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The following comment is shown on web page
http://www.up.edu/portlandmag/2006_fall/music/music4.htm
At first, I thought there was a misspelling. Immanent is defined as
"1. Existing or remaining within; inherent: believed in a God
immanent in humans."
This short commentary speaks about the evolution of one person's faith
from believing in a magician in the sky image of God to connecting
with that creative energy that formed the universe. I'm sure Liz and
Edie, and others, will enjoy this short comment.
Mike
___________________________________________________
What does it mean to honor a God whose immanence takes precedence over
his transcendence? How do we pray to a deity who eludes even the
personal pronouns he, himself, and who, who absconds from the temples
of our imagination and hides in the interstices of creation?
There is a tradition of Christian prayer that is open to mystery
and yet attuned to God's immanence. The Trappist contemplative Thomas
Merton describes it this way: "When I am liberated by silence, when I
am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of
it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no
distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full
of prayer ... Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and
solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the
sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my
prayer, for God is all in all." He might have added: the whirling
galaxies are my prayer, the ceaselessly weaving DNA is my prayer, the
folding of the mountains and the grinding glaciers are my prayer.
*
I was raised in a culture of prayer; it permeated every aspect of my
young life. The school day began and ended with prayer. As an altar
boy at our parish church, I served countless masses, benedictions,
weddings, funerals. A not insignificant proportion of my youth was
spent in church, listening to prayers, reciting prayers. Yet, looking
back on my childhood, I wonder what it all meant. Most of the prayers
I recited were formalistic; I might as well have been mumbling the
Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag or nursery rhymes. Many of the
prayers were in Latin and therefore doubly inscrutable. Certainly
there was nothing spontaneous or heartfelt about my prayers. The only
prayers that were not formalistic were anxious petitions. In these
earnest entreaties to a deity, I was not alone. A recent Newsweek poll
found that 87 percent of Americans believe in a God who hears and
answers prayers, and more than a quarter of Americans pray to such a
God every day. For many people, the entire purpose of prayer is to
invoke God's intervention in the course of their daily lives, to
adjust the tilt of the universe in their personal favor.
I am now more interested in the kind of prayer that I found on the
mountain. If we accept, with the early Irish saints, God's immanence,
then prayer becomes an expression of wonder, thanksgiving and praise,
not to someone outside of the creation who could and might intervene
to redirect the flow of events, but to the creative agency within the
creation — a God whom we intuit through the mind and heart but who
evades all definitions (including the convenient pronoun who).
*
A corollary of belief in the efficacy of petitionary prayer is the
so-called problem of evil: If God can redirect the flow of events in
contravention of natural law, then why does a loving and just God
allow bad things to happen to good people? One answer is hinted at in
the Celtic notion of God's immanence. I am the point of the spear,
sang Amergin. He might have added, I am the wind that blows the ship
upon the rocks, I am the wolf that carries the lamb from the fold, I
am the pestilence that takes the child from the parent. The creation
and the creator are all of a piece: light and darkness, happiness and
sorrow, life and death. The creation is neither good nor evil, but
Jesus and other great religious leaders have emphasized our freedom to
act in ways that can nudge history towards the good. What Celtic
pantheism advantageously received from Christianity is the Sermon on
the Mount, and indeed the entire message of the gospels: Do unto
others as you would have them do unto you. In the broadest sense of
this maxim we recognize a basis for moral action in the world and a
concept of redemption in which our every action moves all of creation
toward harmony.
Our quest for encounter with the Absolute goes arm in arm with our
study of nature. The great Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin:
"Let us go on and on endlessly increasing our perception of the hidden
powers that slumber, and the infinitesimally tiny ones that swarm
about us, and the immensities that escape us simply because they
appear as a point," he wrote, extolling the atomic and the galactic.
Each discovery plunges us a little deeper into the ground of all
Mystery, he believed, leading us at last into contemplation of the
ineffable, unspeakable deity who "through his Spirit stirs up into a
ferment the mass of the universe." Less and less, he said near the end
of his life, did he discern a difference between research and
adoration. If we are attentive enough, we will be led into encounter
with the ineffable Spirit that stirs the universe into a ferment.
I am the wind on the sea. I am the ocean wave. I am the sound of
the billows. I am the hawk on the cliff. I am the dewdrop in sunlight.
I am the lake on the plain. I am the meaning of the poem. I am the god
that makes fire in the head.
--- Liz wrote:
"when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it,"
Oh, wow, Edie, I love this sentence!
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