Sunday Meditation

                                                                    12 Levels of Being

 

There are two levels to most authentically religious expression.

1) The consciousness of sin.

2) The corresponding consciousness of the need for redemption.

 

Most people today have no experience of either. More, such plays no role in their lives, in the form of life they are part of. It is unintelligible that these two attitudes to life – two aspects of one attitude actually –  can be a part of any serious person’s life. This religious attitude is only intelligible to most people as a form of neurosis or narcissism.

 

The consciousness of sin comes from the gap between understanding what goodness requires and your ability always to do and be what good requires you to do and be.

C. S. Lewis wrote: “Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. . . . They do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.”

I don’t like the concept of law in this context. States enact laws to set up limits that preserve the state. To characterize my betrayal of Ela as breaking the law seems offkey. I broke faith. I violated a sacred vow. I demeaned our life together and thus her life. I caused her tremendous suffering. And for what? So I could live out a sexual love fantasy. These are the sources of my remorse and not breaking a natural law. “Oh my God, what have I done! I broke the Law of Nature!” Nonsense. If I wanted to formulate an abstraction to cover all such transgressions, I would say I violated reality: Ela’s reality, my reality, D’s reality, God’s reality. Just like taking a terrible drug like meth damages your body doing evil violates souls, the soul of the evil doer most of all. The only medicine is forgiveness and the constant will to do whatever is possible to make amends and heal damage. At a further level of abstraction we can make principles of action: Don’t violate reality. And you can imagine that on analogy to laws if you want. But to me the law analogous doesn’t add anything to my understanding. It confuses me rather.

Evil is like poisoning the roots of a flower to get something you desire. There was a Cadfael episode, a rose bush in the yard of a house bequeathed to the Abbey on the understanding the monks could care for the bush was poisoned so that the evil-doer could fulfill his desire of taking the property. The rose bush is a metaphor for reality; the poison for the evil act that damages or destroys a part of reality; greed was the source of the evil act. In my case, my marriage and friendship with Ela was the rose bush; my adultery the evil act; not lust but a deep desire for erotic love the source of the evil act.

Reason – and the heart as the metaphorical center of our feelings is part of reason – is that which can disclose and relate us to reality. My intellect understands that betrayal is evil. My heart feels the pain of remorse for having betrayed Ela. Both are part of reason; both disclose reality and relate me to reality. The thought “I deserve to be happy and my needs are not being met” distorts reality, seeing it through the darkened mirror of the deep desire for erotic love that was the source of my evil act. The feelings of ecstasy were not a response to my reality but a denial thereof. Thoughts and feelings, intellect and heart are part of reason, either disclosing and relating you to reality or distorting and cutting you off from it.

The weird thing is that I am not alone. What I did was a variation of something so common, so all-to-human, as to be universal. Breaking out of fantasy and achieving a grasp of reality in thought and feeling is like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen. You are lucky if you make it part of the way. Only the saints make it far enough to see the mountaintop from a distance – and I am not sure there are any saints. And this is our condition. Not like animals that just do what they do and are what they are. We have been given the gift of reason and learn very early on that reality in its highest expressions is loveable and yet unable to feel worthy of love ourselves (the original sin) we are trapped in fantasies – like spider webs – designed to make us believe we are loveable (by the wrong standards) trapped in the web of our own making when in fact we are loveable outside the web we can’t or won’t free ourselves from. We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch.

 

And usually after the fact we can understand what we did damaged something good, that we did evil. And if we suffer remorse, we get reconnected to reality and can begin to understand it. We are released from a section of the spider’s web. Why is it that only pain teaches us?

 

And only forgiveness allows us to live with the pain of remorse. Yet we still are bound to the web – just not as tightly.

 

We understand only dimly the goodness of at least the highest forms of reality. If I saw the birth trees in my backyard as the Creator sees them – as they are in reality – I would hug them, try to paint them, be glad of them in ways I cannot. Our very bodily life, at least in the spiderweb we have constructed and we call the world, limits our access to reality as it perhaps is. Perhaps reality is like this painting:

           

 But this is all our reason allows us to access:

                          

But through the lens of our constructed world, of our fantasy, we can only see  it like this:

     

We can only with faith, hope and love informing our imagination try to image how it truly is. For to violate the image of reality seen through fantasy doesn’t appear to us as evil. Only if you see it at least close to how it really is does the evil appear. And only if you imagine it as part of the larger picture – which we have no access to and as far as we can know might not even exist –  does the full dimension of the sinfulness of evil appear. Even the purest forms of remorse are based on only a partial vision of reality. If this is what you see

                                             

                                  

you will respond differently to this face as you would if you saw this one, which is higher up on the hierarchy of reality:

                          

 

And of course, if you could see her as God does, in the light of God’s love, our response would be at a qualitatively different level from that. Here the best human attempt to picture that seeing (for me):

 

"God sees not with the eyes of men. God sees the heart." - Brother Cadfael.

 . . .                                     

 

  How does the part of life that is under an obligation to try to see the world right and respond to it accordingly – avoiding evil, doing good – fit in with the otherworldly aspect of religion: the incarnation and resurrection, the drama of salvation for Christianity?  This moral dimension I have been gesturing toward we all more or less understand. You have to be brainwashed like a Nazi or a MAGA to lose that deepest part of your humanity.

  Can’t I find Jesus’s moral teaching compelling without believing in the mythology surrounding Jesus: the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the belief in these supernatural historical events as a condition of forgiveness and eternal life in “the kingdom of God.” And without believing in the theology and rites of the church, the rational attempt to conceptualize and symbolize these mysteries: the Trinity, Mary’s sinlessness, Jesus’s reality as God and man, baptism, the Eucharist, confession, etc.?

   In my life, I have mostly been inclined to answer in the affirmative. The Church doesn’t like that answer because its authority, perhaps its raison d’etre depends on the rites, which relate the soul to this mystery, the supernatural dimension. Is not all this church building and maintaining? Priests as the medium between this world and a higher (non-existent) world as a mode of power and influence in this world? This seems to be the same strategy in every culture. I can’t count the times I have heard priests disparagingly talk about those who see Jesus as a great teacher or even a prophet and not the key to the gates of Heaven. And to get there you have to believe things that are contrary to what we know through science about the universe and contrary to common sense. The punishment for failing to believe in these supernatural teachings is Hell, or at least Purgatory – even if you are perfectly virtuous. (Dante has all the virtuous pagans in Limbo, which is part of Hell. There is no torment but no hope either – that is, no hope of Heaven, which is the telos of human existence. Without the Church, not even Socrates makes it to Heaven.) So we should believe whether it makes sense or not. And that makes no sense to me: to believe in things that make no sense in order to get to Heaven. You can’t really believe things that make no sense to you, not even on faith. Thus C. S. Lewis – the greatest Christian apologist – and of course many others try to make sense of these mythological events that are also part of human history.

   Perhaps the moral and the supernatural are related because we lack the capacity for perfect goodness. Even our best is mediocre. Thus there is – incredibly – a chasm between what we can be on earth and what we should be; between what we can understand and what we would need to understand to become what we should be. We are analogous to – condemned to – a fate of only fulfilling our purpose for existence if we can draw on paper a perfectly geometrical circle, which is impossible since the perfectly geometrical circle is an Idea that judges as (relatively) good or bad any possible actual circle that we draw. We need to be saved not only because of the imperfect circles we draw but because we are the kind of being judged by a standard we are not capable of fulfilling. Hopeless from the outset. I can understand why this whole paradigm is rejected by people of sense.

   Yet, I cannot completely let it go because it resonates with something deep down. Perhaps it is the feeling that Goodness is sublime, like a leak from another world or dimension. To see other people in the light of love is to see them from a higher dimension than our nature and nature as we know can explain.