Update: This entry (and the next) features a continued exploration of thoughts first shared last fall. You may want to read the genesis of my religious beliefs, the story of my exodus from organized religion, and the revelations of my current spiritual state. The background will let you make more sense of this entry.
Our book group began with Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. The book seemed revolutionary at that stage in my life. I was quite taken with his philosophy, enough so that I was eager to read his next book, the autobiographical Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest. Because I've always been something of a mystic at heart, Quinn's quest for Truth appealed to me.
Quinn was raised in a churchless home, yet even as a child he was a bit of mystic himself. He communed with insects. Catholicism fascinated him. At the age of twenty, he decided to join a Trappist monastery.
People of modern sensibility can admire someone who enters a religious order to do good works of some kind, to teach or tend the sick or feed the poor. Even sanctity can be swallowed if it's a good, healthy, active kind of sanctity, like Mother Teresa's. What people don't like to see nowadays are saints skulking in their cells staring glassy-eyed at a crucifix. This sort of sanctity strikes them as morbid and sickly, and naturally this was exactly the sort of sanctity I had in mind for myself.
He threw himself into the order with youthful devotion. For three weeks he lived "a constant round of chapel, classroom, chapel, cell, chapel, classroom, refectory, chapel, cell, chapel, classroom, refectory, chapel, cell." He didn't set a foot outside. One day Father Merton said, "I think it's time you went outside." Quinn thought that a swell idea, and began to look forward to work outdoors. At the last minute, another priest forbade him, and Quinn found himself indoors again. He was crushed, distressed, wanted to rebel against the order. Then, quite suddenly, he realized that his ego was in the way. He surrendered, and "gave himself to God." The next day he joined the other novices for a trip outside:
I went last, stepped over the threshold, turned around to close the door, then turned back to face the sunshine.And the god spoke.
I put it this way. I could put it other ways. I could say that, when I turned to face the sunshine, the veil that clouds our vision was gone from my eyes, and for the first time I saw the world as it is.
There are no words for it.
Someone blind from birth can't imagine what the sighted mean by color, can't fathom what this property might be. If all language were the product of a blind race, the word color would not exist, and if one of that blind race were suddenly to become sighted, he would be unable to describe what he saw; the words would simply not be there for him to use, and this was the way it is for me: The words are simply not there.
But I can put it in other ways, and I will, because that's what I can do.
I turned and faced the sunshine, and the breath went out of me as if someone had punched me in the stomach. That was the effect of receiving this sight, of seeing the world as it is. I was astounded, bowled over, dumbfounded.
I could say that the world was transformed before my very eyes, but that wasn't it—and I knew that wasn't it. The world hadn't been transformed at all; I was simply being allowed to see it the way it was all the time. I, not the world, had been transformed.
I'm trying. Be patient. We've reached the single most important hour of my life, and I have to get it right, have to come as close as I can to getting it right.
I gasped, literally gasped. I lost my breath, seeing that.
Everything was on fire.
I can say it that way, but when you say that something's on fire, you think of the fire as being on it—as a substance that is on the thing.
That wasn't it.
Everything was burning. Yes, that's better. From within, everything was burning.
Every blade of grass, every single leaf of every single tree was radiant, was blazing—incandescent with a raging power that was unmistakably divine.
I was overwhelmed. In a single second of this, of seeing this truth, tears flooded my eyes and poured down my face as I walked along behind the novices. It was strange to see fence posts sitting dead and silent and cold in the midst of this tremendous, thrumming effulgence.
In this vast, scintillating landscape, my nearsightedness was of no account at all. For as far as I could see, for hundreds of yards, I could distinguish with absolute clarity each leaf, each blade of grass—no two alike anywhere. Each was crackling and trembling and all but exploding with the raging power that animated it.
Again I describe that power as raging. Look into a furnace blazing at its top capacity. Look into the heart of a nuclear reaction perhaps. The power that I saw thundering around me makes all our stock images of power seem feeble. But there was no violence or hatred in this rage. This was a rage of joy, of exuberance. This was creation's everlasting, silent hallelujah.
When I first read this passage, my heart sank. I held Quinn on a pedestal at this point, and his blatant spiritualism rankled.
Now, though, seven years further on, I think I know what he was trying to say. As Quinn was experiencing this "vision", it was religious for him, a validation of god, an affirmation that his choice to join the Trappist order was correct. Later in life, the vision took on a different meaning for him. It is this latter meaning which now becomes important to me.
Is it possible to be a mystic, to maintain a sense of awe at life, the universe, and everything, yet deny the possibility of an omniscient, omnipotent being?
Tomorrow: scientific pantheism.
On this day at foldedspace.org
2004 — Differing Opinions Dave and I plan to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow later in the week. Meanwhile, friends are beginning to chime in with their reviews.
Oh jd, how dare you throw out bait like that? Well this time i will not bite! (Let it go,tammy let it go)AAArgggghhhhh!