"God Shows Up": Visions, Myth, and Magic

 

    Apparently, I haven’t learned my lesson. I still understand "God" in an eccentric way debased by my Baptist upbringing. In one of the last sessions of the 4-year "Education for Ministry" (come by and I'll show you my Sewanee School of Theology diploma), we were asked to write a “knee-jerk” response to the phrase, “God shows up.” My response didn't remotely resemble anybody else's, and theirs were mostly alike. Again, I was the outsider. 

    I wrote that I'd love to know that God had showed up, but found "the curtain between the subjective and objective, the relative and the absolute, to be opaque." Everybody else responded, not to “God shows up,” but to "I feel a spiritual presence,” which to me is radically different because of the vast gap between what I feel and what is. If I feel something strongly--say, that Hillary will be elected President--my feeling makes me likely to be wrong. Bias clouds judgement. So a feeling of the sacred, though I cherish it, is no evidence that God has “showed up.” Anyway, isn't God, according to theology (if not mythology), eternally omnipresent? A being capable of "showing up," of being either present or absent, is not outside of time and space, but  inside it--it's a god, not God. A feeling of the sacred, of harmony with the flow, is a fine thing, but how can it be objectified as “God” showing up?

     In defense of my misunderstanding, the person who initiated the prompt did seem to have a sort of ghostly materialization in mind. She described how she was sitting in a room and God "appeared" to her—explicitly Him, masculine with presumed eyes looking at her, ears listening, located in the room—and she begged him to forgive her thousands of sins (some exact number). This was the localized Yahweh--complete with two legs--who walked in Eden in the cool of the day speaking human words (Genesis 3), who passed a cleft in a rock where Moses was hidden (Exodus 33), burned in a bush (Exodus 3), and wrestled with Jacob (Genesis 32). She felt the presence of that finite deity whom later writers the Old Testament universalized in the first Creation story. She lived the God-concept that Augustine of Hippo rejected as having “hair and fingernails" (3.7.12). Moreover, hers was a bookkeeper God who counted times she had sinned against Him (along with presumably the hairs on her head).

    Arthur Green, a Jewish theologian, in his essay "A Monk's Gift," argues that this image of deity afflicts organized Judaism, as it certainly does much of Christianity. Judaism, he says, loses many devout to contemplative Asian religions because they seek a living faith, an engagement with holiness that goes beyond social customs, community, and law. Green, who found such engagement in Kabbala and esoteric Judaism, was invited to speak at an American "day of spiritual teaching" with a Benedictine monk, a Hindu swami, and a Zen master. The event was heavily attended by the swami's robed followers, more sparsely by Jews or Christians. After Green's speech on mystical Judaism, a young man in Hindu robes said, "Rabbi, what you're saying is very nice; I love the idea of standing before the mountain, of inner hearing, and all the rest. But is that really Judaism? Isn't Judaism really about how God is up there in heaven with a book, keeping score, watching the good and evil that you do, preparing to reward or punish you?" Green learned that the young man was Jewish and had dropped out of a leading New York yeshiva one year before rabbinic ordination. "Here," he writes, "was a product of what in some circles might be called the best of inner Jewish higher education--and he was still left with an infantile level of religious faith! No wonder he looked elsewhere when he grew up. Who could blame him?" (Green 62-65).

    The young man's quid-pro-quo, hanging-judge God, more accountant than CEO of the universe, is the same white-bearded codger William Blake mocked as Nobodaddy, "Father of Jealousy." After a period of believing in this figure as a child, then losing belief and passing through a phase of nostalgic desire, I now find the character suitable only for cartoons, the sort that depict him walking barefoot on fluffy clouds. Some forms of religion, of course, exploit this tribal lord of law and lightning for social control, threatening troublemakers with a Santa who leaves eternal sticks in the stockings of bad children. Or, more positively, religions hoist this god as a kind of humanoid flag, an anthropomorphic outward and visualizable sign of their own invisible power. Of course, even if churches devolve to social clubs under Nobodaddy's account book, they may still (like cultic AAs) save their own from loneliness, alienation, or addiction. Human love may triumph.

    But seems that too many churches are comfortable functioning at this level--as once-a-week social clubs, service organizations at best--offering little impetus for the spiritual development of their members. As Richard Rohr says in The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, "All the Christian churches are being forced to an inevitable, honest, and somewhat humiliating conclusion. The vast majority of Christian ministry has been concerned with 'churching' people into symbolic, restful, and usually ethnic belonging systems rather than any real spiritual transformation into the mystery of God. After serving as a priest for more than thirty years, . . . I am convinced that most of our ministries have legitimated the autonomous self [the ego] and even fortified it with all kinds of religious armor. Religious people are even harder to transform because they don't think they need it" (xv). 

    The transformation Rohr refers to is a process of seeing through the habitual "false self" of compulsions and addictions we have cobbled together since childhood to cope with the practical world--our personal identity attached to ephemeral accomplishments and failures. It's about learning to live simply as our core selves. Paul calls it dying and rebirth. Rohr's busy life demonstrates that this is no call to ignore the world, but rather to engage it with clarity, raising our eyes from Whack-a-Mole games of no lasting value. It's about resigning from addictive rat races--from what Aldous Huxley describes as "the God-eclipsing activities of ordinary unregenerate life" (112)--and engaging reality with our whole beings. Only in this way can we find the unconditional value that, Rohr teaches, can never be earned through human effort but is always present, waiting to be seen and accepted. It's grace that comes from pure action without anxiety over outcomes.

    The Enneagram's program of spiritual development calls us to see through our one-sided compulsions to be praised, to escape blame, to be right, to be safe, to be needed, to be respected, to be noticed, to be successful, to be smart, or to be happy, none of which is intrinsically good, though all may be desirable. These are what the Stoics called, preferables, colors prismed from the pure white light of the Good. We find wholeness and peace by defragging ourselves, by letting go of ego-obsessions and living out compensatory "wings" and opposites--much like an auto mechanic balancing the wobbly soul-wheel until it spins true. In the process, we love our neighbor, not as a sacrifice, but as an inevitable consequence seeing the world intact. This kind of spiritual development goes far beyond Sunday sermons and is devalued by churches that, as Rohr suggests, tell the faithful that, by merely joining the club, they have arrived and are not in need of soul-work.

    The religious philosophies of India insist that "the final goal of life must be the attainment of transcendental consciousness" (samadhi), which is direct apprehension of God, even unity with the One (Prahavananda 216). This is, of course, related to the Enneagram program of balance and purification from worldly obsessions: "Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God" (Matthew 5:8). The Vedanta movement--based on the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna, a mystic who professed to have practiced Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism and arrived at the same God in all three (232)--describes all religions as culturally adapted paths to samadhi expressed by teachers such as Jesus who have a achieved unity with the divine: "I and the father are one" (John 10:30). 

    Swami Prabhavananda says it this way: "there is only one truth, one substance that has never been defiled, and that is the truth of God. None has ever succeeded in describing that in words." All scriptures and teachings are, he says, "defiled" because "they have been uttered by a human tongue" (217). The usual path to samadhi in India involves a life of asceticism and meditation to detach the consciousness from temporal obsessions and open it to the eternal. Here, morality and self-discipline are means, not ends. They are preparations to receive the gift of grace, not merits in themselves. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches that, if a bad man were  to experience samadhi, he would be saved (4.36).

    But, in practice, seekers in the Eastern tradition submit to an enlightened teacher and expect years of discipline before experiencing samadhi, if ever. Along the way, Swami Prabhavananda notes, many aspirants experience mystical visions of etherial light, spiritual beings, and revealed wisdom. This kind of vision is, of course, central to Christianity from Our Lady of Lourdes through Joan of Arc's saints, all the way back to Paul's vision on the Damascus road and Christ's transfiguration before Peter, James, and John--the climax of all three synoptic gospels. But Prabhavananda cautions that, though such visions shouldn't be dismissed as hallucinations, they should not be confused with a transforming encounter with the One--the supreme sense of "God shows up." Visions are useful when they encourage aspirants to continue in spiritual development but are only milestones on the road to illumination. Prabhavananda repeats Sri Ramakrishna's reply to a disciple who complained that, unlike his comrades, he hadn't had any mystical visions: "Try to cultivate devotion to God and learn perfect control of the self. These are much greater than visions" (219).

    In his essay "The Magical and the Spiritual," Aldous Huxley relegates most of public religion--everything that does not cultivate direct apprehension of the eternal--to a psychic shadowland he calls magic. At their best, churches work "white magic." Religious practices such as intercessory prayer, prophecy, and healing function (as far as they do) by wielding for good the same forces that demagogues wield for evil. The "unusual and supernormal," he says, need not be of divine origin, and religious language and symbolism don't make it so. Denying the spirituality of most religions, Huxley parallels Rohr's critique of churches and demotes all but a few gurus to salaried psychics. The church's "liturgical and sacramental devices" are not always "God-eclipsing," he concedes, and may benefit those unsuited for actual spirituality. "Adherence to to a predominately psychic religion of white magic is better, on the whole, than adherence to no religion at all, or to some idolatrous pseudo-religion such as nationalism, communism or fascism."

    The idea of a high and low road in religion, the high one for only a few, was part of early Christianity in the form of Gnosticism but was condemned by Orthodoxy and finally extinguished by the cruelties of the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition. Still, it remains a stubborn fact. Visions of God, or heaven, or any "spiritual" spectacle in creaturely imagery, impressive though they may be, are second-hand knock-offs of the real no-thing, tarnished by anthropomorphism. A few (and I think of Thomas Aquinas, who shortly before his death called all his theology "straw") may have glimpsed the genuine article, a God who really showed up.

Works Cited

Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Albert C. Outler, Barnes and Noble, 2007.

Green, Arthur. "A Monk's Gift." My Neighbor's Faith, edited by Jennifer Howe Peace et al., Orbis Books, 2017, pp. 62-67.

Huxley, Aldous. "The Magical and the Spiritual." In Isherwood, pp. 112-115.

Isherwood, Christopher, editor. Vedanta for the Western World. George Allen and Unwin, 1948.

Prabhavananda. "Samadhi or Transcendental Consciousness." In Isherwood, pp. 216-224.

Rohr, Richard, and Andreas Ebert. The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective. Crossroad, 2012.