Un"traditional"

Christmas is always a very reflective time for me.  I despise the hokey cheer and even more the consumerism packaged as love and friendship.  To me this is not Christmas.  It might be for some people, but I wish they would just call it something else and leave my holy day to me and those who want to keep it.

This is why I don't get bent about people saying Merry Christmas or celebrating other holidays, even the made up ones.  Great.  If you don't believe what I believe then stop getting in the way.

I don't understand how...no I do understand.  I was going to say I don't get how things get passed off as part of Christmas that have nothing to do with it, but I get that and don't want to belabour it.

Instead I want to focus on what it means to me.  I don't pretend that this is some historically accurate date, or even that it wasn't placed on this date that coincided with other cultural holidays.  That doesn't change what I celebrate.

I think of a young tradesman, struggling with the stigma of a used wife, the scandal of someone else's baby.  The young woman thought to be unfaithful.  The oppressive politics of the day.  The long trip.  He couldn't leave her, legally because she was his wife and had to register too, ethically because she might have the baby any time, and morally because people were judging them.  I think of the frustration at finding no place in such need.

I think of the innkeeper who found what space he could for them.

I think of the birth, alone.  No midwife or doctor.  Did they know what to do?  Had someone prepped them before the trip, just in case?  Even knowing who the child was, doesn't wipe out human fears and concerns.  I've been in many cases where I knew God told me to be, but I had no idea how it was going to work out.

I think of the stable, how God would be born amongst livestock.  He a sheep for slaughter, himself.  I know the smells of livestock, and it can be a comforting smell of genuineness and peace...you don't understand until you've been around it for a while.  I can imagine the animals there yielding their worship to him.  Helping in their way.  Of course I don't think they did anything anthropomorphic, but I have watched creation bend and serve God.  How much more in this instance!

I think mostly of shepherds, living apart from the hustle of life and culture.  The abiding goodness that tends to grow in people like this, even as their roughness and uneducation makes them seem backward and undesirable to many.  It is a subculture of its own.  I think of their excitement.  I wonder who stayed behind with the sheep while the others ran to find the child.  I think how they are the most unlikely herald: the least likely to be believed by the educated, yet the least likely of all to lie about it or spin it.

I think of times when God has broken through my reality and blazed in front of me.  How much more in this setting!

I think of the gift that this was.  For the limitless God, the moving creating breath of God Himself to shed it all and be confined to the most helpless state of a helpless creature.  I think of what this means in the fabric of the universe.  I think of what this means to my life.

I have had real living experience of this person, this God.  And to know that this same person did these things for me is stilling, overwhelming, emotional.

It makes all the traditions of our culture meaningless at this time.  I don't care for trees or decorations or feasts or treats or gifts or family time or warm memories.  I want to slip off into the night and stare at the sky and let the moment of this event flood all over me.  I can't truly help it anyway.  It keeps flooding in even if I don't want it to.

So when you see me at this time of year you'll know why I'm quiet, why my eyes seem wetter than normal, why I keep slipping away to private places, staring out windows.  This is my Christmas.  And you're welcome to share it with me.

You can keep the rest of it.  I have no use for it.

Contemplation

So, I've been trying this blog out for several months now. It was an experiment originally, in reaction to the death of a long-running message board and to the rapid-fire bullet thoughts from the sites that took its place.

I find it very helpful to process my thoughts in writing. To discover my own ideas. The blog has been extremely effective for this. But the second part of the process is the sharing of those thoughts. I also find it very valuable to read others' reactions to my own, and to move forward in conversation, dialectic. That is where the blog has not been so great.

The reason for this is not surprising. I figured it would be the case. People have to actually take the time and interest to read a blog. And this one is far from interesting to most people. I recently bit the bullet and posted a link and an invitation to read on Facebook. The responses confirmed this.

But that's ok. I don't expect many people to like it. Still, in case anyone else does happen to find this, I wanted to talk a little about what Contemplation is to me...not the blog, but the practice. It is a way of life. It's more than simply musing like many modern people, including many bloggers, use the term. Contemplation is a term that to me describes a life of circumspection. A constant attempt to live simply and in unity. Ideally, there should be no real distinction in my personality at work, home, church or any part of my life. My faith and intellect and emotions and physicality should also all be unified. Body, soul, spirit. Contemplation is the way of life that helps accomplish that.

Since all good things proceed from God and we are unable to fix ourselves, it only makes since that the primary goal of Contemplation is to know God better. This is the dry explanation. The actual experience of it is much harder to explain. It truly is a very romantic sort of thing, better described through metaphor than empiricism. I'm sure many people have actually experienced something like it at one time or another, or maybe just echoed it in a movie or book once. It is a world of emotions, overwhelming, confusing, magical, concrete, all rolled together. Truly the best metaphor is that of a lover and his beloved. Like Romeo and Juliet, Jack and Rose, Edward and Bella. Contemplatives have written love songs and stories about it for centuries. It is not the kind of thing to really be understood, but experienced.

If you are on that path, if you have had that kind of experience and perhaps not understood it, or if it simply intrigues you, then this blog might be interesting for you. And I would love to hear from you. If you don't want to comment, at least use the one-click reaction buttons at the bottom to let me know what you think.

Lion

Prior to Christmas this year and following Avatar, I was lying in bed one morning, as I often do. It was too early to get up, but I am such a poor sleeper that I spend a lot of time awake in bed. I often try to fill this time in the morning and evenings with prayer and contemplation, which are not two separate things, but very much intertwined.

Anyway, I was lying in that state between fully awake and fully asleep and rolling over the ideas expressed in Avatar, what was beautiful about it, what was True amongst the commercial stuff...see the former post for more on that. I was wondering how much of a metaphor it could be for our time and what kind of metaphor that would be. This led to thoughts about metaphors in general and how they are powerful tools. How I've spent a lot of my life looking for metaphors to express Truth precisely as I understand it. How I had never been able to find one that I could really bite into. Some have come close...but like Bono says, I still hadn't found what I was looking for. And as Jack says, it's hard to beat the rich fertile metaphors we find in the Bible. At that moment, I had a vision...or a dream...or both, call it what you will. Jesus appeared to me as a lion...as Aslan from the Narnia books. Nothing was spoken, but something was communicated. It lasted only a moment, but in that dream-time, so much transpired.

I don't know that I could fully explain what I learned and gained from the experience, but I'm not sure that I should. These things are often meant only for the one who receives them and I only chronicle it here as a reminder, a remembrance to myself more than anything, that it did occur.

Just like the Galadriel experience posted in the early entries of this blog, I was profoundly humbled, overjoyed, and ashamed of all that I am not. One thing I can communicate is known to those who have these kind of experiences. There is a profound sense of unworthiness, like being embarrassed to be flesh, acutely aware of all my flaws, every time I've failed to be what I am created to be, of the true depth of my rebellion and helplessness. Like being totally inappropriate in so many ways. Going to a state dinner directly after mowing the grass in August only approximates an aspect of what I mean. But in that very moment is a deep unbounded love. And at the very moment that I think, "I'm so unworthy."
The reply comes, "I know; I'm choosing you."

Why Aslan? Why a fictional character? It has to do with metaphors and the role the extended metaphors of Narnia and Aslan have played in me. I am convinced that Aslan is far more than a fictional character. Jack must have known this image, this face, had seen it and felt it, and then wrote about it. Truly, it is cited this way in the biographies. Good God, the power of these moments falls so flat in writing. Imagine stepping into a story and finding with every step you take that it is far truer than you ever could have imagined. This is my life. It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.

The Veil

If you know anything about contemplation, or even contemporary Christianity you must have run across references to the veil. It's in songs and literature. Without going into a whole dissertation on it, the image refers to the cloth that was hung in the ancient Hebrew Tabernacle to separate the area known as the Holy of Holies...or the place set apart for God's presence to reside. It was a very restricted place because...well, it was holy...in the true sense. God's presence was too powerful for people to experience. It would kill the mortal who entered without the proper preparations. I'm not going to go into why right now; that's a whole different topic. Suffice to say it became the symbol for the necessary separation between God and man.

When Jesus died, the Bible says that the veil in the temple was torn in two, symbolizing that there was no longer any separation between God and man. Also possibly that God's presence was no longer residing in that place...but that is a thought that just occurred to me on the spot...I'll have to think that one through more.

Anyway, throughout Chrsitianity, the symbol of the veil remained as a metaphor for the aspects of God that we can not comprehend or know. Sometimes it was called the Cloud of Unknowing. It is also used in a variation on this sense when someone refers to experiencing God in a way greater than normal. They may say they, "passed through the veil." or that the veil parted.

I have always wondered, and longed for, sometimes even raged at the lack of experiencing God more fully. If He was real and He represented ultimate reality and this world is but a shadow, why did He not show up like a pillar of fire! If not that grand, at least a concrete experience that could not be mistaken or denied. Why didn't He simply make Himself plain!

Of course I've heard all the answers about the need for faith. But that is insufficient. I'm not talking about a lack of belief. I believed as much as anyone could, but I wasn't going to pretend to be blind or deaf. If by faith someone meant pretending to be satisfied with arid prayers and the occasional emotion stirred by music, that was not going to cut it! Were those "charismatics" as I heard them called growing up, really experiencing something I wasn't or were they all wrapped up in emotion and mass-hypnosis/hysteria as was supposed by many?

Even as I learned more and experienced more and was given answers they were still not sufficient to satisfy that longing for something real. Now that I had experienced God in ways that I never had and was totally assured of His existence, why couldn't I touch Him? Hadn't Jesus parted that veil? Why was He still hiding behind it? I had read the mystics experiencing perfect union and describing it in very physical terms. I wanted that! Why only glimpses? Why nothing sustained? I had heard the explanations that it was so I could function in this world as I couldn't if His presence was that strong, but that is not sufficient either. World be damned! I would take all of Him any day! Plus God was a God of order, why couldn't He reveal himself more concretely without harming me if He chose? Why, why always the veil!

Of course, I have gone through the entire gambit of responses. Pressing harder until Iwas ground to the dirt straining against the immovable, fasting until I was so weak I collapsed, holding myself to such strict account of my behavior that I was locked in self-loathing, giving up and resting in that there was nothing more, feeling rejected and unworthy, striving to mentally unlock the secrets...and many more. Through it all, I still didn't understand that blasted veil that shouldn't be there.

Recently, I ran across an article that really lept off the page to me. I was reading, in a modern voice, what Contemplation was and how to verify it. I felt like I was reading a chronicle of my own experience. I had read this same kind of thing many times, but always in such an ancient voice or muddled by the incoherance of the mystic that I couldn't quite grasp it all. But here I was reading it in clear modern English. The effect it had on me is too deep for words, especially blog words. Lest I start babbling like a mystic, suffice to say I understood much more than I had and was humbled.

Then today, I was thinking about the great mercy that God has given us. That's when it hit me that the veil is also an immeasurable mercy! Just as the Hebrews needed to know that God was with them, but couldn't survive the presence, just as God had to cover Moses' eyes when He passed before him, so the veil was not an indication that God was hiding, but that He was present! Now that the temple veil is split, God truly is always with us. He is not hiding. He truly does reveal himself to us, and by ever greater degrees as we seek Him. But only in His way. To get to a new place we must go by the directions we are told. If we don't follow the one who knows the path, we can't expect to arrive. So we must come to know Him in the right path. Unfortunately, the Cloud of Unknowing is far more apt a term than I had ever known. There is no hard fast boundary to a cloud of moisture. We aren't outside it, and then inside. As it approaches, it gradually obscures our vision until we can not see. Likewise this Cloud gradually takes us beyond our ability to comprehend so that unless we are told what is happening, we are gradually more and more confused. We feel less and less. In truth, He is closer than He ever has been in this time. But we can't see it or even recognize the effects it has on us because He is beyond mortal sense and we are operating in that mode in the Cloud.

When He steps out of the cloud to reveal himself, it is a necessity and greatest mercy that He stays behind the veil. Otherwise we would be terrified and unmade. The veil is not a means of hiding himself from us, but of revealing when we are too unprepared for the greater presence! The fact that I recognize the veil is not a mark of how little I experience of God, but of how great He has chosen to reveal Himself to me. If I were to see Him concretely as I had wanted, that would be so much less of who He is because it would be confined in the mere mortal sense (like the tesseract is only a shadow cast by the 4 dimensional object). Perhaps this is what the apostle was thinking when he wrote that God humbled himself to the point of being human. My problem was not that I wasn't experiencing God, but that I assumed the experience would be a sensible matter. How could it be?! And how great a mercy that despite my pleas and tantrums and vanities, God continued to walk me by the hand down the road of revelation to a far greater place than I had realized.

That said, if I had the advantage of a trusted director to help me understand these things, it might not have been so difficult for me to come to this understanding. That is another reason this blog exists. Lacking any organized and wide-spred community of contemplation where we might find experienced teachers and directors, perhaps my ramblings may be helpful to other children of the woods wandering outside the Keep. And just perhaps, some Godly experienced teachers may find this letter in a bottle and realize that there are thousands more adrift looking for someone to help us understand this fog, if only you would sound the horn!

Space

I had in mind when I created this blog that it would not be a teaching or preaching sort of thing. That it would contain contemplations only, for others to read, evaluate, comment on, and to color their own worlds. To that end I didn't want to post things I had already worked out in my own mind, but only things that were currently passing through.

However, it recently occured to me through a variety of circumstances that if two people start talking about abstractions (like ideas) from vastly different perspectives, they may in fact understand very little of what each other means. So, it would be necessary for them to provide a bit of background to see "where he's coming from". To that end, I may periodically post a few things that most people haven't ever really engaged. These things are pretty much worked out in my own head through long consideration, but so influence my outlook that they may make my often cryptic postings a bit more understandable.

So regarding space...as in the universe...the stuff, or absence thereof, that we live in. Scientists have spent years describing space. Trying to define it, model it, so that we can grasp it. This is useful in many of our technological advancements. And, as with most things on this order of thinking, it blurs into philosophy. It has even crossed into popular culture in many scifi kind of ways, though it usually gets perverted for purposes of the story. A good example is the concept of wormholes. If you read, you might be familiar with a very famous series of books involving tesseracts. These books were also heavily steeped in these 'shape of space' concepts.

So what does space look like? It is considered that space is not actually flat, but wrinkled, like a crumpled ball of paper. If we were a tiny microorganism that could only move across the surface of that paper, in fact so flat that we were effectively 2D, the paper would appear to be exceedingly flat, since our measurements would not be scaled large enough, nor could they pass into the necessary dimensions to picture it as it was. From that perspective, moving from one point to another would require crawling along the surface of the paper. If the paper was 10cm wide, then it would be a 10cm trek to get to the other side. From our perspective out here in 3D, one side of the paper may actually be very close to the other side in 3 dimensional space because it's all crumpled up. If the 2D bug could only jump through the void to the other fold, his trip might be exceedingly shorter.

Now translate this to our world. Measured in three dimensions, space appears immense. But if it is actually folded up in other dimensions, then things that can move through those other dimensions might appear to disappear and reappear in another location, maybe vastly far from the origin. Scientists report seeing quantum particles do this!

Of course this leads to all kinds of Trekkie, Star Gatey notions about space and time travel, but stay with me. (Carl Sagan did an excellent bit on this next portion, which I highly recommend watching online, since it has visuals that I am asking you to imagine in this format.) So let's think about one more dimension above ours...the 4th. Contrary to popular belief, this is not time. Dimensions are squares of the next previous...think back to geometry. A point has no dimensions, but if we string them together we get a line. Now if we square length and graph it, we get width...now we have 2 dimensions (a box). Square that and graph, and we get 3 (a cube). Square 3 and graph and we get 4. But here's the difficulty. We exist in three dimensions, so we can't show a fourth dimension...where would we put it? But for purposes of thinking about it, we can project a 4D object into 3D, like we can draw a cube (3D) on paper (2D). When we do that, we get what is called a tesseract. It's like a picture of a 4D object drawn in 3D. It looks like a cube inside a cube, and if you rotate it across the 4th axis, it passes through itself...Of course it doesn't actually, it just appears to do so in our 3D picture, just like a 2D drawing of a cube appears to have edges passing through other edges, though in reality they don't.

If you're lost at this point, go to Youtube and look up Carl Sagan's thing on 4D and come back. It's short. Ok, done that?...Let's move on.

So, just as Sagan said, a 2D creature, our little bug, would not be able to conceive of a 3D world. If we tried to communicate with it, all it would see of us is a series of flat shapes, like the apple print. Similarly, if the 2D critter were swept up into 3D it would be incomprehensible to him and he might decribe it in a variety of odd ways that would sound more or less insane. Translate that to 3D, and you might imagine some people who have tried to explain wierd phenomena and end up sounding insane. Think of Ezekiel and the whirring wheels. What is that about!? But he isn't alone. There are countless accounts of these sort of ecstatic (ex-stasis, out of the normal state[of existence]) experiences and all are very similar.

So are these things just trips of human psychology? Manifestations of chemical phenomena upon our brains? Materialists think so. But if we believe (as I argue must be the case) that there is an existence greater than what we see in the everyday world, then these accounts would certainly seem to fit the bill. Am I saying that God is really a multidimensional alien? No, far from it. But if He is truly God, He must be multidimensional, and that stands to reason that there may be created beings that exist in more dimensions than we. These beings, if operating in our world, may appear or disappear suddenly as they intersect our dimension, or project something from beyond our dimension...like emmanating light. Could it be that what we call Angels (which really just means 'messenger') are beings existing in dimensions beyond our 3?

Could it further stand to reason that if we were taken up into these other dimensions they may appear to us as incomprehensible and we might babble a bit trying to equate what we have experienced into words that only work in lesser dimensions?

I'm not trying to make theological statements here. I'm simply describing a way to think about these things that lets me make as much sense of it as my brain can handle. This model seems to work pretty well. Of course, I would caution everyone not to stop at this point. By orthodox definition, God is so far above our understanding that anything we can concieve to model Him is necessarily less than He is. So, don't fall off into wierd New Agey stuff. Stick to orthodox understandings. They have the weight of history and the large community of consent to back them up. Without that anchor, you are adrift in treacherous seas. These ideas have been treated numerous times in history, you just have to get past the latest fads and dig into the older stuff...most of which was written in the middle ages...hardly "Dark", any experienced scholar can tell you that was a time of fabulous philosophical and natural learning.

So if this stuff is real, ancient philosophy and modern science confirm it, but can't be described coherantly, then how can we know what is valid from lunacy, fantasy, or lies? That too has been addressed! There are whole treatises on assessing and confirming true "religious experience" (to use the church language) on various levels. Just look it up and you'll see. The internet is a wonderful resource for this kind of stuff as long as you use authoritative sources and resist the urge to self-diagnose. In addition, many modern sources have adapted the older concepts up into our langauge, making it far easier to understand. The first step is understanding the terminology used. Contemplation, Mysticism, Ecstacy, etc. Get a good dictionary (again, online)and look at the old meanings too.

I'm certainly not the only one who thinks these things. Obviously Sagan does. CS Lewis certainly does. These are just two sources of many. As you begin to investigate this as I have, and still do, you will also begin to see that science and religion blur into each other. In fact the conflict is mostly perceived rather than actual. Faith, correctly understood, is perfectly rational. Science, if true, will point to reality, which is God. But this is a whole other discussion that I do not have time for on this blog.

One last point on the subject. Many will inevitably say that other traditions outside Christianity also demonstrate similar experiences. How can one claim supremacy? I can't tell you which is superior. I could give you all my reasons and you would still have to come to that decision on your own. Seek and you will find. But I can at least save you some time and elliminate the common mistake of using similar experience to justify universalism (all ways lead to God) by drawing on one of my greatest teachers, CS Lewis. There are only so many ways that a ship can depart a port. Though the departures may all look alike, the seas they sail and their destinations may be quite different. Take it from this ancient mariner; there truly are far fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world.