Sunday Spelunking: Sightseeing and Seeing Sight

Sorry about yesterday's verbal clusterschmuck. We ran into a linguistic emergency on the way down, with words shattering, scattering, and splattering all over the place. We weren't totally prepared for dream logic overwhelming the day, which taxes syntax and makes a mess of it. 

Not only are all times are copresent, they’re in one place, like an orchestra sounding at once. Everything is a symbol with polyvalent meanings. There are no clues because everything is a clue. And because it's dark, we find ourselves going round and round in the goround of the ground.  

So, why would we go down there again? Simple: it’s what we do. Yes, but why do you do it? Because no one else is doing it, and someone has to do it. Otherwise people will forget, and then what? Also, I’m frankly not the competitive type. If no one else is doing it, this assures me that I am the best at it.  

This is far from the first time we’ve been down this rabbit hole. I just now scraped the living hull out of the knowa's arkive for some rightfully buried exhumples: 

Again we return to the Word, or the mystery of language. How to deploy language to achieve God as opposed to eclipsing God? How to use language rather than being used by it? For one can laterally talk of God all naught and deity without actually doing so, whether one is religious or very much so. This is why so much religious talk is precisely meaningless, because it attempts float on the ocean of Spirit with dinghy lingos that are allwetty fools of themselves. Pure pneumababble!

In order to even think about reality, science must deal in models of reality, and it is always tempting to reify the abstract model and confuse it with the underlying reality. Real reality will always elude the grasp of science. But this hardly means it eludes the grasp of Man, who always knows more than he can say, at least when he isn't saying more than he knows.

In contrast to science, religion deals with the timeless and eternally true. The problem is, how does one employ language in such a way that it does not relativize the absolute and reduce it to a "figure of speech?”

As Schuon wrote, "God likes to shatter and to renew forms or the husks of things; for He wants our hearts and is not content with our actions alone." You might say that God perpetually O-bliterates speech, despite our best efforts to put it back together. Or as Joyce -- someone who knew an itsy bitsy about the allforabit -- put it, "And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkword again, there'll be iggs for the brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care.”

***

Whatever, Bob. Are you trying to lose your last reader? Let’s get back to Eckhart and the Ground:

it is within the very act of preaching and the ascesis of attentive listening that awareness of the divine birth taking place in the ground is attained (McGinn).

You might say this goes to the ultimate answer to the question of what the Incarnation has to do with us, of all people. Well, if it has happened then it can happen. In describing this mysterious birth, Eckhart’s sermons “have an improvisational character, appearing as a series of virtuoso variations” on the same theme; call it ontological soul jazz, perhaps a distant reVerberation of what must go in inside the Trinity. 

In so doing, Eckhart “feels free to indulge” in "paradox, oxymoron, and hyperbole,” comprising 

the “shock-treatment” of a mystical discourse designed to awaken by challenging traditional modes of speaking and understanding…. Anyone who reads these homilies carefully cannot doubt that he speaks out of the ground.

Out of the ground, which is to say, from within it. This is not some dogma or doctrine or merely objective account; he is not so much describing God as undergoing God, and doing his best to bring back verbal souvineers. But in turn -- and this is important -- these latter are intended to facilitate or recapitulate the experience in the listener.

Thus, there is a kind of… “musical” component, in that music is a direct and irreducible expression of what it is. It cannot ultimately be described, only heard. And even then, only by those with ears to hear. 

The other day I alluded to the idea that if we’re not careful, we can start to think about the Trinity quantitatively, when it is more fundamentally a quality. As we said, math is all well and good, so long as we don’t forget that the mathematician can never be reduced to a #. Rather, like anyone, he is always more than the sum of his nimbus.  

With this in mind, try this on for size and see if the shoe fits: that there are “three births of Christ,” which is to say, “from the Father in eternity, from Mary in time, and in the hearts of the faithful today.” In truth there is only one, but we may participate in it. And we may participate in different ways, degrees, and dimensions. God has many mansions and rabbit holes, more than enough for everyone. 

Sightseeing down here is fine, but better still is seeing sight. To have sight is to be capable of seeing anything that is seeable.  

Now transpose this light to a higher key, and you’ll see what we mean, for eye is to light as intellect is to Light. But one of the reasons it gets confusing down here is that we can only see in the dark, the darker the better. 

Analogously, imagine you want to look at the stars. Where is the best place to do that? In the desert, where it is totally dark, and there are no crosscurrents of light pollution from other sources.

I’m pretty sure this is why the fathers lit out for the desert, in order to better see the light. Let’s check with Clement’s The Roots of Christian Mysticism. Moses, for example,

penetrated into the darkness where God was. Likewise we…, in going beyond any vision of the mind or the body, penetrate into the divine Darkness. It is the symbol and the experience of a presence that cannot be grasped, a night in which the Inaccessible presents himself and eludes us at the same time. It is the nocturnal communion of the hidden God with the person who is hidden in God.

There is much to be unpacked in this description. For example, when he says the symbol and the experience, this goes to what I said above about the words uttered from the ground not being merely a description but directly conveying the experience. We’re also back to our reach exceeding our grasp, to the logic that rules the night, and the birth that takes place there.

I’m going to stop here and resume tomorrow. I don't always boycott the NFL. Only during the regular season.