Many years after I first shared here the following thoughts about psyche and spirit, they still embody my convictions and offer me nourishment. So it seemed reasonable to share them now for newer friends of Reckonings.
Namaste.*
______________________
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."
In all of his life, his teaching and writing, Dunne was engaged in what he called "passing over" and "coming back," passing over into the lives, the spiritual stories and traditions, of others, and then coming back again, with new insight, into one's own. The spirit of such journeying is that of pilgrimage, and, less obviously, that of Sabbath. For it is in the natural rhythms of movement and rest, speech and silence, action and contemplation, that one finds (and gives) the greatest nourishment. Dunne wrote of "the homing spirit," of his own pilgrimage: "I realized I had to find a point of rest in myself where I could rest in God, where God dwells in me, and let that be my point of origin and of return. I had to pass over to God in others and come back again to God in myself."
In the following parable of the mountain, Dunne is contemplating a related pair of journeys, ours toward God and God's toward us. In doing so, he helps us to understand the inescapability and the holiness of the mundane world.
"Man, let us say, is climbing a mountain. At the top of the mountain, he thinks, is God. Down in the valley are the cares and concerns of human life, all the troubles of love and war. By climbing the mountain and reaching the top, man hopes to escape from all these miseries. God, on the other hand, is coming down the mountain, let us say, his desire being to plunge himself into the very things that man wishes to escape. Man's desire is to be God, God's is to be man. God and man pass one another going in opposite directions. When man reaches the top of the mountain he is going to find nothing. God is not there. Let us suppose that man does reach the top and does make this discovery. Or suppose that that he passes God on the way, or finds God's tracks leading downwards, or hears a rumor that God is descending the mountain. One way or another, man learns that climbing was a mistake and that what he seeks is to be found only by going down into the valley. He turns around, therefore, and starts going down the mountain. He sets his face towards love and war, where before he had turned his back upon them."
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.'"
Buber, in a small gem of a book called The Way of Man, writes of the teachings of the Baal-Shem Tov, legendary founder of the 18th century Hasidic movement in Eastern European Jewry. The Baal-Shem Tov taught about "the cares and concerns of human life" that
...no encounter with a being or a thing in the course of our life lacks a hidden significance. The people we live with or meet with, the animals that help us with our farmwork, the soil we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use, they all contain a mysterious spiritual substance which depends on us for helping it towards its pure form, its perfection. If we neglect this spiritual substance sent across our path, if we think only in terms of momentary purposes, without developing a genuine relationship to the beings and things in whose life we ought to take part, as they in ours, then we shall ourselves be debarred from true, fulfilled existence. It is my conviction that this doctrine is essentially true. The highest culture of the soul remains basically arid and barren unless, day by day, waters of life pour forth into the soul from those little encounters to which we give their due; the most formidable power is intrinsically powerlessness until it maintains a secret covenant with these contacts, both humble and helpful, with strange, yet near, being."
In my wondering about those others we find sometimes as companions, did I include 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.
_______________________
*While the traditional greeting of "Namaste," derived from Sanskrit and common among people of South and Southeast Asia, has become popularly kin to our common way of saying "Hi," when accompanied with its traditional bow and hands held together, it has the deeper reverential meaning of "I bow to the divine in you." It's in that sense that I use the term above.