Dear Friends in Christ,
John Tully Carmody helpfully, to me at least, gets at what religious folk are aiming at in cultivating a religious life via a distinction between “flatland” existence and a desire to live “three-dimensionally.”
The strange, gratifying, hopeful reality is that any time our humanity
is exercised, any time that we leave flatland and begin to live
three-dimensionally, the mysteriousness of life, and so of life’s source,
comes into view…John’s (St. John of the Cross) God is at issue whenever
we come to ourselves’, realizing through either joy or pain that we have
to be more than our own. If we are only our own, we frustrate the
desire in us crying out to be purified. If we become God’s own, through
spiritual espousal, our humanity is redeemed from frustration.
This is, of course, a rather complicated and mystical way of saying that “God is Love” and that only by living out of the love ethic do we become real humans, i.e. “come to ourselves.” I like how, for Carmody, we need to be redeemed, not from sin, but from frustration. What has been frustrated in us is the desire to be us. And here’s the kicker, we can only become ourselves by becoming more than ourselves, if we live toward others–love again!
So later in this essay, Carmody says: “…when God espouses the soul it feels what it has been made for.” We cannot find ourselves in ourselves. Martin Buber goes so far as to say that love is not something that happens in us; it is something that happens in the space between us. Thich Nhat Hahn calls this “interbeing.”
Sir James Frazer famously defined religion as consisting in two parts: (1) Belief in a Supernatural deity, and (2) Action to propitiate this Being. This is problematical for me because I believe myself to be deeply religious, but I cannot subscribe to either of Frazer’s definitions of religion. God is not a god. God does not need or want anything, least of all my puny acts of propitiation. For me, God is the love that has been extended to the world in Jesus. This God has extended God-self to the world (i.e. love to the world) in other ways as well, but this is the channel through which I have experienced it.
For me, the primary (first) response to this God-Love is gratitude. This month we celebrate Thanksgiving. This is essential because out of truly thankful hearts flow all of the Christian virtues. Ungrateful people rarely praise God, love their neighbors, or practice good works. They tend instead to insular acts of anger and bitterness. Their sense that they are not more than their own is a true loss of God–the only atheism worth worrying about–interestingly, many orthodox, catholic Christians are such atheists. They believe in god, but not in God. They do not know that God is Love. They do not experience the humble joy of gratitude. The live in flatland.
Have a happy Thanksgiving,
–Pastor Bastien
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