A Nontheist’s Ash Wednesday Meditation

[F]or dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. – Gen. 3:19b

[A] man who dies is not a living man who enters into death. – Alain (Emile-Auguste Chartier)

Lent begins today. I will perform no acts of penance; not because I have not sinned, but because I have no fear of knowing divine wrath after death. I have, in fact, no fear, or hope, of knowing anything at all after death. The dead – to use an absurd but necessary expression – know nothing, for knowing requires a knower, and dying is the destruction of the knower. When one’s existence has ceased, one cannot know that existence has stopped, because one no longer exists: there is no one to know. The stopping itself may be horribly painful, and we fear it naturally. But, after the stopping, the actual absence of being: our fearing of that seems foolish. And yet we do fear it, perhaps because we cannot imagine not knowing that we have lived and died. Reflexively, we feel that “being dead” must be some kind of experience.

But to “be” dead, if it were possible, is to experience nothing, not even that one is experiencing nothing. Death is the inevitable actualization of the seemingly impossible: the sheer nonexistence of body, mind, soul, and spirit. The living mind can think in the shadow of nonexistence, but it cannot comprehend the reality. Death – the absence of presence, the absence of absence, the absence, even, of nothingness – is the absolute limit, the transcendent, the inaccessible infinite.

Zen master Bunan said, “While alive, be dead, be thoroughly dead. And then do what you will.” The good master must have been misled, or seeking to mislead: one cannot be thoroughly dead while alive. One can approach death; one can perhaps even die metaphorically. But not thoroughly. Not really. As monk Mamiya’s master said, “Dead men do not speak.” By speaking, Bunan belied his advice. He thought, perhaps, to show us an escape from life and death, but the door is trompe l’oeil.

One who speaks exists, and one who exists is not and cannot be dead, because death is the extinction of be-ing. We may say that one who is dead does not exist, but in fact no one is dead, no one does not exist. There is only a name, a memory, within those who continue, for a time, to exist. They who were do not somehow live in that memory: a memory is not that which is remembered; a name is not that which is named. Memories and names may remain, but beings cannot.

A being is but the opening and closing of a moment of time. “Afterlife” and “beforelife”: nonexistence. In a moment between them, in a brief irruption out of the eternal not, we exist. We may feel, to our horror, that we are trapped in time, but in fact time is what we are. When the time that we are expires, we are no longer. It is only now, in this moment between not and not, that I am. What do I do with this shrinking moment that is I?

One thing I need not do is worry about nonexistence: that would be to worry about nothing. Because I exist only now, because I will not exist after my last moment, and because there is no experience without existence, I am, for myself, eternal. Absurdly so, but eternal. But I do feel concern, because I know that I will someday be dead for others. I am not alone: my disappearance will cause enduring anguish for a few people. True, that anguish will vanish soon enough, as if it had never been, when those people, too, have ceased to be; but if, thrown into existence in this moment, I impart any meaning to life at all, it is in and through solidaric relationship and compassionate response to other beings. That everyone and everything is ultimately void does not mean that all is thoroughly void now. Our importance is not negated by our impermanence; on the contrary, it subsists there. For all of us.

No one gets out of this alive; therefore, no one gets out. But in our present, in the time that we are, we’re all in: whatever this is, however frightening and painful and pointless it may be, we are in it, we are it, together. Because our suffering, which is all the more intense and horrible for being meaningless, cries to a deaf heaven, we have only each other, and many of us have no ears to hear. But some hear, and some who hear respond. Otherwise, to be would be unbearable.

Deep in our hearts, we know that ultimately we are nothing. But the humane heart, because it also knows and responds to the reality of the present in its depths, says No – not now – to nothingness. And, cherishing living beings in their frailty and impermanence, moved by their plight, it says No to the suffering that it sees and feels. To be true to that heart is the best I can do. Moreover, because my every day is a kind of Ash Wednesday, a prolepsis of extinction, it is for me the difference between life and death.

Now, while I am not nothing, I make something of myself, something that is as real as a moment of consciousness can be, something that says Yes to life and, therefore, to acts of love that honor and harbor life and being. With eyes and heart open, I allow myself to live deeply and responsively; despite the pain, I will not attempt to live as if death were life. That would be to search for a back door, for a way out of the depths into dissociation and unreality; to indulge such delusion would be to waste this brief time that I am. Dead people do not know or speak, because there are none, but here and now I exist among other beings in the stark knowledge of life and death. Here and now I speak and hear, offer and accept, love, without which I would be nothing.

On Extended Wings

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. — Thomas Merton¹

On a Sunday almost twenty years ago, I traveled to New Jersey for the funeral service of a friend who had been something of a father figure for me. On the way, I stopped in Mount Holly for worship with Friends. As it happened, worship was held that day in the house in which the “Quaker saint” John Woolman had lived. After the meeting for worship, I would tour the house and read some passages by Woolman, noting that the phrase “living deeply” appeared more than once in the brief selections I’d found. From then on, that phrase would color my understanding of Quaker practice.

Even more significant, though, was my experience of worship there. As we sat together in a small room, the sincerity and depth of the silent worship lifted me up. And when another visiting Friend spoke of seeing a rare hawk soar over his home in Delaware, I was touched by his love and concern for the natural world. I had joined the Friends in Mount Holly in sadness, but in waiting with them upon the spirit of love, and in hearing words spoken from the heart of another, I was strengthened, even enabled to soar above the “ocean of darkness and death.”² I was put in mind of a poetic passage from the Book of Isaiah.

They who wait upon the Lord shall have their strength renewed; they shall mount up on wings, as eagles; they shall run and not stumble; they shall walk and not falter.³

Sitting in worship this morning with the gentle Friends of Little Falls Meeting, I thought back to days when, forgetting the lesson of Mount Holly and the “they” of Isaiah, I had experienced myself as a lone eagle, propelling myself upward, toward the light, on powerful wings. But time has a way of dispelling delusion. I am much older now: winging heavenward, even with help, is beyond me; on mere feet I falter. Retiring from full time work, I stumble into an uncertain but certainly briefer future as I struggle daily with frailties of body and soul. Observing those memories in the familiar peace of the meetinghouse today, I understood that I am a different person now, and that I need a different kind of poetry. And I smiled as an appropriate passage came to me, lines from Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”⁴

And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

No soaring eagle now, I am an anonymous old bird among the many flocks of pigeons – “rats of the air,” I’ve heard them called – known as “baby boomers,” my existence increasingly a burden to others, my vanishing traces ambiguous, my trajectory drawn “downward to darkness.”

But if these wings, weary yet still extended with the strength of worship, carry me downward now at evening, I can speak only of change, not of loss or gain. For soaring toward the sun is beautiful, but one must descend to go deep, and darkness need not be deprivation: after all, darkness is where the light shines. It may be that the darkness into which I sink is, in Merton’s words, “blazing with the invisible light of heaven.”

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.⁵

The emptiness of me is the name of God, written in the void of my heart. And the name of God is Love. Descending into the darkness of spiritual poverty, I may vanish into the hidden spark of love that is “in everybody” – not the isolated glory of a soaring eagle, but the pure and invisible “glory of God” shining in the nothingness that, in essence, we all are.

However I may be known to the world⁶ within and without, Love is my true identity. Sinking into darkness, I sing my Nunc dimittis. Love is my name.

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NOTES

1. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 60.
2. George Fox, Journal, p. 80 in Vol. I of his Works.
3. Isaiah 40:31.
4. “Sunday Morning” is in the public domain and can be read in its entirety at Wikisource.
5. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 158.
6. Friends sometimes signed in such a way; e.g., “Given forth by me, whom am known to men by the name of MARMADUKE STEVENSON, but have a new name given me, which the world knowns not of, written in the book of life.” (Stevenson, one of the “Boston martyrs,” was hanged in 1659 “for conscience sake”: for being a Quaker. The execution date, October 27, is now International Religious Freedom Day.)

For the original journal entry about my experience at Mount Holly, scroll down to “March 24, 1991 – Homewood Friends Meeting” after clicking here.

Of Smiles, Secrets, Strawberries, Sunyata

[Revised 10/17/2010.]

As he passed me in the hall this afternoon, a colleague said, “You’re always smiling. You must know something I don’t know.” Of course, I’m not always smiling, but I do smile whenever I encounter someone, whether student, staff member, or visitor: in such a place (a school for emotionally disturbed children), they deserve it. And I am genuinely pleased to see them. But I find it ironic that this person who writes knowingly about darkness, depression, and anxiety is perceived as “always smiling,” as if in possession of a happy secret.

What secret might I know? I don’t even know who I am. When I go deeply into myself, I don’t find anyone or anything – which is why I sometimes resist going deep. But the depths are always there, always in the heart of my heart. I may try to repress it, but I can never completely cover the trace of untouchable nothing at the center.

Nothing, void, emptiness, sunyata:¹ is this, then, the reality of who and what I am, the truth that the consolations of religion and mysticism tried and failed to cover?² At the heart of me, at the heart of all things, I am confronted by emptiness: not soul, not Being, not God or godhead, not a “That” or Absolute, not “Reality,” “Truth,” or “Essence,” but the brutal simplicity of sunyata, the radical darkness of void, the pure and pregnant emptiness, perhaps, of the null set.³

Sunyata is unseen, but its trace can be traced, the presence of its absence noted. And then the secret is out: the secret that, as Caputo reminds me, there is no Secret,⁴ and that, as Zen reminds me, those who sell Secrets are selling water by the river. Once, long before I discovered Derrida, I ran to the river and dipped my cup to steal and still the living water, hoping to learn its secret. But the rushing river took me up and carried me through a floodgate, and there is no going back. That gate is no gate,⁵ opening to nowhere, and what flows through it is simply water, an inessential essential of an inessential life. Water fills my cup, yes, but the cup is still empty.

A cup of water in the hand; a strawberry on the tongue:

A man pursued by a tiger caught hold of a strong vine and swung himself over a precipice. Above him, the tiger sniffed at him from the edge. Hanging there, clinging to the vine, he looked down and saw another hungry tiger pacing as it looked up at him. Two mice, one black and one white, began gnawing through the vine. Then the man noticed a strawberry growing from the cliff face before him. Reaching out with one hand, he plucked the strawberry and ate it. How sweet it tasted!⁶

Trembling in terror, he tasted the strawberry, the accidental gift, and then he, the accidental being, continued falling, as he must have, as we all do. Nothing that we are, we yet taste the terrible sweetness of falling. (And are our screams not blessings upon Brother Tiger?)

Does that Zen parable have a moral? Does it recommend, for example, that we doomed beings grab such lifelines and pleasures as we can? Does it offer the strawberry as a symbol of the Secret? Zen should know better than that (but of course there are many Zens). As I read it, the story is tersely descriptive of human experience, akin to haiku. It paints an accurate picture of our lives: the falling through emptiness; the grasping for survival; the horror of certain, painful, and imminent annihilation; the beauty of the transient even in our extremity; even the beauty of our transient extremity. Life as helpless falling, futile grasping, sweet horror.

Christianity would reverse my fall, return me to a fabled prelapsarian happiness, redeem me from fallenness and fallingness. Zen quietly points out that I have never been free of falling and never will be; that falling, the passing of nothing from nothing to nothing, is, in fact, my very life. From this fall there is no redemption, for there is nothing to be found that could be redeemed.

But surely there can be no falling? Nothing is, after all, nothing, not something named “nothing.” And yet I fall. Now, in this moment, I exist, and to exist is to fall. And to grasp. But later my existence itself will not exist, and I know that later arrives in a moment and, in a true existential prolepsis, is now⁷ – and always has been. This moment (isn’t the phrase itself a futile attempt to grasp the ungraspable?) is past, present, and future, all empty, as I am, void even of voidness, unknown and unknowable. I in/and the moment: sunyata. Even falling is empty.

And yet I cling, trembling, to my vine; the yin-and-yang mice gnaw; the tigers pace; the strawberry is eaten. Although I see that nothing is happening to no one, I wish it would happen less painfully, less horribly, for everyone. Everyone I meet is a falling through void, and the tigers are never sated. So I smile for them all as, sadly, I sow strawberries.

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NOTES

1. “Sunyata” is a Buddhist term that can be difficult to define in a few words. The Wikipedia article on it, for whatever it’s worth (I’m not qualified to critique it), can be found here.
2. It seems that there’s always (an) essential “Being” (thus, some thinkers speak of onto-theology), even if, as in Neoplatonic mysticism, it’s “Being beyond being” (hyperessentiality). For a discussion of that issue in this context, see David Loy, “The Deconstruction of Buddhism” and Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” both in Coward and Foshay, eds., Derrida and Negative Theology.
3. The image of pregnant emptiness is from David Loy, op. cit. On the null set as void, see Frederiek Depoortere, Badiou and Theology.
4. In More Radical Hermeneutics, John D. Caputo (echoing Derrida) says more than once that “The secret is, there is no Secret….” On page 1, he writes, “The secret is that there is no Secret, no … access to The Secret, which is what Jacques Derrida means by the absolute secret….” See also the aforementioned essays by Derrida and Loy in Coward and Foshay.
5. “The great way has no gate. Those who pass through this gate walk freely between heaven and earth.” – Zen saying.
6. A Buddhist story. I first read a version of it in Reps and Sengaki, eds., Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, originally published in 1957. In the 1970 printing by Tuttle, the story, called “A Parable,” is found on pp. 38-39.
7. That reminds me of John 4:23, a favorite Quaker verse: “The time is coming and now is….”

The image of the strawberry is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_strawberry

Endarkenment

I’m in the here and now, and I’m meditating,
And still I’m suffering, but that’s my problem.
Enlightenment: don’t know what it is.

– Van Morrison¹

Enlightenment. Don’t have it; haven’t seen it; can’t imagine it. Wouldn’t know it if it hit me over the head—or on the shoulder, jikijitsu-like. Don’t know what it is.

Reputedly, enlightenment “fixes” people. That seems appropriate, because I’m certainly broken—all the way down. But the hopelessly broken is not a candidate for repair. And I really don’t want to be put back together. Although it occasionally chokes my heart, brokenness is welcome to me in this world of suffering and failure. The liberation I want is not from the brokenness, but from the constriction. And I know where that liberation lies: it’s when I fear to feel the broken edges that I choke. But that’s my problem.

Enlightenment? Not here; not now; not for this writer. This fellow is a fraud; a shameful absurdity; a corpse preening in a mirror; a mirage obsessing over human error, fuming over intractable facts, shivering over survival. It seems that even we walking dead want to walk a while longer, look as good as possible, be admired for tricks like playing dead. At least, we want such things when we think we’re somebody. What is my original face before my parents conceived me? This I am even now: nihil sub aeternitatis specie.² But I forget. Brokenness can do that.

And this brokenness does, indeed, go all the way down. Unlike the estimable Leonard Cohen, alchemical hero of my cohort, I’m not singing “Hallelujah!” Let the Lord of Song be serenaded as he will; the spirit groans within me as I wait with the creation for the revelation of the children of God,³ weak and broken though they be. Groaning and longing don’t appeal? I understand; “I don’t expect that you should follow me.”⁴ To borrow Eliot’s words, I “wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”⁵ Hopelessness has few friends.

Enlightenment eludes me, but endarkenment: that I know. It is my spiritual condition, a kind of seeing in and by the dark. Maybe it’s the other side of enlightenment; maybe it’s a synthesis of enlightenment and ignorance; maybe it’s madness. In any case, one doesn’t get it by taking thought, nor does one get it by not taking thought;⁶ one simply opens one’s eyes in the unity of light and dark, good and evil, life and death, yes and no. So it’s all the same to me? No, it isn’t; perhaps if it were I’d be enlightened. But it’s all “not-two”⁷ to me, and that makes all the difference. I can’t rest in half-measures.

And so I rest in endarkenment, simultaneously seduced and repelled by the dark beauty of our Darwinian world. Or, I should say, I unrest here: I cannot “say ‘peace, peace’ when there is no peace.”⁸ It may be that “all manner of thing shall be well,”⁹ but not yet, not now. Life is suffering,¹⁰ and the end of suffering is the end of life: surely, no satori could switch off all pain sensors, confer immortality, or take the anguish of the world from my heart. Life is suffering, and the less suffering I bear, the less deeply I live—and the more other creatures bear for me. Where is the light in that? What spirit would move me so? Yes, “I’m in the here and now, and I’m meditating, and still I’m suffering,” but that’s not my problem.

Endarkened here and now, I am a failure as a Buddhist; degodded long ago, I have failed at Christianity as well. I belong nowhere, a solitary broken heart who wanders through life working and writing, poorly but never poorly enough, from a longing to love. Understanding that, I no longer hope for enlightenment; I want only to become ever more faithful to what I am—to be better attuned to not-twoness, more courageous in accepting brokenness, less limited in offering love. Those who feel a similar longing will know what I mean.

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NOTES
1. Van Morrison, the title song from Enlightenment (1990), an excellent collection. (Excerpt punctuation provided by me.)
2. “Nothing from the point of view of eternity.” Quoting the Latin phrase here probably qualifies as Spinoza-abuse; it’s lifted from Prop. XXXI of his Ethics, where he uses it in a very different way.
3. See Romans 8.
4. Justin Hayward, “Shame,” from The View From the Hill (1996), another recommended collection of songs. “Shame” seems to express a sense of the “not-twoness” mentioned later in this essay.
5. T. S. Eliot, “East Coker.” From Four Quartets, first published as a collection in 1944.
6. See Eicho (1429-1504 C.E.), Zenrin Kushu.
7. Chien-chih Seng-ts’an (d. 606 C.E.), “On Believing in Mind.”
8. Jeremiah 6:1: “They have healed also the hurt of my people superficially, saying, ‘Peace, peace!’ when there is no peace.”
9. Julian of Norwich.
10. The Buddha’s “First Noble Truth.”

Sunyata: an Unorthodox Experience

Increasingly, I live in emptiness.

To live in emptiness, I find, is not a deprivation, nor is it an attainment, nor is it salvation. It is simply to be surrendered to reality.

To live in emptiness is not deprivation, although it is disillusionment. As my friend Gary G. has pointed out, to be dis-illusioned should not be a bad thing for a sincere soul. Disabused of beliefs and notions, even against my will, forced into freedom, I am no longer abused by illusions and lies. When I do not confuse dream and reality, I am free to dream.

To live in emptiness is not an attainment, although it is in each moment a kind of kensho. It is an awakening to and in perfect darkness, the inability to deny my nothingness, the discovery of freedom from the desire for light and the need to be. When I do not require light or being, I am open to their transient graces.

To live in emptiness is not to be saved but to be lost, to be so thoroughly, irretrievably lost that all directions are equally perilous and promising. It is to see that the hope of salvation—of any sort—was a denial of life and death, a betrayal of my humanity, a soul-smothering resentment. If I find any salvation at all in emptiness, it is this unsought liberation from hope.

To live in emptiness confers neither uninterrupted happiness nor imperturbable inner peace. To the contrary, it cuts the root of the desire for those goods, of the illusion that happiness and peace are worthy of my seeking and holding. Nor, however, does it bring unrelenting sadness or turmoil. But it opens the heart, deepening the experience of compassion, and to be so opened is to feel the joy and the agony of the world. Happiness is but half of life, if that, but in emptiness is the fullness of feeling. I am joy and sadness, peace and turmoil, acceptance and horror, alternately, simultaneously, intensely. Seeing as I do, feeling as I do, I cannot be otherwise.

To live in emptiness is to live in death—not in the shadow, but in death itself. When I walk in the shadow of death, alone or with God, I am a shade, a half-alive being wandering in the half-light of an unreal world. But to walk in the perfect death-darkness of emptiness is to live fully in perfect light, because, perfection being completeness, darkness and light are an interpenetrative whole.

To find myself living in emptiness was not initially a welcome experience. The condition is not a desirable one, not something that a seeker would want. Nor is it a saleable commodity, perhaps especially in the religion/spirituality market. Who would pay for it? It seems, in fact, to possess no value whatsoever. And yet I would not trade it now for a life of happiness. I would not abandon the insecurity of emptiness even to be cradled in the arms of an omnipotent god. No, not would not but could not, cannot. For as I had no choice but to come into this condition, I have none but to remain. When one’s eyes have been opened, one may close them again, but the light shines in the darkness, and darkness is darkness no matter how bright.

How did I get to this here that feels like nowhere? I can’t say; I don’t even know where I am. This is neither home nor wilderness, here are no landmarks or signs, and roads I walked no longer exist. Nor can I recommend this condition to others: for all I know, being here could appear to turn out badly. In speaking or writing about it, I can only try to describe how it feels to be lost as I am lost, wandering in the noonday dark with a sad heart and a happy smile for little ones, irreversibly awakened to my essential and existential nothingness and learning to live more deeply in the emptiness of that deepening realization.

Miracle and Sense

Today’s post, a complement to my recent “Saving Selving,” is a meditation developed from a little verse that I wrote more than fifteen years ago. Back then, I titled the verse “Dogen’s Miracle” because it had been inspired by a reading of Zen master Dogen (13^th century C.E.).

walk on water
second water
carry water
first

The verse refers to a classification used in the gem business. A diamond of the highest quality, one that is as clear as pure water, is said to be of the first water. A diamond of lesser purity would be rated as of the second or even third water. So the verse asserts that to walk on water, as Jesus is said to have done, is a miracle of the second water, of lesser quality. The finest, purest miracle is that we carry water, that we exist and that we can and do care for ourselves and others. The verse also carries the implication that one who would walk on water must first perform the taken-for-granted activities that sustain and express our existence—the unnoticed quotidian miracles of human life. Those, after all, are the truly important things.

Of course, many of us no longer carry water. We have accomplished the miracle of having water come to us, even into our dwelling places, at our demand. In one sense, that’s surely a tremendous gain. But does it make us even more likely to forget about the mundanely miraculous, more likely to require walkings on water for the meaning, the sense, of our lives?

Reading Jean-Luc Nancy last night, I was struck by his reference to “sense beyond sense.”¹ Tradi­tion­ally, what some call “ontotheology” has posited, believed in, a sense beyond the world: the world makes sense because God exists and transcends it. The world makes sense because, as it were, Jesus walked on water: sense does not inhere in the world but is derived from the world’s subservience to the divine. To go beyond such wishful thinking is often to move into nihilism, or “non-sense.” But Nancy offers a different perspective. For Nancy, the world no longer has sense; it is sense.

[Neither do] we have to orient ourselves in a state of complete blindness, nor [is it] a matter of indifference that we are disoriented, and that there is no difference between the best and the worst. On the contrary … there is no sense given anywhere that could make us tolerate the intolerable, no more than there is non-sense in virtue of which we could disqualify or annul existence. In other words, this means that ‘nihilism’ dissolves every bit as much as any ‘idealism’ (or ‘metaphysics’ in this sense) because it, too, remains in the final analysis submitted to the regime of supposition. It dissolves at the touch of the absolute point of existence.²

“The absolute point of existence”: reading that, I think not so much of Eliot’s “the still point of the turning world” as of the immediate encounter with life—the life of community in which alone we exist—that is signified in Zen’s simple image of drawing and carrying water for self and others. This is radically different from the totalizing idea of community that we find incarnate in party, state, church—the kind of herd mentality or “Church patriotism” that Simone Weil feared would infect her if she joined the church:

I am afraid of the Church patriotism existing in Catholic circles. By patriotism I mean the feeling one has for a terrestrial country. I am afraid of it because I fear to catch it. It is not that the Church appears to me to be unworthy of inspiring such a feeling. It is because I do not want any feeling of such a kind in myself. The word want is not accurate. I know, I feel quite certain, that any feeling of this kind, whatever its object, would be fatal for me.

There were some saints who approved of the Crusades or the Inquisition. I cannot help thinking that they were in the wrong. I cannot go against the light of conscience. If I think that on this point I see more clearly than they did, I who am so far below them, I must admit that in this matter they were blinded by something very powerful. This something was the Church seen as a social structure. If this social structure did them harm, what harm would it not do me, who am particularly susceptible to social influences and who am almost infinitely more feeble than they were?³

Those saints had succumbed to the totalizing claims of the walking-on-water lie, the myth of the miraculous. Community for them was imposed, artificial; it was far from, even a denial of, the simple, natural community of those who need water. Their community was bound together by the “making sense” that their belief gave them, a sense by which they sought to “tolerate the intolerable” rather than allow the raw experience of the intolerable to awaken the transforming compassion of being-with. Their world made sense only in light of the closure of their belief in God and his ecclesial system, and, warned by the story of Peter who sank when his belief faltered, they fought tooth and nail to preserve that sense. They wanted to close the world within their system and to feel safe—saved—there. But some of us want to open the world, or, better, to recognize and enter into the openness of the world, opening ourselves to the sense of the world itself.

As soon as the appearance of a beyond of the world has dissipated, the out-of-place instance of sense opens itself up within the world (to the extent that it would still make sense to talk of a ‘within’).⁴

That is not, of course, to move the “out there” to the “in here,” but to recognize that the world itself is sense. It is to stop imagining that one could walk on water—or that someone has done it for us—and to pick up the pail. Then we may find that to carry water is much more useful and meaningful than to walk on it. And we may find ourselves in a first-water community that is not bound and tyrannized by the frantic effort to force life to “make sense,” a community in which we can acknowledge and support each other in what we actually are, terribly temporary beings who not only are radically contingent but who also know that we are.

A community is the presentation to its members of their mortal truth (…). It is the presentation of the finitude and the irredeemable excess that make up finite being: its death, but also its birth, and only the community can present me my birth, and along with it the impossibility of my reliving it, as well as the impossibility of my crossing over into my death.⁵

It is said that when confronted by a rival who claimed that his teacher could walk on water and could make his signature appear on a paper on the other side of a river, Zen master Bankei replied, “My miracle is this: when I’m hungry, I eat; when I’m tired, I sleep.” Commentators sometimes seek to add to the master’s statement, opining, for example, that he was actually boasting of his single-mindedness in every activity. I don’t think so; I think that he was pointing directly to life, to nothing more or less than eating and sleeping, carrying water and chopping wood. I think that he was pointing to the sense that the world is (rather than makes or has)—to the unspeakable, breaking-open sense that we sense at the “absolute point of existence.”

I can’t speak for Nancy, and I can’t claim to have read much of his work with understanding. Nor can I speak for long-dead Bankei. I hope I will be forgiven if I have misinterpreted either or both of them. For myself, though, long past belief in divine beings, and lately shaped by an ever-deepening intuition of the non­existence that is death (“the impossibility of my crossing over into my death”), I can trust no one who walks on water, nor any whose master does. I hope for no miracles, now or after death, beyond the present miracle of our shared existence. I simply want to carry water for as long as I can, and then as now to accept graciously that which other, stronger people carry to me, we all the while resisting together the victory of the intolerable, until I am no more.

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NOTES
1. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bergo, Malenfant, and Smith (New York, Forham University Press. 2008), page 126.
2. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Librett (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. 1997), p. 79; quoted in “The Sense of Being(-)With Jean-Luc Nancy” by Ignaas Devisch in Culture Machine 8, 2006.
3. Simone Weil, Waiting for God (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Capricorn Books Edition. 1959), p. 53.
4. Nancy, The Sense of the World (quoted in Devisch; see note 2, above), p. 55.
5. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. 1991), p. 15. Quoted in “The Community according to Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis” by Anja Streiter, Film-Philosophy 12.1, April 2008.

Gnosis of the Heart

The yearning for purification and transformation, which is especially intense today, has been with me for a long time. It often brings to mind the promise of Ezekiel.

A new heart also will I give you,
and a new spirit will I put within you:
and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh,
and I will give you a heart of flesh.

More than once I have referred to that passage (Ezek. 36:26) in vocal ministry, at least once offering something like a prayer: “Take away this heart of stone, and give me a heart of flesh.” But again today I wonder, as I do each time the passage comes to me, if such complete re-creation can ever really happen.

Ezekiel’s promise is interwoven in my mind with a passage from Ode of Solomon XI (trans. Barnstone). I once mentioned part of it — lines 1, 2, and 5 — in vocal ministry, and those same lines often come to mind during worship and at other times, such as now, when I’m feeling the weight of the world’s sadness. Here’s the entire passage.

My heart was cloven and there appeared a flower,
and grace sprang up, and fruit from the Lord,

for the highest one split me with his holy spirit,
exposed my love for him, and filled me with his love.

His splitting of my heart was my salvation,
and I followed the way of his peace, the way of truth.

Picturing those lines, I usually see a rock being cracked open by the force of the world’s random suffering. I see a small stem emerge, blossoming: the flower of compassion. But then I remember the passage from Ezekiel, and the image freezes; I am unable to imagine how a small blossoming of compassion would lead to the removal and replacement of my heart. Today, however, perhaps because of the urgency of my feeling, which is tinctured with the intuition of nonexistence, I need to resolve this, to understand. But I don’t want to uncouple the two passages, which both speak to me powerfully and which together seem to form a gestalt. And so I read more carefully, noting that the ode’s author says, in the lines I usually overlook, that he or she was filled with the Lord’s love when her own love was exposed. And I look within more carefully, allowing imagination to illuminate.

Peering into the cleft, which is growing wider as I look, I see that the stone is hollow, a mere shell. Within the stone is earth, and I recall Jesus’ reference to the fertile ground in which the seed of the divine Kingdom of justice, mercy, and peace is rooted. I perceive that the flower of compassion proceeds not from a simple stem but from a vine, and I understand that this vine of the Kingdom is the Christ, “the hidden human being of the heart” (1 Pet. 3:4). The vine grows as I watch; it fills the empty space within the stony shell and begins to wrap around the outside. Soon it covers the stone completely, so that the shell is both filled with and covered by the life of compassion and justice.

“Seeing” that, I feel that my eyes have been opened.

In my naïveté and pride, I had imagined that my stony heart would dramatically be destroyed and replaced; that, as I thought Paul said in Galatians 2:20, I would be crucified and live no longer as I. But today I am edified and humbled by this vision. In my case at least, pace Ezekiel, the stone is not removed; it is covered, inside and out, by the spiritual vine Christ, the divine-human form of love — or is that equivalent to removal and replacement? And, pace Paul, I am not crucified; I am broken, yes, but I am also covered, knit together in my brokenness, by suffering love — or is that equivalent to crucifixion and resurrection? (Does not the risen Christ continue to bear his wounds?) The images, icons, take me beyond themselves into the reality of my heart.

As understanding deepens, I see and can say this: I have never had a heart of stone. My heart has a stony carapace, but by the grace of love it has never been fully enclosed within its shell. And the shell itself is increasingly opened and covered by love’s flesh and blood, the Christ-vine of compassion whose seed lives in the humus, the God-breathed earthly humanity, that has always been my heart of hearts.

Knowing that life and love are suffering and will always be so, I understand the shell’s formation and function: it is the original innocent transgression, the protective human sin that is with us from birth. I understand, too, that for now it must remain, although eventually it may crumble, no longer needed, within the vine’s embrace. No matter. “Blessed is he whose sin is forgiven, whose transgression is covered” (Ps. 32:1). The vine lives in me and offers its healing life to me: freely may I receive; therefore, freely may I give. As compulsion yields to compassion, I see the end of law; I know more fully the peace of freedom in the face of nonexistence; I feel the blessedness of a heart of flesh.

Wrestling with Nothingness

The intuition of nonexistence, which I wrote about recently, continues. It has a definite Buddhist flavor, as in these lines from Ryōkan (1758–1831), a Zen Buddhist poet and hermit.*

This is an old truth; don’t think it was discovered recently.
“I want this, I want that”
Is nothing but foolishness.
I’ll tell you a secret:
All things are impermanent.

But given my bi-spirituality, I acknowledge a Christian aspect as well. Zen and Christianity come together in the religious experience of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who, through his writings, was my spiritual guide for many of my younger years, and who in the latter part of his life studied and wrote about the Zen experience. Here is a statement from an interview with Brother Paul Quenon, a Trappist who studied under Merton at Gethsemane Abbey.

[Merton and I] were talking about prayer and that prayer is like a struggle with God. It’s like Jacob struggling with the angel in the night, and when you’re encountering God God is not a thing, and so God is more like nothing, so when you enter into the depth of prayer it’s like entering into nothingness.

Wrestling with nothingness seems to be a good description of where the intuition leads me. If I possessed the kind of theistic faith that sustained Merton, I might be able to frame the intuition as apophatic mysticism. When I am just coming out of the experience, I can sense how easily my perception of it could be changed by such faith. But while I don’t rule faith out on a priori grounds, each time I consider it I see that the world makes less, not more, sense from the perspective of theism. And so I wrestle, trying to come to terms with the experience, learning to accept the unacceptable and to allow this reality to shape my remaining time.

For without God, emptiness is truly empty. In Buddhist thought, the term “voidness” is not always reframed as “plenitude”: sometimes it is permitted to mean what it says, and that’s how I must use it now. This all seems most ironic to me, that a man who is grasped by the moral vision of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus comes, as he approaches the end of his life, to this Buddhist-like experience of voidness, of emptiness — without even the escape hatch of a substantialist interpretation of the doctrine of Buddha-nature, sometimes used to pretend that emptiness isn’t really empty.

Ryōkan again:

The village has disappeared in the evening mist
And the path is hard to follow.
Walking through the pines,
I return to my lonely hut.

When I was young, the Catholic Church was my village. (See “The Making of a Quaker Atheist.”) Leaving there discouraged, I found this poor heart-hut at hand and stayed here, thinking that it would be but a temporary shelter. It became my base for exploration. After wandering about and staying awhile among other communities, I discovered the Quaker village, and it is there that I continue to visit when I leave my inner hermitage. But that village, too, is swallowed by mist at the end of the day, and I see no path elsewhere. In the obscurity of age, I return to my lonely self. I will visit the village again, but I understand now that this temporary hut is my spiritual home. And I am beginning to understand that no one lives here. But if that truly is the case, I wish I could learn it fully while no one is still someone.

When you encounter those who are wicked, unrighteous, foolish, dim-witted, deformed, vicious, chronically ill, lonely, unfortunate, or disabled, you should think: “How can I save them?” And even if there is nothing you can do, at least you must not indulge in feelings of arrogance, superiority, derision, scorn, or abhorrence, but should immediately manifest sympathy and compassion. If you fail to do so, you should feel ashamed and deeply reproach yourself: “How far I have strayed from the Way! How can I betray the old sages? I take these words as an admonition to myself.” — Ryōkan

In the physical house in which I bide my time, there is a beautiful, although damaged, Buddhist shrine, in which reside images of the Buddha, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and Thích Quảng Đức (who immolated himself in Saigon when I was 13 years old). For a couple of years, the shrine, facing a space too small for sitting in meditation, has been closed. The shrine is something like my heart: beautiful, intricate, Bodhisattva-harboring; broken, misoriented, latched. Today, I think I will turn both of us around and open the doors.

———-
*Note: passages from Ryōkan are from “Zen Poetics of Ryokan” by Meng-hu, reprinted at The Hermitary.
———-
[Related post: "I Know What It's Like to Be Dead"]

“I know what it’s like to be dead”

My title is from the Beatles’ song called “She Said, She Said”: a couple of the lyric lines are relevant to my topic. When I attempted to describe to my friend Gary G. the change in my experience that I will attempt to describe to you now, he immediately recalled the song.

“She said, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.’”

Back in May, I decided to tell my relatively new acquaintance, John C., too, about this significant change in my life. I’ll use some of what I wrote to John to help me introduce it here.

Not long ago, something “clicked,” and suddenly I understood the ineluctable reality of evolution as a soulless and self-contained process. From then on, I have awakened many mornings in a kind of near-death experience, a strong intuition of what it means to really not exist at all. That experience returns to me a few times during each day as well. As a result, my felt sense of the world has changed, and I have more compassion now about people’s desire to remove the fear of the unknown. Another positive result seems to be that I no longer fear the dark so much, metaphorically speaking. But I understand first-hand now how dangerous that experience can be, because time is telescoped and, in a real sense, I already do not exist. I seem to have more respect for and yet less fear of death now. Maybe one function of religion has been to protect us from such knowledge — to serve as a kind of socially-inculcated defense mechanism?

That last sentence raises some interesting issues, but I’ll leave them for future musings. Today I want to focus on the experience.

I remember reading many years ago a Zen dialogue (which, if I haven’t imagined it, I may be able to locate later). In the story, a monk is challenged with something like this: “You can conceive of nonexistence, but can you conceive of the nonexistence of nonexistence?” The question itself is subject to a variety of interpretations. For example, one may read it as implying that nonexistence does not exist, that there is no such thing. Well, yes, nonexistence is not a thing: it’s a predicate. One could even go on to say that the Zen master must be teaching that nothing ever ceases to exist. But I don’t think that the master was teaching that: Buddhism attributes only conditional reality, if that, to things. My reading of the question was more like this: do you understand what it means, in terms of your life, that “nonexistence” not only is not a thing, but also is a characteristic that cannot be predicated of any thing? My answer then was, “Yes, but I’ll need to think about that.”

Thinking more about it didn’t give me a useful understanding then, but now the ongoing intuition of nonexistence is helping me to think (and feel) differently. No thing can be said not to exist, I see now. I cannot not exist: not because I am eternal, but because nonexistence is not a characteristic of any real — existing — thing, and I am such a thing. (“Existing” as a thought in someone’s mind is not the existence I require for myself.) There is no time when I will not exist, and yet there will be a time when others can rightly say of me, “He no longer exists.” Contemplating that paradox, I begin to understand “the nonexistence of nonexistence.”

And the reality of death. I might say that death is unconsciousness that never ends, but only with the proviso that no one is unconscious — and that unconsciousness can be predicated only of an existing being. Analogies can’t be of much help here. But this I can say: there are dead bodies, for a time, but no dead persons. I will die, but I will never be dead.

“And she’s making me feel like I’ve never been born.”

And yet, in a sense I am dead now, because to intuit nonexistence is to feel past and future in the present. As I told John, time is now telescoped. Seeing beyond existence allows me to feel the timeboundness and momentariness of our existence. Knowing now the eternal reality of nonexistence and the relentless relativity of time, I begin to understand that already I do not exist. And I see, too, that, from the perspective of eternity, I have never been born.

I’m reminded of a kind of prelude experience that I had in 1990, on the day that my adult family’s first pet dog died. Below is a paragraph from the entry I wrote that day in my journal. (Click here for the entire entry. At the time, I was thinking of Zen Master Bankei‘s notion of “the Unborn,” thus my reference to “Mind” in that entry, but my experience now is different, beyond the reach of doctrine — as, for all I know, Bankei’s was, too.)

A line seems to have an origin and an end, but I come from nowhere and go nowhere. I am an imaginary series of points between two deaths. Each point is drawn on the plane of emptiness; each point of life is a point of death. In perfect stillness I pass through them all. If I could enter that stillness, I would know peace. I would know death in life and life in death; I would no longer want to deny what I am. I would live, at last, as a free man.

I now know death in life. And, because of that, I am learning to know life in death. It may be that freedom is at hand.

[Follow-up post: "Wrestling with Nothingness"]