Brennan Manning
 

Infinite and Intimate           

The effects of "beholding God”¾that is, contemplating the glory of the Lord¾are profound and far-reaching. In the life of prayer, for example, adoration assumes a pre­eminent position. The aptitude to appreciate the grandeur of divine Reality, born of the brush with kabod (the Hebrew word for “the glory of the Lord”) takes pride of place, and begets an Isaiah-like spirit of speechless humility and breathless amazement at the overpowering splendor of God. 

          After the encounter, a Christian will resonate to the words of Abraham Herschel on his deathbed, when he said to his friend, "Sam, never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me." Confronted with the vision, however fleeting and obscure, of divine majesty, one becomes reluctant to speak and disinclined to share, because human language breaks down in the attempt to convey what can be grasped only in a non-rational, intuitive way. Intellect capitulates to mystery; spiritual reading, meditation, and reflection on scripture inevitably yield to silent reverence. 

         To adore is to recognize the unfathomable greatness of God and the nothingness of the adorer. In somewhat baroque language, Pere Sertillanges says, "Adoration is nonentity swooning and gladly expiring in the presence of Infinity." Baroque, yes. Diluted, no.

The human tendency toward projection¾ascribing to God our thoughts, feelings, and attitudes about ourselves and others¾is unmasked in all its absurdity. Distorted images and caricatures of God as vengeful, whimsical, fickle, and punitive (images that cannot fail to engender anxiety, fear, scrupulosity, and unhealthy guilt) are exposed for what they are¾puny and pathetic human constructs.

The same judgment is passed on the illusion of control. When life is tranquil, relationships intact, finances secure, and physical health flourishing; when the enemy is not at the gate; when the war drums are not rattling; when the Calvin Klein perfume advertisement for Eternity for Men seems plausible¾then a sense of complacency, self-sufficiency, and personal command of one's destiny deludes and lulls us.

But the reality of kabod shatters every delusion. As previous certainties desert us, we become vulnerable and open. The glory of God makes possible the primordial act of religion: the realization that we are not sufficient unto ourselves, that we have received our life and being from another. In a decision that reaches the roots of our most intimate self and demands the renunciation of belonging to that self, we freely ratify our condition as creatures. Through this fundamental act of dispossession we acknowledge the illusion of control and open ourselves to the reality of God.

The enormous difficulty of pain, suffering, and evil remains, heartache lingers, and there are certain wounds of the spirit that will never close. Unfortunately, organized religion is often of little help in times of spiritual crisis. In fact, it often makes matters worse. Any brand of religion that focuses exclusively on the supernatural and makes breezy pronouncements about the afterlife offers no comfort, consolation, or solidarity in our present suffering. The arrogance, rigidity, and blazing enthusiasm of religious fanatics who see in every hurricane and cosmic upheaval a sign that we are at the brink of apocalyptic catastrophe only alienate the shipwrecked and heart-broken.

However, a fleeting, incomplete glimpse of God’s back¾the obscure yet real, penetrating, and transforming experience of his incomparable glory¾

The late Karl Rahner insisted, "In the days ahead, you will be a mystic, i.e., one who has experienced God, or nothing at all." If Christianity is merely an ethic, a moral code, or a philosophy of life, it will not withstand the incursion of suffering. The graced experience of the divine kabod is not something esoteric, reserved for an elite few. When Thomas Merton was asked who might receive this gift, he replied, "The answer is obvious: everybody.

Kabod is not a safe topic. It induces a feeling of terror before the Infinite and exposes as sham our empty religious talk and pointless activity, our idle curiosity, ludicrous pretensions of importance, and our frantic busyness. The awareness that the eternal, transcendent God of Jesus Christ is our absolute future gives us the shakes. One day out of the blue comes the thought of our inevitable death, and the thought is so troubling that we want to live the rest of our lives in a shoe.

Small wonder that there is a deafening silence from our pulpits and publishers about the transcendent character of Almighty God. And who can blame us? Throughout the history of salvation God has revealed his presence but never his essence. Since the Holy One is ultimately unknowable, we can only stutter and stammer about an omnipotent deity who, with effortless ease, created a star 264 trillion miles away.

As a spiritual leader, I do not want to appear stupid. Nor do I want to sound like a blathering boob or a wimpy wuss. Given the very real danger of both options in the face of the unknowable, prudence dictates that I avoid the issue of Gods transcendence altogether. Furthermore, I want the congregation to like me and to feel good about having spent an hour of their precious time in church on Sunday morning. Sending parishioners from the building quaking and trembling and needing to reexamine the entire direction of their lives; sending them off feeling that they are being stalked by an implacable God who demands nothing less than everything, would be not only be an example of masochism but also an act of professional suicide. I am not pastoring a Holy Roller assembly. Leave the shaking and quaking to the Shakers and Quakers, I say!

But we pay a price for steering clear of transcendence and unknowability. The loss of a sense of transcendence among today's believers has caused incalculable harm to Christian spirituality, and to the interior life of individual Christians.

The first casualty has been silent reverence, radical amazement, and affectionate awe at the infinite goodness of God¾those traits that are embodied in the scriptural term "fear of the Lord." Adoration, which flows naturally from the aptitude to appreciate the grandeur of divine reality, is conspicuously absent in our prayer life. Quiet time is often not quiet. Our designated prayer time is generally consumed by hurried meditation on a scripture passage, a run through the Rolodex of persons to intercede/petition for, and occasional expressions of gratitude for the gifts of our lives¾faith, health, family, and friends. The inner urgency to fall prostrate before the Infinite rarely intrudes on our consciousness. Recent studies have shown that the average congregation on a Sunday morning can tolerate only fifteen seconds of silence before someone feels compelled to break it with an announcement, a song, a prophecy, or whatever.

Ironically, the church itself often impedes our efforts to reach inward and upward toward God. As Parker Palmer notes:

When the glory of the transcendent God is not addressed, our focus shifts to human behavior, the cultivation of virtues and the extirpation of vices, the qualities of discipleship, and so on. Personal responsibility replaces personal response to God, and we become engrossed in our efforts to grow in holiness. Our primary concern becomes our spiritual, intellectual, and emotional well being. When other Christians ask us if we are happy, we automatically respond in the affirmative or brush them off with a benevolent smile even if we are close to tears.

Obviously, there is something pokey and cramping about this inordinate attention devoted to ourselves, the state of our souls, and the presence or absence of happiness in our hearts. As Simon Tugwell notes, "One of the surest ways to avoid being happy is to insist on being happy at all costs. The religion of cheerfulness, as Father Brown reminds us, is a cruel religion, and maybe the best way not to go mad is not to mind too much if you do go mad."

Moralizing surges to the fore in this unbalanced spirituality. At the very outset, it presents a warped idea of the relationship between God and humans. From her parents a child learns of a deity who strongly disapproves of disobedience, hitting one's brothers and sisters, and telling lies. When the little one goes to school, she realizes that God shares the fussy concerns of her teachers. At church, she learns that God has another set of priorities: she is told that he is displeased that the congregation is not growing numerically, that irregular attendance is the norm, and that his recurring fiscal demands are not being met.

When she reaches high school, she discovers that God's interests have expanded to an obsession with sex, drinking, and drugs. After twelve years of Christian indoctrination at home, school, and church, the teenager realizes with resentment that God has been used as a sanction by all those who have been responsible for her discipline¾as when Mommy and Daddy, at their wits' end over her mischievous antics as a toddler, alluded to "the eternal spanking." Through this indoctri­nation, God is unwittingly associated with fear in most young hearts.

Moralism and its stepchild, legalism, pervert the character of the Christian life. By the time young people enter college, they have often abandoned God, church, and religion. If they persevere in religious practices, their need to appease an arbitrary God turns Sunday worship into a superstitious insurance policy designed to protect the believer against God's whims. When wounded people fail, as inevitably they must, they engage in denial to protect themselves from punishment. The perfect image must be protected at all costs.

We work hard to protect our collective image as well. When a youth worker at a church in a Midwestern town dared to confess to the staff one morning that he struggled with pornography, he received his letter of termination that afternoon.

Clearly, the God of our imagination is not worthy of trust, adoration, praise, reverence, or gratitude. And yet, if we are unwilling to address the issue of transcendence, that is the only deity we will know.

The loss of transcendence has left in its wake the flotsam of distrustful, cynical Christians, angry with a capricious God, and the jetsam of smug bibliolatrists who claim to know precisely what God is thinking and exactly what he plans to do.

A caveat is necessary at this juncture¾one that leads to the final point of this chapter: transcendence must be conjoined with immanence; heaven must be balanced with earth. In other words, God's distance must be complemented by his nearness.

          An exclusive emphasis on the divine kabod and the transcendent mystery of God banishes God from our world and our lives. He remains far away, aloof in his infinite majesty. He dwells in unapproachable light. The whole universe is too small to contain his immensity. We can no more catch a hurricane in a shrimp net or Niagara Falls in a coffee cup than we can grasp the infinity of God's reality. A one-sided focus on his Otherness reduces the Holy One to a cosmic observer, a distant outsider disengaged from the yaw and pitch of the human struggle.

Immanence is not the opposite of transcendence but it is correlative, immanence and transcendence are two sides of the same coin, two facets of the same divine reality. Transcendence means that God cannot be confined to the world, that he is never this rather than that, here rather then there. Immanence, on the other hand, means that God is wholly involved with us, "that he is living in all that is, as its innermost mystery, that he is here in his mysterious nearness. Disregard of God's immanence deprives us of any sense of intimate belonging, while inattention to his transcendence robs God of his godliness.

The towering importance of the above caveat is that transcendence must be conjoined with immanence, that divinity must be coupled with humanity, that heaven must be balanced with earth, and that God's distance must be complemented by his nearness¾is essential if we are to grasp the true meaning of the glory of Jesus.

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Taken from “Ruthless Trust; The Ragamuffin’s Path to God, by Brennan Manning. Used by permission. 

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