Psyche and Spirit: Introduction

At the outset: psyche and soul, human development and spiritual development, are one being, one path, not two. It took me well into the presumptive years of adulthood to encounter either of them seriously. But when I did, I had the good fortune to be introduced to them together, in their commonality.

Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Sacred [1917]), is usually translated now as The Idea of the Holy. Otto drew from the words of those who sought to find some way of describing the inexpressible. Doing so, he characterized religious experience as numinous: experience of a reality that is overwhelming, awe-inspiring, at once (or on different occasions) terrifying and ecstatic, always permeated by mystery, “wholly other,” not in the sense of alien but rather different, extraordinary if one can imagine the full resonance, the furthest reaches of that word. His summary Latin phrase was mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which means in English about what one would imagine it to mean. (The Latin word numen became associated in ancient Rome with divine will, but it literally describes a nod of the head, as an expression of will or consent. I am fond of that ambiguity.)        

In the wake of Otto’s work, it became common to distinguish between the sacred and the profane, experience possessed of that numinous quality and experience that is not: the dogged reality of every day. The interesting thing about this distinction, however, is that it is never at rest, neither hard nor fast. Any object, for example—a stone, a tree, a sip of wine, a breath of air, an apricot—can reveal itself as sacred or profane, so that its sacredness is not inherent in the object itself, but in the character or quality of relationship between knower and known, a reality requiring both an “I” and an “Other.” 

That is why the distinction is between sacred and profane, and not sacred and mundane. Profanity, in its deeper sense, implies impersonality, turning away, withdrawal, rather than turning towards, fragmentation or partiality rather than wholeness, absence more than presence, seeming rather than being; mask (persona) or semblance instead of authenticity, withholding rather than giving, monologue rather than dialogue, collectivity rather than community. The contrast between the profane and the mundane is wonderfully illumined in a story told by the Notre Dame theologian, John S. Dunne, a story he called "The Parable of the Mountain." 

 

Circle back, then, upon the words of Rudolf Otto. If we would continue to find them attractive, experience them as an invitation rather than descriptive only of some grand annunciation beyond our ken, they must be read with care. The word “extraordinary,” for example, is much like the word “supernatural”: if we use either word carelessly, it is likely to evoke separation rather than communion. Consider them this way: the most completely, authentically ordinary and natural of all, when nothing is withheld.

Those  who know the writings of Martin Buber will have already recognized how much I draw from his companionship and guidance. “Each of us,” he wrote, “is encased in an armor which we soon, out of familiarity, no longer notice. There are only moments which penetrate it and stir it to sensibility. And when such a moment has imposed itself on us and we then take notice and ask ourselves, ‘Has anything particular taken place? Was it not of the kind I meet every day?’ then we may reply to ourselves, ‘Nothing particular; indeed, it is like this every day, only we are not there every day.        

Did I really say an apricot? I was remembering W.S. Merwin’s poem, “West Wall”:

In the unmade light I can see the world

as the leaves brighten I see the air        

the shadows melt and the apricots appear

now that the branches vanish I see the apricots        

from a thousand trees ripening in the air

they are ripening in the sun along the west wall        

apricots beyond number are ripening in the daylight.

Whatever was there        

I never saw those apricots swaying in the light

I might have stood in orchards forever        

without beholding the day in the apricots

or knowing the ripeness of the lucid air        

or touching the apricots in your skin

or tasting in your mouth the sun in the apricots.