Well, I’m at the age now when one really has to begin to deal with those things. I can only give you some thoughts that I myself use for my own encouragement. I ask myself, for instance, Don’t I know people who are very old and physically quite decrepit, and yet who are more alive than I can ever hope to be? In a sense, their aliveness is now no longer dependent on the body.
We have even in nature this image of the fruit: The bud and the blossom and the fruit are very much depending on the tree as they are growing. But then comes the point when the fruit is really ripe, and it just drops off the branch, and has its own life and it has the seed for new life. I don’t want to push the parallel too far, but we can see in human beings that this aliveness in the mind is something that is not limited by the body.
You can ask yourself, for instance: When you think of your friend, someone you really love—or think of someone you have never met, who lived hundreds of years ago and means very much to you—if you think of that person, you come alive. That’s the kind of aliveness that we’re talking about. Now you come alive in every way through something that is removed from you in space and in time, and yet it has this influence on you. You can only reach this friend with your mind right now, and yet that mind connection makes you really alive.
That mind somehow is life-giving also; therefore, I can very well imagine that when this life outgrows this aliveness—outgrows the limitations of the body—when this belonging gets greater and greater, that sense of belonging can no longer be limited to this one little body I have here, and then I have to somehow leave this body behind and all I have is that sense of belonging, but that is beyond time. It’s not afterward. I do not expect to go on and on and on. Like before, I’m happy that it’s over, that it’s a limitation, a conclusion. But there is something beyond life that simply lasts, that simply is, that I have, that belongs to me.
That would be one way of dealing with it. And all these things may seem to many of us to come so much from below, you know, working out and up there. Doesn’t this come from above? Haven’t we been told that God gives us life from above, and God is life, and so forth? Well, my answer is, I believe that myself, but how do you know?
This intuitional question—how do you know?—always leads you back to your own experience. What you don’t know from your own experience, you just don’t know. Therefore, you have to start from your own experience, and my experience tells me that when I am fully alive, in my best moment of total belonging—when my body blazes, when I’m totally belonging to everything—then I also belong to God and to that which anybody calls God if they use the term correctly, that ultimate reference point of our belonging. Therefore, in the spiritual experience, in the peak experience, we have also the anchorage for our religious experience.
The task is to spiritualize all of life. That means to make all of life vibrant with life—all of our aspects, including the body. The important story in the Gospels, the so-called transfiguration of Jesus, literally is depicted as the body aglow, this peak experience that is here projected onto Jesus. And in Christian iconography, particularly in the East, there are very important rules that must be followed. To a certain extent the artist is free; but because the icons, the images in the Eastern Church, are considered as a fifth gospel—as important as the Gospels as a message about Jesus—they must not be altered in decisive points. And one of the decisive points about the icon of the transfiguration is that Jesus must stand squarely with both feet on the mountain. And if you think of Raphael’s famous “Transfiguration” in the West, he’s flying up there in the clouds. That is against Christian tradition; he must stand on the ground. It is this body, here in this world, that is transfigured.
Chapter Five: Encountering God through the Senses
Why not start spiritual training with a foot bath? For an experience in which our senses spontaneously spark off a grateful response, a foot bath is not a bad choice. Your heart and your tongue may not yet be ready, but in their own way your toes will start to sing gratefully. Can anyone deny that this is a step in the direction of “life abundant”?
—From A Listening Heart
When someone asks me about my personal relationship to God, my first spontaneous reply is a question: What do you mean by God? For decades, I have been speaking about religion with people all over the world, and I have learned one thing from this experience: the word God ought to be used with utmost caution if we want to avoid misunderstandings. On the other hand, I find far-reaching agreement among human beings, once we reach that mystical core from which all religious traditions spring. Even those who cannot identify themselves with any organized religion are often deeply rooted in mystical experiences. This is where I find my own reference point for the meaning of the term God. It needs to be anchored in that mystical awareness upon which all humans agree before they start talking about it.
In my best, my most alive moments—in my mystical moments, if you want—I have a profound sense of belonging. At those moments, I am aware of being truly at home in this universe. I know that I am not an orphan here. There is no longer any doubt in my mind that I belong to this Earth Household, in which each member belongs to all others—bugs to beavers, black-eyed susans to black holes, quarks to quails, lightning to fireflies, humans to hyenas and humus. To say “yes” to this limitless mutual belonging is love. When I speak of God, I mean this kind of love, this great “yes” to belonging. I experience this love at one and the same time as God’s “yes” to all that exists (and to me personally) and as my own little “yes” to it all. In saying this “yes” I realize God’s very life and love within myself.
But there is more to this “yes” of love than a sense of belonging. There is always also a deep longing. Who has not experienced in love both the longing and the belonging? Paradoxically, these two heighten each other’s intensity. The more intimately we belong, the more we long to belong ever more fully. Longing adds a dynamic aspect to our “yes” of love. The fervor of our longing becomes the expression and the very measure of our belonging. Nothing is static here. Everything is in motion with a dynamism that is, moreover, deeply personal.
Where love is genuine, belonging is always mutual. The beloved belongs to the lover, as the lover belongs to the beloved. I belong to this universe and to the divine “Yes” that is its Source, and this belonging is also mutual. This is why I can say “my God”—not in a possessive sense, but in the sense of a loving relatedness. Now, if my deepest belonging is mutual, could my most fervent longing be mutual, too? It must be so. Staggering though it is, what I experience as my longing for God is God’s longing for me. One cannot have a personal relationship with an impersonal force. True, I must not project on God the limitations of a person; yet, the Divine Source must have all the perfections of personhood. Where else would I have gotten them?
It makes sense, then, to speak of a personal relationship with God. We are aware of this—dimly at least—in moments in which we are most wakeful, most alive, most truly human. And we can cultivate this relationship by cultivating wakefulness, by living our human life to the full.
The Bible expresses these insights in the words, “God speaks.” Having been brought up in the biblical tradition, I am comfortable with its language, though I would be reluctant to impose it on anyone else. What matters is that we come to a shared understanding of what this, or any other, language wants to express. “God speaks” is one way of pointing toward my personal relationship with the Divine Source. This relationship can be understood as a dialogue. God speaks, and I am able to answer.
But how does God speak? Through everything there is. Every thing, every person, every situation, is ultimately Word. It tells me something and challenges me to respond. Each moment with all that it contains spells out the great “yes” in a new and unique way. By making my response, moment by moment, word by word, I myself am becoming the Word that God speaks in me and to me and through me.
This is why wakefulness is so preeminent a task. How can I give
a full response to this present moment unless I am alert to its message? And how can I be alert unless all my senses are wide awake? God’s inexhaustible poetry comes to me in five languages: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting. All the rest is interpretation—literary criticism, as it were, not the poetry itself. Poetry resists translation. It can be fully experienced only in its original language. This is all the more true of the divine poetry of sensuousness. How then could I make sense of life if not through my senses?
When and to what do your senses respond most readily? If I ask myself this question, I think immediately of working in the garden. The hermitage where I am privileged to live for the better part of each year has a small garden. For fragrance, I grow jasmine, pineapple mint, sage, thyme, and eight different kinds of lavender. What abundance of delightful smells on so small a patch of ground! And what variety of sounds: spring rain, autumn wind, all year round the birds—mourning dove, blue jay, and wren; the hawk’s sharp cry at noon and the owl’s hooting at nightfall—the sound the yard-broom makes on gravel, wind chimes, and the creaking garden gate. Who could translate the taste of strawberry or fig into words? What an infinite array of things to touch, from the wet grass under my bare feet in the morning, to the sun-warmed boulders against which I lean when the evening turns cool. My eyes go back and forth between the near and the far: the golden metallic beetle lost among rose petals; the immense expanse of the Pacific, rising from below the cliff on which this hermitage is perched to the far-off horizon where sea and sky meet in mist.
Yes, I admit it. To have a place of solitude like this is an inestimable gift. It makes it easy to let the heart expand, to let the senses wake up, one by one, to come alive with fresh vitality. Yet, whatever our circumstances, we need to somehow set aside a time and a place for this kind of experience. It is a necessity in everyone’s life, not a luxury. What comes alive in those moments is more than eyes or ears; our heart listens and rises to respond. Until I attune my senses, my heart remains dull, sleepy, half dead. In the measure to which my heart wakes up, I hear the challenge to rise to my responsibility.
We tend to overlook the close connection between responsiveness and responsibility, between sensuousness and social challenge. Outside and inside are of one piece. As we learn to really look with our eyes, we begin to look with our heart also. We begin to face what we might prefer to overlook, begin to see what is going on in this world of ours. As we learn to listen with our ears, our heart begins to hear the cry of the oppressed. We might begin to smell that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” We might sit down at table and taste the sweet and salty tears of the exploited which we import together with coffee and bananas. To be in touch with one’s body is to be in touch with the world—that includes the Two-Thirds World and all other areas with which our dull hearts are conveniently out of touch. No wonder that those in power, those interested in maintaining the status quo, look askance at anything that helps people come to their senses.
In my travels I notice how easy it is to lose attentiveness. Over-saturation of our senses tends to dim our alertness. A deluge of sense impressions tends to distract the heart from single-minded attention. This gives me a new appreciation for the hermitage, a fresh understanding of what solitude is all about. The hermit—the hermit in each of us—does not run away from the world, but seeks that Still Point within, where the heartbeat of the world can be heard. All of us—each in a different measure—have need of solitude, because we need to cultivate mindfulness.
How shall we do this in practice? Is there a method for cultivating mindfulness? Yes, there are many methods. The one I have chosen is gratefulness. Gratefulness can be practiced, cultivated, learned. And as we grow in gratefulness, we grow in mindfulness. Before I open my eyes in the morning, I remind myself that I have eyes to see, while millions of my brothers and sisters are blind—most of them on account of conditions that could be improved if our human family would come to its senses and spend its resources reasonably, equitably. If I open my eyes with this thought, chances are that I will be more grateful for the gift of sight and more alert to the needs of those who lack that gift. Before I turn off the light in the evening, I jot down in my pocket calendar one thing for which I have never before been grateful. I have done this for years, and the supply still seems inexhaustible.
Gratefulness brings joy to my life. How could I find joy in what I take for granted? So I stop “taking for granted,” and there is no end to the surprises I find. A grateful attitude is a creative one, because, in the final analysis, opportunity is the gift within the gift of every given moment. Mostly this means opportunities to see and hear and smell and touch and taste with pleasure. But once I am in the habit of availing myself of opportunities, I will do so even in unpleasant situations creatively. But most importantly, gratefulness strengthens that sense of belonging which I mentioned at the very beginning.
There is no closer bond than the one which gratefulness celebrates, the bond between giver and thanksgiver. Everything is gift. Grateful living is a celebration of the universal give-and-take of life, a limitless “yes” to belonging.
Can our world survive without it? Whatever the answer, one thing is certain: to say an unconditional “yes” to the mutual belonging of all beings will make this a more joyful world. This is the reason why Yes is my favorite synonym for God.
Chapter Six: Cultivating Grateful Joy
Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefulness, and gratefulness is a measure of our aliveness.
—From Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Parallel Sayings
Delight in sense experience has often received a bad press. Some have put down sensual enjoyment because they thought this was the proper religious attitude. Jesus did not share this attitude. But then, Jesus was not much concerned with being proper. He showed such zest for life that respectable members of society called him “a glutton and a wine-bibber” (Matthew 11:19). Their own strait-laced stance appeared to them as the truly religious one. In contrast, the friends of Jesus experienced in his company through all their senses God’s liberating presence. In the inflection and modulation of his voice God’s message reached their ears. What he said was inseparable from how he said it. As his hands touched their skin, God’s caring touched their hearts. From there it was only a small step to the insight that every sensuous experience is at heart a spiritual one, a divine revelation. No matter how we repress this intuition, it is there in every human heart just waiting to be triggered.
God’s Good news comes to us humans first and foremost through our senses: “Our message concerns that which was from the beginning. We have heard it; we have seen it with our own eyes; we have looked at it and our hands have touched it: the life-giving Word…. We bear witness to what we have seen and heard…so that your joy may be complete” (1 John 1:1-4).
Joy is the gist of the Christian Good News. Yet, only if we open wide our senses will we be able to drink from the source of this joy. Only then will the Good News prove truly good and ever new.
Common sense tells us there is nothing in our intellect that did not enter through the doors of perception. Our loftiest concepts are rooted in sense experiences. Only by going to their roots can we “dig” great ideas. People who are too fastidious to dirty their hands by coming to grips with concepts at their roots are left with notions that are literally “cut and dried.” Cut off from the senses, dry reasoning turns into non-sense.
We must, of course, distinguish between sensuousness and sensuality. The difference is that sensuality gets so wrapped up in sensual pleasure that it never goes on to find full joy. A life rooted in sensuousness thrives. A life entangled in sensuality chokes and withers; it resembles a tangle of roots. Healthy sensuousness rises from root to vine to leaf and fragrant blossom. The sweet scent of honeysuckle in the evening air could not exist without the vine’s hidden roots; but now this surpassing fragrance has its own existence. True joy surpasses mere sens
uous pleasure. Without ever rejecting our senses we must go beyond them. Sooner or later, our senses wilt and die. True joy lasts….
We humans belong to both realms, the realm of the senses and a realm that goes beyond them. This stretches us. To avoid the tension of this stretching process we are apt to settle for half of our rightful inheritance. Still, our human birth gives us a dual citizenship. Only by claiming both realms as home can we avoid the polarization of our human consciousness. Our noblest task is to make the most of this creative tension. If we neglect what goes beyond our senses, we sink below animals. But if we deny being animals and neglect or reject our senses, we clip the very wings on which we are meant to rise to higher spheres. Unless we claim our dual citizenship and are at home with both angels and beasts we become alienated from both, alienated from what is truly human; we become—in Christopher Fry’s apt image, “Like a half-wit angel strapped to the back of a mule.”…
As human beings we stand at the crossroads of body and mind, of senses and sense. To hold these opposite poles together in harmony is our existential task. Now and then, someone accomplishes this task and the result shines forth as uniquely human beauty: a body radiant with brightness from beyond the senses; intangible splendor yet fully embodied. The eyes of true lovers are lucid enough to see this beauty in each other; we catch glimpses of it in great masterpieces of the visual arts; a piece of music may express it, or a poem, or a dancer’s grace. The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote his Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus in the same year (1922) in which T.S. Eliot wrote The Wasteland, made our standing at the crossroads a central theme of his poetic work….
The Way of Silence Page 5