To jump to the current version of this note (at my new site), click here.
‘Infinite and Unforeseen.’ Quakers, Cathars, T.S. Eliot, and me.
A friend of mine who read a couple of my blog entries was complaining about what she called the “Christian overtones.”
“When did this happen to you?” she asked. “And also, why? You didn’t used to be this way. I don’t like it.”
It’s true; I wasn’t. In college, influenced by my reading of Sartre, I was an existentialist. I believed in existential nausea, freedom, and some sort of ethical duty (I forget the source since there was no God) to live an ‘authentic’ existence in the circumstances presented to me. Later, when I began to read Chinese philosophy, I became interested in Taoism. Buddhism interested me as well, but I liked the simplicity of Taoism. Don’t go against the flow. Accept change; learn to flow with it. When the professor asked me on an examination to describe the central tenets of Taoism, I wrote, “This:” and left the rest of the paper blank. To the disgust of the other students, I received an ‘A.’
I have always been attracted to cosmology. While studying Taoism, I began reading the works of the great, the very great, English philosopher and mathematician, “Alfred North Whitehead.” I wanted to write a paper on his work, but of course the true meaning of Whitehead was really very far beyond me when I was in my late teens. I’m working on it now though. I find it profound and beautiful.
But Christianity…..no. No, I wanted no part of it. I grew up in the Bible Belt. I didn’t like the religion practiced by a large part of my family (thankfully, not my parents or my mother’s family); I didn’t like the hypocrisy---many so-called ‘Christians’ I saw were and doubtless still are unapologetic racists, just for example---and I didn’t like the fervor or the anger. I didn’t like the suspicious and---I can’t call it hatred; it was more like dread---of the religious practices of other denominations (let alone other religions). Catholics were strange and exotic in my town; I remember my 11 year old cousin telling me in shock and horror that the Catholics worship the Pope and Mary. And the whole family were despondent over the fact that my family attended the Episcopal Church and were therefore ‘Whiskeypalians.’
But I did grow up in a family where religion was constantly discussed (not at my parents’ table, but by my paternal grandparents, my many aunts and uncles, and cousins by the dozens). I therefore never had any aversion to discussing it myself, even though my mother largely banned such discussion at our house.
In college, my areas were philosophy and religion as noted. I wasn’t very good at either, really. I wrote papers on which I received good grades and answered complicated exam questions, but I wasn’t that interested in understanding schools of thought or the history of thought; I was looking for answers. I don’t think I realized it, and I was greatly offended when a professor said to me, “Look, it’s not about finding something to believe in. You don’t have to believe any of it.” I was offended by the implication that that’s what I was after. Looking back, I see that it totally was.
I didn’t give much attention to religion until I was older, though I gave it a certain amount of thought. I read books and poetry that talked about it (Eliot, for example). I was in my late thirties and I’d fallen in love. My situation and his were such that we seldom met---because he lived in another country and we seldom met.
It was the deepest, most fulfilling love of my life because----I suppose for different reasons we both were lonely---it was such a complete meeting of the minds. We couldn’t meet in any other way. I suppose if we had, the other aspect would never have developed. But it met some need in my nature for a feeling of connection. Because our communication was limited to electrical impulses over the wires, I developed a sense of his presence even though he never was there. I thought of him all the time and I knew he was thinking of me. There was a real feeling on both sides---I know this because I have the letters to prove it----of communion. It wasn’t a sexual thing at all. It was a foretaste, or a precursor, of genuine religious feeling. The word ‘soulmate’ gets flung around a lot, but that’s what it was.
There’s a long by Jeff Buckley that gets played way too much on TV when someone wants a ‘religious’ theme. I have a notion that Leonard Cohen may have written the original version, but if he did, Buckley changed the words. Anyway---I know it’s a bit lame to quote song lyrics, but here it comes----a couple of lines from that song express how I feel when I remember my friend and how it felt to love him: “But remember when I moved in you and the holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was “Hallelujah.” The song is talking about something else, but the something else is exactly the same.
I’m glad I had the experience because it’s not one that many people today get to have. Sex happens right away nowadays and----nobody likes me to say this but it’s true----sex absolutely ends any possibility that the sort of connection I am speaking of can ever happen. That connection was different. It was an expansion of consciousness. It didn’t last because it couldn’t, but it made me understand something most people never actually do understand: what I wanted from life. I wanted a lasting sense of expanded consciousness. In that state, you’re never lonely, never without solace, never without the feeling that you’re loved and cared for. I think it was then that I started to understand the notion (not the thing itself, but the idea) of feeling that sort of connection all the time without having to worry about losing it). You reach out, and it’s there.
It was a dilemma for a nonbeliever. It was not resolved for years afterward. That particular relationship, being a relationship between human beings, changed over time. Through the various incidents and accidents of life, we stopped being in love and became ordinary friends. As to finding a subsequent version of the same thing, that was never going to happen. I was sad afterward because afterward I was just me again. I’ve had other loves since, but never again that feeling of merging my own being with someone else’s.
I read something somewhere about the essential futility about seeking fulfillment from relationships because of the certainty that human relationships will change. One writer said that falling in love is simply a bad substitute for finding connection with the something greater constituting the divine presence.
And that may be so. I didn’t exactly intend to try. I don’t even know how I went within the space of a few months from secular humanist to devoutly religious. I couldn’t tell you the path, though studying the gnostic gospels and the medieaval heresy of Catharism certainly played some part it in.
Nor can I explain how I fixed on Christ as the object----possibly simply because he was the most familiar object of devotion to a westerner. Taoism wasn’t enough (though it definitely helped) because it is so impersonal. I didn’t want to be one part of the whole on the theory that it’s the whole that mattered; I wanted to feel---whether rightly or wrongly---that I mattered too.
I was heartened by reading some of Eliot’s poetry. I knew from my past studies that religion can be something you simply decide to do. His poetry is full of images that are helpful to someone who comes to Christianity by the alternate route and independently of anyone else’s urging. “In the juvescence of the year came Christ the tiger.”
The actual change felt and still feels a bit like that----it’s annihilating. Moreover, the connection isn’t reliable; there are times when I don’t feel it at all; when I feel completely alone and fully as unimportant as I doubtless am to most of my fellow human beings.
But I do get moments when I feel tuned in to some presence that seems to be there---now I’m going to quote George Harrison at his most annoying---‘within you and without you.’
The weirdest thing to me still is feeling that it really IS there. When I first started to have these moments, I was actually terrified by it. Was I going insane? Dying? Having a seizure? Because if you look, you won’t see anything at all. My friend’s voice over the wire produced electrical impulses that created sound waves from the phone receiver that transmitted signals to my brain. That was actually quite a tenuous---an ethereal---connection, if you think about it. But this isn’t even that. No sound waves. If there is a stimulus, it is originating in my own brain. Is it something I am just doing to myself, as my friend suggested?
And does it matter if it is?
Regardless: I’m getting to a place now where I feel intimations not of mortality but of some actual presence that responds when I ask. You reach out and there is something there. But---and here’s the thing I didn’t get about prayer going up----you have to ask. It’s not imposed on you. And if you’re not paying close attention, you won’t recognize it. When I realized this, it was the first time I understood the real significance of Christ saying ‘Seek and ye shall find.”
The Quakers speak of an inner light that’s in everyone (a notion derived from the Gospel of John). The Cathars seem to have believed in something roughly similar. If you’re caught up in the things that relate to the mortal part of you, you won’t know it’s there, because if you’re caught up in those things, you’re really caught up. You have to ask, then you have to be quiet. If you’re quiet, you get---quoting Salinger now---‘not an answer, but a response.” You get a sense there's something more. You feel enhanced.
And, for anyone wondering what gets into all these religious nut cases, that’s what gets into them. It’s something sufficiently terrifying and awesome and life-altering that you naturally feel that other people ought to know about it. The difference between them and me is that they believe they’ve got to make you believe in it. My version of Christ, which includes him as he appeared in the Gnostic gospels knew that not everyone wants or needs that sense of connection to God. He was the Christ who told parables to the crowd to give them guidance on how to live, but whose ‘secret teachings’ were reserved for the inner circle of those who chose to follow him. “Let those with ears to hear, hear me now.’ That part isn’t something you can impose on anyone. It happens only if they ask for it because they actually want it.
The title comes from a K.D. Laing song. She was writing about romantic love: "It takes you by surprise." So does this sort.
RELATED POSTINGS
“Infinite & Unforeseen.” The Cathars, the Quakers, T.S. Eliot, & Me
Chaotic Simplicity
Quaker Meeting
Matisse and My Mom
1:02:28 PM 
|
