the eternal embrace of the Father, so that where he was and is we can be too, enfolded with him into the Father’s unbroken delight—the “constant conscious awareness” of us that makes us who we are.
B: I love that picture. “God is the One who enfolds me.” I can say I have embraced and been embraced by God. I have experienced grace directly— “mystically”—in a great number of ways and by a variety of means. I’ve “found” God in devotional stillness, in contemplation, in liturgical participation, in art, in Matthew 25 activism, in my deepest afflictions. How do we help one another toward that “finding”? How can I help others feel the divine hug?
C: I’d say you’re doing it all the time. Poorly, perhaps, but nonetheless. One way or another. Intentionally or not. Sometimes working with the grain of the Spirit, and sometimes working against. We’re not all saints, not yet, but we’re all always helping to make saints!
B. Yes!
C: There’s this too: the divine embrace must be felt differently moment to moment. Our hugs, if they’re genuine, take the shape of the moment. How much more God’s?
B: I understand that we’ll feel it differently, but is there the possibility that we can settle into an ongoing state of knowing God is near, present to me, active within me? A constant and conscious awareness? I’m so nervous of the word “feeling” but I’m convinced this settled sense is essential for Christianity to survive and flourish. Doesn’t Rahner say somewhere that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all?
C: Almost. Here’s the quote: “It could be said: the devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’, one who has ‘experienced’ something, or he will cease to be anything at all.” Earlier in that same essay, which is a consideration of the future of Christianity, he says, “The primary and essential factor, and one which must play a decisive role in the Christian living of the future also, is one’s direct personal relationship with God.” And later, near the end of the same section, he says we can be fully ourselves only in prayer, and that prayer is truly prayer only when it arises from an unshakable confidence that God wants to hear what we have to say!
B: I love this. It also untangles dramatic encounters from the reality of ongoing fellowship—ekstasis from koinonia.
C: Mind you, Rahner says all that in an essay under this heading: “The Experience of God as Incomprehensible.” We must experience God, he says. But if it is truly God that we’re experiencing, if our experience is worthy of the name, we have to accept that God is not contained in or curtailed by our experience.
B: Ok. But how does that incomprehensibility not steal the sweetness of the embrace? Isn’t it just as bad for God to be too real for me as it is for God not to be real at all?
C: I believe, wholeheartedly, that Jesus is experienceable. That’s what it means for him to have a body, a face. He can be touched. Recognized. Thanks to the Spirit, he is always here exactly as the Father desires him to be and as I need him to be—nearer to me than I am to myself, speaking and listening, acting in ways that make room for me to act. Leading the dance. Making music of my flubbed notes. But precisely for that reason, there is always more happening in me than my mind and heart can catch up to. That does not make my experiences meaningless. Anything but. It simply means that my experience of my experience is never simply identical with what God is actually doing. My experience of my experience is never as good as the reality God is bringing about in me, for me.
B: Agreed.
C: Remember what Maximus said about Jesus being God beyond God? That is how it is that God can speak to me in what I say to myself, addressing me, calling me into being, from within the movements of my own self-address.
B: God is in our self-talk? Say more.
C: Yes. We might say it like this: God is always speaking me to myself by speaking to me about himself, the Word. In prayer, therefore, I am welcoming the Word to speak in my voice. As I do that, I find my words are pregnant with the truth he alone knows about me. Union with God necessarily involves communion with my own heart.
B: What is it that Paul says? “Anyone united to the Lord is one spirit with him.”
C: Yes! Not only “one flesh,” as humans may be, but also one spirit. A truly astounding promise.
B: So, if I’m tracking you, the question we should ask after an “experience” is not “Was that God or was that me?” Instead, we should ask, “How was God-in-me at work in what I was experiencing?”
C: Yes. We want to maintain a difference between the reality of what God is doing, which is always so much more than we can grasp, and the good of our grasp of what God is doing. Rahner gets this right, I believe. Listen to how he frames this prayer: “Your living Word is still shrouded in darkness. It still echoes ever so faintly from the depths of my heart, where You have spoken it, up into the foreground of consciousness, where my scrawny knowledge is wont to parade and take itself so seriously.”
B: I’m listening.
C: Rahner assumes that God is present, speaking. But he also acknowledges that his hearing of God is faint, shrouded in darkness. And he reminds us that God’s Word challenges our “scrawny knowledge” of God that loves to parade itself. “[My] knowledge puffs up; [God’s] love builds up.” The smallness of our grasp is not to be despised, however. As Christmas tells us, God delights in humble accommodations. Nothing is too small for God!
B: Agreed. And I might add that our knowledge is not only “scrawny” but also “filtered.” What is in reality a gentle correction from the Spirit may be disfigured into a seemingly lambasting rebuke through the distortions created by my soul’s wounds or my bad theology. As God’s voice has “toned down” for me over time, what I believe actually changed was not God’s tone, per se, but that god-awful filter that was distorting my hearing and seeing. But some, reading what Rahner is saying, might object, “Isn’t that dismissive or demeaning of our experience?”
C: 100%. And I appreciate the concern. But in the end, no, I don’t think what Rahner says is dismissive. He’s trying to give us a way to make sense of our experiences—while trusting that God’s work is not limited to or restricted by what we’re feeling or thinking. Simon Tugwell, the Catholic charismatic, says this in his terrific book on prayer: “Somehow we must find a way of remembering God that does not work in fits and starts, but that will actually last through the day; a kind of fundamental remembrance of God that will affect our heart, and allow our most unpremeditated and spontaneous behaviour to be transformed, as it were, at the root…” What Rahner is doing, I believe, is reminding us that that transformation is out of our sight exactly because it works at the root—in our deepest, darkest depths.
B: I love that Tugwell says there’s a way of remembering God that “will actually last through the day.” But I’m not sure I’m fully tracking yet.
C: Let me try to put it like this: First, primarily, I believe God gives us what we need the way we need it. And we need to feel God’s delight in us. We need divine hugs, as you said. We need God to feed us when we’re hungry and to give us shelter when we’re in trouble. And God never fails. That reminds me of one of my favorite MLK sermons, one he preached many times, even in the final months of his life: “You may not know philosophy. You may not be able to say with Alfred North Whitehead that he’s the Principle of Concretion. You may not be able to say with Hegel and Spinoza that he is the Absolute Whole. You may not be able to say with Plato that he’s the Architectonic Good. You may not be able to say with Aristotle that he’s the Unmoved Mover. But sometimes you can get poetic about it if you know him. You begin to know that our brothers and sisters in distant days were right. Because they did know him as a rock in a weary land, as a shelter in the time of starving, as my water when I’m thirsty, and then my bread in a starving land. And then if you can’t even say that, sometimes you may have to say, ‘He’s my everything. He’s my sister and my brother. He’s my mother and my father.’ If you believe it and know it, you never need walk in darkness.”
B: That is living connection. “If you know him… you begin to know…”
C: Yes. “You never need walk in darkness.” Even, especially, when you’re walking in darkness!
B: Right!
C: So, that brings me to my second point, which is not meant as a negation of my first! The way God meets our needs always overflows and saturates our capacities, because God is always working, as Tugwell says, below the level of our contrivances. Most wonderful of all, what God is doing always does more than meet our needs! Grace is never less than what we need. But it is always, always, always more. The Spirit is prodigal.
B: Amen.
C: And that leads me to the third point, which I think gets right to the heart of the heart of the matter. I am close to God, as we all are—necessarily. Without that closeness, we simply wouldn’t exist at all. Sometimes, I can sense that closeness. At least its edges. But I can’t feel close to God in a habitual way, in that way which Tugwell and Rahner are describing, without living with a deep, abiding self-awareness. I can’t sense God’s touch if I’m not in touch with myself.
B: This is what you were saying about God speaking in our self-talk and the need to commune with God by communing with our own heart.
C: Yes. Exactly. The question is, what keeps me from that self-awareness, that communion? The answer, I believe, is the screen of my ego-centricity and the walls of my ego-defenses block my self-awareness, and so make me “misread” what is and isn’t happening to me. That screen screens out the truth of my experience. Those walls keep me from feeling what is in fact real. Once those walls come down, once that screen is removed, I can finally be one with myself in such a way that God’s Word, always already spoken, always already resonating in the depths of my heart, can finally be heard. God is always holding me. But I can’t experience that hold as a hug until I am comfortable enough with myself to admit that I need a hug and want one.
B: “Closeness”—there’s a good word. I asked my Godfather once, “How do I have this living connection?” He said, to my surprise at the time, “You already do.” I retorted: “And what if I don’t feel it?” And he directed me to the story of Lazarus. Jesus speaks the “Come forth,” but Lazarus’ new life cannot begin without the removal of the stone covering his tomb and the removal of the grave clothes that are binding him.
C: Right. And notice: Lazarus cannot do the removing of the stone and the loosing of the bindings for himself by himself. He can at most cooperate with the work others have started.
B: Amen.
C: And, you know, we’re never more like God than when we’re helping others “work out” the salvation God is working in them. Experiencing God is one thing. Being part of that experience for others is another. But given that Jesus is divinely human and humanly divine, one folds into the other.
B: I agree. Now, of course, for some of us, “helping” can devolve into rescuing, codependency and messiah complex. But in my own recovery, paying forward the mercy I’ve received and sharing the good news as I’ve witnessed and experienced it seems crucial to the healing journey and spiritual growth. As Step 12 says in the recovery world, “Having had a spiritual awakening, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” That is not subsequent to our recovery, but the pinnacle of it.
C: Man. Yes. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.