This is a recreation of my talk at the 3 in 1 gathering, in St Michael's church, Dunedin, last Sunday.
I want to tell you a parable. The kingdom of heaven is like two young fish who are swimming along when they encounter an old fish. "Good morning boys," says the old fish, "isn't the water lovely today!" The two young fish swim on until the old fish is well out of earshot, then one turns to the other and asks, "what the heck is water?"
I borrowed this parable from a speech by David Foster Wallace. He was using it for other purposes, but it fits nicely with the verse from John's Gospel I mentioned last week:
No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known. (John 1:1)
No one has seen God, or heard, smelled, felt or tasted God either, for that matter, but that doesn't make God unreal, just as the fish's unawareness of the water in which they live, move and have their being doesn't diminish the reality of the water. Like the water, God is around us, and in us. The fish are made of water. We are made of God.
In another Biblical passage, St. Paul is talking to the philosophers in Athens and notices all the statues of the various Greek gods. We sometimes imagine that the gods of ancient peoples are artefacts of their naivete: that they made up these strange old stories of gods, goddesses, and nymphs, and ogres, and so forth and to give explanations of stuff they didn't have the foggiest clue about. But they were far more sophisticated and subtle and knowing than we give them credit for. The ancient tales were signs and symbols of the various forces seen to be at work in the world and in the human psyche. So a worshipper of Mars, for example, might be inclined to believe that power was the principal energy of the universe, and a devotee of Aphrodite was awestruck and entranced by the various energies of nature. The ancient tales metaphorically expressed the relationships and origins of the mysterious powers which shape us. And, amongst the carved marble testimonies to all these forces, Paul saw a statue dedicated to an unknown god. Paul tells the sages gathered around him that he wishes to speak of this unseeable god, who is, in fact, the very foundation of the universe and everyone in it. This God is seemingly separated from us, but, in reality, is not far from each one of us, for "In him we live and move and have our being...and... we are indeed his offspring".
The reason we can't see God and find it hard to know God is that God is not a thing. God exists outside of space and time. How can we know no thing, when our whole lived experience is of things? The chair you're sitting on is a thing, and so are you and I and the air around us. We are so used to dealing with things, that when we say that God is (to quote Meister Eckhart) no thing, we think this means that God is nothing; that God is less real than all that other stuff. Like the young fish we assume that because we cannot perceive the water there is nothing to know. What Paul told the scholars of Athens is that God's inscrutability didn't mean that God was less real, but that God was more real than all those other forces personified in all those other statues. This is a tricky concept to come to terms with, but this is at the heart of what Jesus was on about. In a sense, Jesus was like the old fish, come to tell the young fish about the water.
Jesus' enduring message was about the Kingdom of God - the life we begin to live when we perceive the ever present reality of God, in which, unknown to us, we live and move and have our being. Most of what Jesus is recorded as saying is about the Kingdom of God. To prepare ourselves to perceive the Kingdom and become part of it, Jesus told us to repent. In the original Greek, Metanoiete, which we translate as "repent" doesn't mean to feel guilty about our own personal suite of questionable behaviours, but rather to have a new way of seeing things, or to adopt a new world view. "See things differently, "said Jesus, "because the Kingdom of God is as close to you as your own hand. "
This is what the prayer of silence is about. It's learning to see in a different way. It's learning to get out of our own way and see the reality which surrounds us and forms us and in which we are constantly immersed. It is hard to see no thing, and it's hard to discuss no thing, or even to think about no thing. So when we try to address ourselves to no thing, we usually hive off into one of two easier, more accessible, more controllable places.
1. Ideas. Our tendency always is to turn God into an idea. An idea is a mental construct that can be accepted or rejected. So instead of Christianity being about the Kingdom of God (which is to say, about what we are and how we act) it has become about our beliefs (what we think). So we ask one another "do you believe in God?' and then talk about this abstract concept. We are (or we imagine we are) in charge of what we believe. Ideas exist in our heads and they are definable and containable. Thought and belief have come to completely dominate the Christian faith to the point that Christianity is, for the most part, no longer a transformative path, or a way of life but a 'belief system". We define God and then divide ourselves from one another by virtue of those definitions. There are 45,000 different Christian denominations, all divided from one another on some point of difference in their ideas about the God whom no one has ever seen. The greatest schism in the Church, that between East and West, is over the way we understand the nature of Jesus' relationship with God: is Jesus made of the same substance as God? or of similar substance to God? As though either side of the argument could ever possibly know! As though the God who is no thing has any substance in the first place! In chapters 5-7 of Matthew's Gospel there is the long passage which we call "The Sermon on the Mount" in which Jesus speaks about the Kingdom of God. In many ways this is the quintessential heart of Jesus' teaching. There is not one word in it about what we should believe. It is all about what we should be and what we should do. Fast forward 300 years to Nicea, when the bishops of the church gathered and drew up the statement which has been the basis of Christian life ever since. There is not one word in their statement about being or doing; it is all about what we should believe. In the space of 300 years, ideas came to dominate the church. And have continued to do so, ever since.
2. Projection. A little girl of my acquaintance, "Sarah" is 4 and is one of the most wonderfully creative and physically assured children I have ever met. She makes up extraordinary narratives and she can run, bike and throw balls with the best of them. In her adventures she is accompanied most places by Myrtle the Turtle, an insubstantial friend. Myrtle has some very helpful opinions.
"Mum," Sarah will say to her mother, "Myrtle says that broccoli is not good for you. Myrtle says popcorn is good for you." Or,
"Myrtle says that children don't need to go to bed at 8.00pm but should stay up and watch movies like their Mum and Dad."
One day Sarah, who learns ballet and is exceptionally good at it, rushed up to her mother and executed an almost perfect pirouette. This is not something that her ballet class was likely to learn for another few years, and her mum was impressed.
"That's amazing Sarah" she said.
"Yeah, " said Sarah. "Myrtle showed me how to do that."
"Really?' said her mother. "But Myrtle is a turtle, right? I would have though she would find it hard to do ballet."
"Yeah" said Sarah, hardly pausing for breath, "but she's awesome at breakdancing."
An imaginary friend with a convenient set of opinions. That's what many of us carry around in our heads and give the most high falutin' names to. When someone says to me "the Lord says this" or "the Lord is giving me that" I usually expect that a (only very slightly) more sophisticated version of Myrtle the Turtle is lurking around somewhere. Which is not all bad. With little Sarah, Myrtle isn't just a lie or a fantasy. Sarah is a very intelligent and self aware little person, and she often experiences ideas popping into her head, that come from goodness knows where, but which make a lot of sense to her. Such as "broccoli is pretty foul, and popcorn is not, and I know what I'd rather be eating". She is physically adept and in tune with her body, and, by dint of imagining her way through the process, she suddenly just knows how to pirouette. Myrtle the Turtle is a code for this mysterious knowledge and for the workings of her mind, which take place well out of sight. Myrtle is a projection of her abilities, memories, dreams and desires, as is, more often that not, the image of God we manufacture for ourselves. As when friends of mine felt absolutely called of God to a particular parish and were led by the Holy Spirit to go and see it. The Spirit spoke deep in their hearts, right up to the moment when, for the first time, they saw the vicarage, whereupon the undeniable call of God was suddenly for somewhere else. It's not impossible, of course, that the God, who is more real than the reality we perceive, is somehow mixed in with our intuitions, but we need to be careful. When God votes for the same party as us; when God seems to like or dislike the people we like or dislike; when God's views of social issues closely align with our own; or when God's call is conveniently congenial, we should suspect that Myrtle is hovering nearby with a large, turtlish finger in the pie. And notice what happens when Sarah's narrative is presented with a check - when a glaring hole in the narrative structure is pointed out. In a flash, and without even knowing she's doing it, Sarah brushes plausibly over the hole with a deft change of subject. Myrtle is too precious to her, too convenient, to be given up by mere plausibility.
And so we come to silence. Like an old fish, Jesus invites us to behold the water. Of course we can't. We nudge one another in the ribs and ask "what the heck is water?" But if we can be still, and if we can attend, we will get it. Like the stuff Rachel Hunter used to advertise, it won't happen overnight, but it will happen: in the silence we will constantly be presented with our ideas and with our projections. We won't fight them. We won't resist them, but neither will we respond to them. We will release them and return to the silence. And we will be present to the reality which is more real than any thing. Perhaps, given time, we might come to know that reality with enough clarity to one day say "Morning boys! Isn't the water lovely today!"
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