‘What we have lost, though I think, is that core of silence….At the centre of what we do in order to be who we are we need silence, we need retreat, we need contemplation’. Revd Richard Coles
I remember in the January snow of 2010 spending five minutes filming the back garden. The snow fell silently. The sound of traffic was more intermittent than usual. In the snow the world is quieter. With leafless branches pointing into white skies there’s a great simplicity in a snowscape, as there is in any winter landscape. Everything is stripped back and unadorned like the unbleached woollen garments worn by Cistercian monks. At the heart of simplicity is the clarity, unity and in the end bare reality so beloved of the mystics. I am increasingly inclined to the view that the ultimate reality, which might be called God, is this clear, silent, still and unfurnished heart of things. And if we want to see ourselves as we really are we could look to the clear, silent, still and unfurnished heart of me or you. Then ‘All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. All matter, all life is charged with [God] everything is emptiness and everything is compassion’. (Thomas Merton – The Asian Journal) Any sense we might have of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘mine’ and ‘yours’, is an illusion, a trick of the mind that prevents it from seeing the ultimate reality, indeed realising the emptiness and compassion. As Einstein put it; “human beings are a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe”, a part limited in time and space. We experience our self, our thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest.., a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
The temples of the ancient world had a space at their heart in which to place an idol of their God, in Jerusalem this space was called the holy of holies, and in the Jerusalem temple the holy of holies was empty. God was represented by nothing but an empty space. God was not to be represented by an image created by human minds and hands.
In the book of Exodus, Moses encounters God in a bush that seemed to be on fire and yet was not consumed by the fire. Moses was called by God to lead his people from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land.
‘But Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you”, and they ask me, “What is his name?” what shall I say to them?’ God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’ He said further, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “I am has sent me to you.”’ (Exodus 3:13-14)
God refuses to be named, refuses to be put in a box of human description, God simply ‘is’. St Thomas Aquinas argued something very similar; he described God as ‘ipsum esse subsistens’, which is translated by Bishop Robert Barron as “the shear act of ‘to be’ itself”. God is not a being among many other beings, as I am a being and you are a being, God is ‘being’ itself, or as Paul Tillich put it, the Ground of Being. Although you and I are beings among many other beings we are also made in the image and likeness of God. Perhaps in order to ‘see’ ourselves as we really are, that is made in the image and likeness of God, we must learn to discard the images and concepts we have created to represent our selves to become emptied of self and filled with compassion and charity. In the modern utilitarian view of ourselves, we tend to define ourselves as persons that do things. One of the questions we often ask people on meeting them for the first time is, ‘What do you do?’ as if that is who they are. But we also call ourselves human beings. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’. Maybe what that really means is that those who can see themselves as they are also begin to see God as God is; namely one who is empty of all passion, description and image. God just is and to know God maybe we have to learn again how to simply be. If this sounds depressing, bleak, nihilistic, and even hopeless, on a cold January morning, it is perhaps that we mistake the unfurnished heart of things for the absence of anything real whereas it points to the truly real, the ultimate reality that we call God. And what is love other than the expression of a need to reconnect beings made separate by the illusion of self. Love is a emptying of self to connect more fully with the other. God is Love.
A New Year like a new day is like a clean slate, a time for a greater simplicity, a time to remember the simple self emptying nature of love, charity, compassion.
In the clarity of leafless branches pointing into white skies we can learn again to see our true humanity emptied of all idols and illusions.
Brislington Community News 