WHAT’S THE POINT?

I recently heard someone say of a murdered friend: “I’ll always remember her for teaching me that the most important thing in life is to put yourself first”. That comment struck me as at odds with what many would say and what the gospel teaches: ‘… the last will be first, and the first will be last. … whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’ (Matthew 20.16, 26f)

The emphasis on ‘self’ – self-improvement, self-help, self-will – can easily lead to a focus preventing growth, for growth depends on being part of a community and interaction with others. ‘Self’ concern can also feed into the belief that we should try to get as much out of life as we can, a narrative embraced by many in society to the extent that the need to give more than we get is forgotten. This, in turn, informs the way we can understand our relationship with the planet: private companies and governments seem to view creation as offering a never-ending source of materials to be plundered, without considering that the planet needs compassionate care lest Mother Earth reacts to our selfish pursuit of gain.

Western, industrialised society has developed against the backdrop of a spirituality which stresses the ‘positive’ attributes of God.  Such a spirituality is known as ‘cataphatic’ because it affirms that the more we seek the more we can discover about God who is revealed through the created world which reveals images of the divine.  It is the way of light and enlightenment. This has meant we have tended to overlook or even reject the way of unknowing nor realised the importance of darkness – the ‘apophatic’ way.  That was stresses the unknowability of God; that we can never understand God whose brightness is shrouded in a cloud, who hides in darkness.  God is to be found along the way of unknowing and so our goal is not to gain increasing knowledge but to be stripped and made empty.  God is an eternal Mystery and to be fully human is to accept the mystery of our own identity; that we can only realise that identity as we open ourselves to the Mystery; to understand that Mystery requires us to stand beneath it, contemplate it and realise that being human involves the loving gaze upon a darkness that contains light.  As T. S. Eliot wrote in East Coker (The Four Quartets):

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property, […]

 O dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant […]

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. […]

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. […]

In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

__________________

Our society teaches us the necessity of making a profit, yet rarely stops to count the cost of that to creation. Earlier societies realised they were part of the whole and understood life as a costly gift for which they needed to give thanks to the Giver, rather than viewing life as a right.  People like Francis of Assisi recognise themselves as part of a whole with which they need to be in communion – Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Fire and so on. The consequence of emphasising individuality is that we can ignore the fundamental importance of community.

To be human is to know oneself as part of that whole.  Mother Earth, like the universe, is in a constant process of development, it grows and wains, expands and retracts, and all of this involves what St Paul described as ‘birth pangs’ (Romans 8.18f).  For life to exist we have to accept it involves pain and suffering as well as joy and happiness, and to be fully alive is to be someone who experiences anguish and grief and doesn’t try to hide from those conditions. Pain killers have an important part to play, but suffering unites us and provides the means to offer compassion.

The glamour we can long for needs resisting lest we become misled and fail to realise the cost of living, which involves the pain of birthing. The more attention we give to externals offered for our enjoyment, or as the goal of our desires, the less we may give to the heart of life. External temptations, along with the drugs offered to numb us, need resisting lest we are misled and fail to realise the true wonder of life.

‘Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live for ever’ (1 John 2.15f).