The Mystery of Why

If humankind could have known God without the world,

God would never have created the world.

-Meister Eckhart

Here I go stealing from Richard Rohr's daily devotion again (I'm not the only one, almost every one gets linked to facebook by some clergy colleague of mine or other).  But I have to admit, I love the idea that Eckhart puts out there, which is essentially that creation is an act of love, it flows out of God's gracious desire to know and be known, it is not a necessity, but rather it is a way in which we are given the chance to experience God.

Is this anthropocentric?  You betcha, of course it may not just be humankind that benefits from the existence of the universe. I would absolutely subscribe to the notion that God's ability to know and be known is rather deeper and wider than we can imagine.  But what really matters to us, at this juncture in our spiritual history, is that we can and should view creation as part of the divine movement of God's Spirit as opposed to something separate and broken and even evil, which is the gnostic impulse, which has been the bugaboo of the Abrahamic faiths for a very long time.

The thing that keeps me coming back to Rohr over and over again is the way he sort of pulls me towards non-dualistic thinking, which he equates with the mystics that exist in many different faith traditions.  But I have to admit, I don't feel much affinity for the word mystic on a gut level.  I think of mystics as people who are sort of nebulous and who, while they certainly produce moments of profound truth, tend to dissolve like a fog.  Rohr presents dualistic thought as a necessary step in maturing, not something to be despised or rejected, simply grown out of, like falling in love with the wrong person or some unfortunate fashion fad.  Rohr repeatedly mentions that people in the dualistic mode of thought tend to think that mystics are nuts, which I find to be true.  Eckhart, Julian of Norwich and John of the Cross were not my favorites in Seminary, which I would say marked a high-water point for me in terms of dualistic thinking.  Now I read them with different eyes.

Oddly enough, at one point, before my religious journey really began, my faith journey took me through another sort of non-dualistic phase, where I did not judge right or wrong or black or white, or at least I thought I didn't.  But rather than leading me "further up and further in" as C.S, Lewis winsomely describes the journey, this phase led to a rather bleak landscape that more closely resembled Dante's Limbo than the light of heaven.  In the early years of my spiritually awake period, while I was working through the often rigorous motions of dualistic thought again, I judged this period as dissolute and vain.  Learning to let go of that judgment and trying to compartmentalize all my experiences in a neat, linear fashion, has been part of moving towards a more non-dual mode of thinking.  Part of that motion has been to learn to show grace and empathy towards people, including my former selves, who were trapped either in a world of judgmental dualism or a bleak shadow of mysticism that did not welcome the Holy Spirit in any form.

This is one of the wonders of God's creativity that almost buckles my knees: there are so many options and possibilities for what we can be and what we can know and what we can think.  The divine relationship of the Trinity is at the center of all of them, and is indeed the source of all of them, including the shadows that it casts.

Scripture says, "The Earth is the Lord's and all that and all that is in it, the world those who live in it;" Psalm 24:1  How seriously should we take that? How big do we want to let that get?  Dualism gives a brief nod to the cosmic implications of that verse (and sentiments like it that are rather common in Scripture if  you want to get proof texty), and then starts naming all the rules and regulations about what we should do in light of that reality.  Non-dual thinking, so it seems to me, simply sits with the reality of God's creative love and lets the knowledge sort of wash over it.  There may be an insight, there may be an inspiration, there may even be a motivation to go and do something, but the mystic does not start with the desire of results in mind, they do not demand answers to their questions, they rather let God speak what God will and listen with a holy hunger.

To some this sounds scary, to others simply too vague.  I wonder myself what practical implications it has for the church.  It simply does not lend itself to practicality, but by all the saints it does help you love God.  The Love is extravagant.  Imagine this: God has made the entire universe, in all it's vastness and mystery, for you.  You certainly don't need all that, but it's for you nonetheless.  Once you get as much of a grip on that as you possibly can, imagine also that you who have been so extravagantly loved are called to share that love with everyone and everything.

Jesus says, "All authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me." (Mt 28:18)  He understands this: the vastness of the universe and the intricacies of creation are for him, so that he might know God and be known by God.  The immediate consequence of that reality is that it needs to be shared, it needs to be taught, it needs to be spread to all nations because it is Good News.