Beyond words

In the intimate depths of your heart

At my last dental appointment, the hygienist happened to be Muslim, a very friendly, chatty Muslim. And when she found out I was an Episcopal priest, she wanted to talk theology…while her hands were in my mouth. “Now, we believe in one God,” she said, “but you believe in three, right?” Honestly, I was sort of glad that I wasn’t in a position to respond. She understood.

But here on the Eve of Trinity Sunday, a Sunday that often includes a bit of awkwardness in church pulpits, a few of my favorite theologians offer some helpful wisdom about theology and its conundrums.

Karen Armstrong sets the stage in her autobiographical book, The Spiral Staircase, in which she points out that all good theology is really a species of poetry. Topics like God, the Trinity, holiness, the eternal…these are too much for prose. In a way, they’re too much for poetry, too, but good poetry points to and often evokes an experience of the ineffable.

Christian Wiman brings Karen Armstrong’s point to life.  Wiman is the former editor of Poetry magazine and is now a professor at Yale Divinity School. Recently, I revisited his book entitled, My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer, and I was again arrested by a passage I had underlined years ago. He writes:

I have tried to learn the language of Christianity but often feel that I have made no progress at all. I don’t mean that Christianity doesn’t seem to “work” for me, as if its veracity were measured by its specific utility in my own life. I understand that my understanding must be forged and re-formed within the life of God, and dogma is a means of making this happen: the ropes, clips, and toe spikes whereby one descends into the abyss. But I am also a poet, and I feel the falseness – or no, not even that, a certain inaccuracy and slippage, as if the equipment were worn and inadequate – at every step. 

— My Bright Abyss, p. 117

I love Wiman’s metaphor from rock climbing: maybe traditional church teachings can be helpful in our initial approach to the unspeakable, transcendent Mystery of the Divine. Maybe such teaching can even help us begin our spiritual descent or ascent (choose your own spatial metaphor -- descending spiritual depths or climbing spiritual heights). But at some point, this equipment that used to feel necessary begins to fail.  It becomes worn and inadequate to the task; it no longer grips as we expected it to; it fails us in our journey.

Wiman’s language reminds me of something Thomas Merton wrote the year before he died.  In 1967, the pope had asked for “a statement of contemplatives to the world,” and he suggested that Merton might be the one to compose such a piece. Merton’s response was a beautiful letter that he addressed to a typical man or woman of the world in 1967. But he began his letter by acknowledging that

“The language of Christianity has been so used and so misused that sometimes you distrust it.” 

— Thomas Merton, in Contemplative Interbeing, “A Message of Contemplatives to the World”

The language of Christianity — the ropes, clips, and toe spikes that we once thought would help us — often fails us.  As Wiman says, they are “worn and inadequate,” causing slippage on the spiritual journey, perhaps especially for modern believers.

But even the great 13^th century theologian, Thomas Aquinas, who wrote brilliantly and voluminously about God, eventually seemed to recognize the worn inaccuracy of all he had written, and he flatly refused to write anymore.  His scribe, Reginald, was aghast. But Aquinas explained that he had had a mystical experience that changed everything for him:

“Reginald, what I have seen makes all my writings appear to me now as straw.”

If the works of the world’s greatest theologians like Aquinas are somehow worn and inadequate to the task, what can help us? I love how Christian Wiman puts it:

“We need a poetics of belief, a language capacious enough to include a mystery that, ultimately, defeats it…” (My Bright Abyss, p. 124).    

A language (and a church?) capacious enough to include a death-dealing, resurrection-inducing Mystery. Wow.

The Episcopal priest and “CNN Hero,” Becca Stevens, once told a group at my church,

“I am sure I now have a lot fewer beliefs than I had when I was ordained a priest years ago,” Becca said. “But what I believe now, I believe with all my heart and all my soul and all my body and all my mind.” 

Isaiah Berlin made a similar point in The Fox and the Hedgehog,

“The fox knows many things,” he wrote, “but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Becca seems to know one big thing, and it drives a powerful ministry of compassion.

Many people today, including many contemplatives, describe themselves as “church alumni/ae” – they’re done.  Many who have discovered the Christian traditions of contemplative prayer now need more guidance and support in the ancient practices of silence and stillness for their spiritual explorations. In Wiman’s words, they are looking for a church capacious enough to include a mystery that will defeat so much that characterizes the present-day, busy and noisy church. And just imagine what might be born.

The New Testament scholar and celebrated Dean of Trinity College Chapel at Cambridge University, Harry Williams, was working on his 14th book just before he died in 2006.  Posthumously published as Living Free, this unfinished collection contained Williams’ predictions about the future of church.  The only churches that will survive and thrive in the future, he wrote, will be concerned with contemplation, supporting people in practices that allow them to discover the transcendent in themselves, in one another, and in the world around them:

“Churches in due time will cease to be much concerned with services and most of their other religious paraphernalia and will become schools or centres of contemplation.”

— (Living Free, Mowbray, 2007, p. 37)

In other words, churches that thrive in the future will be the ones that finally realize and catch up to the fact that God has been very much alive and active in people’s conscious lives, thanks in part to practices like Yoga, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, Tai Chi, Qigong, and others. And some church leaders will realize that the Christian tradition has a once-cherished trove of contemplative practices that used to be revered and considered foundational.

Thomas Merton concluded his 1967 letter to the man or woman of his time with these timely words, perfect for the perplexed on Trinity Sunday, and a perfect way for me to conclude my reflections, as well:

O my brother, the contemplative is the man not who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say in the surrender of our poverty and incompleteness in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist. The message of hope the contemplative offers you, then, brother, is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God: but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons. The contemplative has nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that if you dare to penetrate your own silence and risk the sharing of that solitude with the lonely other who seeks God through you, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained: it is the intimate union in the depths of your own heart, of God’s spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and He are in all truth One Spirit. I love you, in Christ.

— Thomas Merton, Quoted in Contemplative Interbeing, “A Message of Contemplatives to the World”