God beyond God
1.
So, Burnout Christianity…
So many people in need of saving!
Our family living in the suburbs of Bombay, India. My father scooping up the bones of almost-dead people on the pavement in front of our compound, taking them to the hospice of the Little Sisters for a more dignified death.
My parents telling their missionary board in India that they were out of town, at a religious conference, when, really, they’d booked a hotel room on the other side of Bombay, just for a break from the grind of work and poverty.
Missionaries, without roots in the land, without belonging or defensible personal needs. Their reason-for-being as a being-for-others, being to save souls, to win souls for Jesus and his kingdom. In practice, saving bodies from poverty and early death. My grandfather (fifty years in India) as the de-facto local dentist, concrete layer, panther shooter, and pharmacist (he was trained as a mechanic, and only partially as a minister). My grandmother, literary and capable, the local pharmacist, doctor, and midwife - living on call to rural India. Loved and valued. Dying early, with the body of a woman twenty years older than hers.
My mother’s first “house” beside the public latrines in Bhor. Babies in hanging cots, to evade the rats and scorpions. Her second “house”, which her father had converted and upgraded, previously a large shed for pigeons.
My grandfather, warm and lovable, a law unto himself, falling deeply in love with India and its people. Changing his missionary faith. Confounding bishops back in NZ.
My mother being placed on a train when only five, sent to the south of India for boarding school. Sent on a boat to Australia for secondary school. My grandmother struck silent, ashen-faced with grief.
My Dad, martyred at a young age, by choice, becoming a Roman Catholic priest and missionary father. Yearning for love and eventually, thank God, handing back his “gift” of celibacy and ordination.
Coming to New Zealand, finally having a house of their own.
My mother, bullied out of a job she loves by a colleague, meekly folds. My father and Uncle urge her to fight! She doesn’t fight back or defend herself. Later, she says: That was a very painful time, but the beautiful thing is I got to experience what our Lord must have experienced when he was wrongly accused, and didn’t say a word....
Suspending ourselves to be interested in others, to host others, to give others the (psychological) shirt of our backs. Crashing into exhaustion when the others finally leave.
Christ on the cross, nailed to the cross, the eternal cross: never leaving the cross until the last being is saved.
Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world. We must not sleep during that time. (Blaise Pascal).
Burnout Christianity in intellectual forms:
‘Mastering’ two thousand years of scripture, church history, theology, pastoral care, apologetics, knowledge of culture and human societies, human sexuality, parish finances and management, endless etc.
Studying days and nights, giving up weekends, suspending the self.
Is Burnout Christianity just “Christianity?” Is there a more balanced, life-affirming “true version”? Is Christianity capable of being saved?
And there it is again: Become a saviour. Deconstruct/reconstruct it. Master a better “system”. Save (new) souls as a (progressive, enlightened) priest, a psychotherapist.
Is it not the work of God alone to save souls?
Having formal knowledge to counter the pathological, lop-sided pattern, but the seed is deep within.
2.
The way forward isn’t in finding a better system - more progressive, emotionally healthy, etc.
No putting faith in systems!
No new system replacing the old system! No martyring the self to a purer, higher cause - Christian, religious, or (Greenpeace, psychotherapy, World Without War, etc.) otherwise!
Not giving up on good causes, either!
Burnout Christianity isn’t wholly evil. The villagers in Bhor District got better wells, less plague. My grandfather had the adventure of his life.
Such a richness and a privilege in studying sacred tradition.
No free-floating self, happily unencumbered by tradition.
No abstract, inhuman God.
3.
1n 1952, Paul Tillich wrote a book called The Courage to Be. He spoke of the need to “transcendent theism” - to move beyond belief in God as “a being”; crudely, a literal father, an old man in the sky; more theologically, a being whose existence needs to be proved or disproved. Instead of God as a being or supreme being, Tillich urged us to embrace - or accept being embraced by - the God beyond God, Being itself.
He writes:
Absolute faith, or the state of being grasped by the God beyond God, is not a state which appears beside other states of the mind. It never is something separated and definite, an event which could be isolated and described. It is always a movement in, with, and under other states of mind. It is the situation on the boundary of man’s possibilities. It is the boundary. Therefore it is both the courage of despair and the courage in and above every courage. It is not a place where one can live, it is without the safety of words and concepts, it is without a name, a church, a cult, a theology. But it is moving in the depth of all of them. It is the power of being, in which they participate and of which they are fragmentary expressions. (1)
This passage is very rich for me, and points to a way through the impasse of Burnout Christianity (or whatever form of Christianity is constraining our contact with the Divine). Above all, it offers us a way forward that doesn't involve constructing and submitting to a new, better system - “true Christianity, rediscovered”! How many Christian reformations and awakenings have attempted and promised just that, only to become...
What Tillich offers is not a new religion or theology, but a new attitude, a new way of being religious.
We are not trying to centre and pursue faith in a better “state of mind” (doctrines, theology), in something that can be “isolated”, “described”, and defended. We are not searching for the perfect church, the most eloquent and articulate - inclusive - name of God.
In Tillich’s vision, the old symbols are actually allowed to be: we don’t have to renounce and whitewash our entire religious heritage.
The symbols aren’t God. We don’t believe in them. We can’t possess or defend them as exclusive truths. But through them, we can experience and be accepted by the power of being.
To despair, let go, to encounter the Nameless, to lose our self and yet be born again:
But a church which raises itself in its message and its devotion to the God above the God of theism without losing its concrete symbols can mediate a courage which takes doubt and meaninglessness into itself. It is the Church under the Cross which alone can do this, the Church which preaches the Crucified who cried to God who remained his God after the God of confidence had left him in the darkness of doubt and meaninglessness. To be part in such a church is to receive a courage to be in which one cannot lose one’s self and in which one receives one’s world. (2)
4.
It is Holy Week, Maundy Thursday. On the spur of the moment, I decide to attend an Anglo-Catholic church service. I walk through the door and instinctively look for a little basin of water at the side. There is one! I dip my hand in and make the sign of the cross. I’ve never found these little basins of water - called holy water fonts or stoups - since my Roman Catholic days. I keep looking in every Anglican church I step into. My body, muscle memory, keeps looking.
My head is dripping water, and now I smell the church. Ah, it is a church - made of wood and stone and vaulted space. It is a church, not a modern lounge or theatre. It is dark and old. There is fire inside. There are elements.
The service is beautiful and moving. They have songs and tunes that open my heart. The service is reverent and solemn. There is space.
There is so much frankincense! I would come back just for this. I’ll agree to say anything, believe anything - though maybe not do anything - just as long as you give me my sweet, holy smoke!
And there are things I dislike and tolerate: the sheer distance of the clergy from the parishioners. The lack of warmth when we share the sign of peace. The constant Almighty Father for God.
Afterwards, I think: I’ll definitely come back. I am Catholic in my blood. It will never leave me and will always call me home - just one sound or smell is all it takes. At the same time, I’m happy being Quaker, too. We are a queer people. We renounce all this beauty and these sacred, luminous forms, and meet in some quite ugly buildings. But we love each other (on the whole), value freedom, and allow any one of us to stand up and speak, if the Spirit moves.
I go home, go to bed, fall asleep, and dream: there is a spirit inside me, moving forward, and a spirit beyond me, approaching. I feel excited at the promise of their meeting.
5.
I keep trying to find the best name for what I do when I meditate.
Whenever I settle on a name…
Silent waiting
Waiting on the Spirit
Contemplative prayer
Silence, stillness, and the mystery of the light
…the words distract me when I come to sit down.
References and credits
First image: An illustration of Moby Dick attacking a whaling ship. Augustus Burnham Shute from the Moby-Dick edition published by C. H. Simonds Co.
Second image: Frans Widerberg, Hovering and Lying.
Third image: Pope Francis uses incense as he venerates a statue of Mary during Mass in Verano cemetery in Rome, Nov. 1, 2015.
(1) Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (1952), p.182.
(2) Tillich, above, p.182.
