Whispering, "Oh, God!" Over the Void
My whispered call to God and the sinking impulse behind it suggest Friedrich Schleiermacher's definition of piety as "an immediate feeling of absolute dependence," consciousness of our finitude in relation to God (Christian Faith §33), but it feels as much like carnal despair as piety. Anyway, the whole notion of verticality is absurd. Looking up is honorific, but how is God over my head as opposed to below my feet on the opposite side of the globe? To stay overhead day and night, he'd have to circle like a geosynchronous satellite. The idea of heaven "up there" made sense when people imagined a flat earth under a sky-bowl, but now it's as nonsensical as the idea--which I also form as I whisper God--of a magic-working guy above the clouds, the Man Upstairs who hears my whisper and can grant the emotional support and continued life I crave.
This idea is chronic. I caught it as a child and regularly relapse. It's a bronze-age construct, more applicable to Zeus and Odin than to the creator of a cosmos light years across. Returning to Schleiermacher, though he conceives of God as ultimately beyond any description (except as love) and "the undivided unity and source of all," he goes on in On Religion to defend himself against impersonal pantheism: "If any one look at it rightly, he will find that, on the one side, it is an absolute necessity for the highest stage of piety to acquire the conception of a personal God, and on the other he will recognize . . . how hazardous it is, if it is not carefully kept pure" (footnote 27 in the 1821 edition). Our concept of perfect being, filtered though our humanity, takes on a human flavor. Nicholas of Cusa wrote that, if a lion were to attribute a face to God, "he would think of it as a lion's" (p. 25). My anthropomorphic impulse puts me in good company, but I can't keep a human personality pure. I run into Schleiermacher's hazard. The face above my whisper inclines, not toward a lion, but toward Santa Claus if I look at it directly--and there's scant comfort in crying out to such a figure.
So am I blaspheming, honoring a false god? At times, I curiously observe my spontaneous whispers and concluded that I must be an old-time theist despite the fact that, while remaining devoted to the person and ethics of Jesus, I can form no plausible idea of a supernatural Father. Guilt clings to my whispers. If I scoff at a geosynchronous divine face with Kryptonian super-hearing to catch my whispers and yet I still look up and whisper, am I taking the name in vain? Should I get a grip and quit whispering? Or is it false pride to shun this ancient pathway to "the undivided unity and source of all," the way of the Psalmist that Schleiermacher considered inevitable but hazardous?
But Schleiermacher was no mystic, and other guideposts are--figures such as Nicholas of Cusa again, who declared that God could not be conceived or named: "If anyone said to me that You were called by this name or that, by the very fact that he named it, I should know that it was not Your name. . . If anyone should set forth any concept by which You could be conceived, I know that that concept is not a concept of You, for every concept ends in the wall of Paradise" (p. 58).
Nicholas' "wall" separates the experience of temporal beings from the intuition of an eternal one. It separates existences from Existence. Plurality from the One. Any concept of the divine is a misconception. Any name that can be said is not God's. Given the inadequacy of all language, its ultimate untruth, Nicholas still affirms the usefulness of analogous language to approximate God as part of a process of maturing spirituality, as children are fed milk until they mature enough to eat solid food (p. 52). But the name I whisper is not his name.
In fact, God, the term I whisper, is not a name, but an analogous term that belongs as much to Odin to anything else, a capitalized form of a generic word from Germanic paganism that that missionaries selected to translate the Latin theos. Jacob Grimm suggests that the choice may have been influenced by the fact that the Germanic name for Odin, the All-Father, was Guodan for the Longobards, Gudan in Westphalia, and was sometimes shortened to its first syllable (Grimm, p. 131). Odin, however spelled, was the old Germans' nearest approximation to monotheism, an "all-pervading creative and formative power" on whom depends "wishing, and all highest gifts and blessings" (Grimm, p. 133). Unlike the other gods, he was in a position to observe mortals like me from his throne at a window in heaven. "There is a stead called Hliðskjálf," Snorri Sturluson wrote in The Prose Edda," and when Odin sat there on high-seat, then he saw over all countries, and knew all things that he saw" (Grimm, p. 135), presumably even our whispered words.
If my wish (a term signifying serious need in old Germanic languages, not just a whim) is that I live forever with the gods after my death, then my chances are better with Odin if I perish in battle rather than if I, say, love my neighbors, but in other respects very little distinguishes the Sunday-school God I whisper to from the Norse All-Father--or, for that matter, from Santa Claus, who knows if I've been bad or good ("so be good for goodness sake"). It's an ancient trope. It clings like a field of beggar's lice.
The need that the wish-granting All-Father meets--and only he in any obvious sense--is there when I wake before dawn and feel my heart beating (but how many more times?). Thick darkness hangs over me--over, not under, astronomy be damned--threatening to melt me into itself. There is nothing I can do but lie helplessly in the grace of contingent existence, another few moments of being, a gift incomprehensibly out of my control. The Dark Night. The Cloud of Unknowing. The Void. I may cling to some book in translation from old sages, this verse or that from a gospel, Upanishad, or sutra, but I know that what clings is my own mortal hand, so certainty slips through my fingers. I am left at the bottom of a starless night.
I won't end here. I don't want to leave it here, but what alternative is there? There is acceptance of the darkness, spreading the arms as if crucified and falling upward into the mosh pit of being. It was Jesus's way, I think. Pure trust. It goes against gravity, the law of ego. I don't claim that I have done it, except in flashes of intuition. Mystics east and west agree that the way is by stilling the ordinary mind in prayer or meditation--that image-cleansed state that Christian monks call contemplative. After lying in the darkness this morning, an early day of a new year, I am resolved to do this more.
I think, lost in a cluttered basket by my recliner, there's a prayer rope of beads, a short rosary of the kind used in the Eastern church to pray the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." This is a Trinitarian way of falling into the mosh pit, an gesture of Schleiermacher's "absolute dependence." The tag, "a sinner" (not in the earliest version of the prayer) I understand as an admission of mortal limits, of inevitable helplessness over the Void, not merely of having done misdeeds, which is a relatively trivial fact.
References
Grimm, Jacob. Teutonic Mythology. Translated by James Steven Stallybrass. George Bell, 1882. https://www.norron-mytologi.info/diverse/TeutonicMythology1.pdf
Nicholas of Cusa. The Vision of God. Translated by Emma Gurney Salter. Cosimo, 2007. I have corrected Salter's annoying (to me anyway) affectation of Jacobean pronouns in a 20th-century translation.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. The Christian Faith (1830). Bloomsbury, 2016.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. Beloved, 2019.
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