Presence of God
Presence of God and contemplative
life are one and the same thing. Both are the result of the act and the
experience of going out of oneself. They do not consist in conceptual knowing
as snapshots of reality, but the self experiencing itself as transcending
itself.
I
think we falsify what is really going on here particularly because we presume
that we know through mental images that we fabricate of real things “outside”
of us. Then, the problem arises as to how we can reach the reality of things
outside of us if we have populated our minds or brains with “respresentations”
“inside” of us in order “to know” what is “outside.”
Walker
Percy tried to under stand knowing in terms of a reductive biologism – a kind
of biological engineering - whereby
there is a stimulus outside, and a reaction inside. The attempt was to explain
language, and therefore thought in terms of this binomial of physical stimulus
and response.
Following the philosopher Charles
Peirce, Walker Percy was attempting to understand the nature of language, and
he found it to be beyond physical stimulus and response. He wrote: “the point
is that the picture the psychologist draws, showing stimuli and responses, big
S’s and R’s outside the brain, little s’s and r’s inside the brain, with arrows
showing the course of nerve impulses along nerves and across synapses, no
matter how complicated it is, will not show what happens when a child
understands that the sound ball is
the name of a class of round objects, or when I say The center is not holding and you understand me.”
Peirce
offered “thirdness” beyond the dualism of stimulus and response. Percy finds
and offers the example of Helen Keller (who is deaf, dumb and blind) coming to
knowledge and liberation from the dungeon of the deaf, dumb and blind self to a
self open to the totality of reality. She did this in a kind of lucky moment
when her nurse, Anne Sullivan, was trying to teach her the meaning of “mean.”
She had already known by association
that the Braille symbol for water meant that cool liquid something that could slake her thirst. But
there was some thing missing: the “I” who knew what the Braille symbol
“meant.” She could associate as an animal associates, but she did not know what
“mean” meant – until Anne was pouring the water from the pump in Tuscumbia,
Alabama in 1888, and some thing amazing took place. She “symbolized” the
Braille and “threw” it at the water. This was done by a free, fortuitous act of
the third reality, her “I.”
Helen Keller: “We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of
the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my
teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one
hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I
stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I
felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning
thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then
that `w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my
hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!
There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept
away.
I
left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave
birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I
touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the
strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the
doll I had broken. [She had earlier destroyed the doll in a fit of temper.] I
felt my way to the dearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them
together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and
for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.”[1]
What
had happened? Helen had exercised her subjectivity as cause by “throwing” (βαλέιν)
the “likeness” (sym): w-a-t-e-r at the wet flowing object. She had experienced
herself as cause, and therefore came to a consciousness of herself as “self.”
Percy comments: “before, Helen had behaved
like a good responding organism. Afterward, she acted like a rejoicing
symbol-mongering human. Before, she was little more than an animal. Afterward,
she became wholly human. Within the few minutes of the breakthrough and the
several hours of exploiting it Helen had concentrated the months of the naming
phase that most children go through somewhere around their second birthday.”[2]
What
does this mean? I haven’t thought or
read enough to unpack all the implications. It clearly removes the rationalism from the Enlightenment from Descartes onward, while recovering the "I" of the Enlightenment as real being. That is, it seems that we
understand (legere ab intus) reality by the experience of ourselves as being on the move out of ourselves. Ratzinger developed his “theological epistemology” of
“knowing” the Person of Christ as divine Person, by the profundity of becoming
Christ, or as it was said in Francis’ Aparecida in 2007, “Only God knows God.”
Ratzinger showed that the Apostles had been with Christ in prayer to the
Father, and it was in this context that Christ asked: “Who do men say that I
am”? Simon answer: Some say John the Baptist, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.
And then: “Who do you say that I am?” Simon answered from the experience of
transcending himself in prayer: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living
God.” Christ now changes his name from Simon to Peter and reveals the Cross to
him. Christ gave Simon His own name (Cornerstone): Petros/Peter.
The point is that
we can have a continuous presence of God, by having a continuous experience of
transcending ourselves in ordinary life,
by mastering ourselves and “turning all the circumstances and events of my life
into occasions of loving you…” Ordinary secular life is the proper context for
the experience of going out of myself and becoming conscious of being Christ
Himself. One has presence of God by becoming God. We can experientially turn all of ordinary life into prayer. This is not pantheism but the
experience of holiness and divinization.
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