It’s the AND that kills us
Leonard Cohen, that most wonderful of poet/philosophers, once wrote a song with the words,
‘Do not say the moment was imagined.
Do not stoop to strategies like this[1]’
This perfectly captures what I’ve been seeking to explore in my past two articles[2].
There are experiences we have in our lives that open us up, awaken us, even very slightly, to the possibility of something more, greater, beyond, transcendent…even divine; like a partial glimpse into a deeper reality behind the one we witness every day.
Given the prevailing ‘we don’t do god’ culture and the speed of life and the history of bad experiences, not so many people would dare to admit to these unexplainable and uncertain experiences, even to themselves.
What I have been seeking to highlight is what we do with such moments, such glimpses, through the mist[3]. My dear friend Ralph, in response to the last two articles wrote these words to me in this past week.
“It is easier to say something was imagined, than to face up to the fact that something wonderful was lost, or that something we thought would be wonderful, disappointed us – wasn’t what we’d imagined”
Ralph also said, (picking up on the mist imagery again),
“If you have seen through the clearing mist once – you know it is there”
But what do we do with such moments?
If we experience something that feels true[4], that touches us deeply, but which we cannot fully see, or know completely what it means, then we still have to do something with that experience. The truth is that we don’t know what to do with such experiences and so we head in one of two directions, which both have one thing in common – certainty. The drive for the certainty of atheism and the certainty of fundamentalism in all flavours. Both settle for a place called, ‘I know’.
I am arguing for what I’m calling subtle truth. Truth with intuition, imagination, doubt, hints, clues, uncertainty and mystery. A world of,
I know and I don’t know
It’s clear and it’s misty
It’s light and it’s dark
It’s belief and it’s doubt
It’s love and it’s anger
It’s neediness and it’s action
It’s see and don’t see
It’s hope and despair
It’s vulnerable and it’s secure
It’s certain and it’s mystery.
It’s the AND that kills us.
The question that has been bugging me is this, “Does it matter what you do with it?”
I think I concur with C S Lewis’ reason for writing the allegory, Till We Have Faces[5] in saying, “Yes, it really does”.
If the experiences (however veiled, or glimpsed, sensed, or riddled), woke up our humanity, at any depth at all, they should be honoured and taken seriously, even if they cannot be resolved into certainty. I once had a spiritual experience in the middle of the night in my fifties that was very profound and real and to this day, I still don’t know what its real meaning was. But the uncertainty still does an important work within me.
Back to Leonard Cohen,
‘Do not say that moment was imagined.
Do not stoop to strategies like this’
I believe Cohen and Lewis are creatively making the same point, that when we deny what we have experienced, (if it was real enough to awaken in us even a little curiosity), then we subtly lose touch with our true face, our true voice, our real beauty. The pursuit of certainty, as a strategy to silence mystery, has the effect of slowly killing off the beautiful richness of our own humanity. If transcendence is about anything, it is about becoming more human. In this place of dancing with the mystery, there is an alchemy, a creativity, of becoming more authentically ourselves. It is in the not-knowing and all the difficult emotions that come with it, that reveals our true face.
Interestingly another dear friend corrected my lament recently against Descartes words, ‘I think therefore I am’ (Cogito ergo sum), and drew my attention to the fact that he is always misquoted for easy convenience. What he actually said was far more uncomfortable in this modern age and yet so much richer than the popular words. Apparently, he actually said, ‘Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum’, which means ‘I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am’.
It totally changes the meaning. Doubt now becomes the seedbed of all human becoming. Agnosticism is the only honest route for all meaningful discoveries – Christian agnostic, Hindu agnostic, Jewish agnostic, Buddhist agnostic, atheist agnostic. It is the willingness to humbly stand in the place of I don’t know[6], which is the powerful, creative, alchemical owning of the not knowing. It is the royal road to deepening our true face, our true humanity.
Humility[7].
Which leads me to the second thing that has been bugging me - how has our search for meaning become so ‘me’ centred? We have become the judge and the jury on the meaning of life. God is in the dock[8]. In C S Lewis’ allegory, Till We Have Faces, Orual, the main character, is the one who, for most of the book, feels she has the truth. She has a case to make against the gods, and they need to answer her. She is angry and disappointed and wants the gods to squirm at her judgment and confirm that she is right. She decides the gods aren’t real. She writes out her complaint. She wants her day in court to make the case against the idea of the divine. All of this was her way of shutting down the intolerable experience of glimpsing something so beautiful, but she couldn’t be certain of.
As she gets closer to her opportunity to make her case against the gods, she realises that she had been expected all along. She had always thought that she was in the driving seat on the meaning of life, until suddenly she realises she wasn’t. She was in fact responding to an invitation that had been sent out to her long before, through subtleties, intuitions, imaginations, dreams, hints and riddles.
This wasn’t just Lewis’s view; he was simply capturing a view that had been around since the ancients. We don’t ‘make the divine, we simply respond, like an echo, to the subtlety of the divine. We love, because we are loved. Our hungers, our longings for meaning, for belonging, for the divine, are an echo, a response, not an initiation.
As I conclude my thoughts in this series of three articles, no one sums it up better, in my opinion, than poet John O’Donohue is his masterpiece Eternal Echoes[9].
‘You are not able to name what is missing…something that feels vital to you lies out of your reach in the unknown…this voice comes from your own soul. It is the voice of eternal longing within you, and it confirms you as a relentless pilgrim on the earth.
There is something within you that no one or nothing else in the world is able to meet or satisfy. When you recognise that such unease is natural, it will free you from getting on the treadmill of chasing ever more temporary or partial satisfactions.
This eternal longing will always insist on some door remaining open somewhere in all the shelters where you belong. When you befriend this longing, it will keep you awake and alert to why it is that you are here on earth.
It will intensify your journey but also liberate you from the need to go on many seductive, but futile quests.
Longing can never be fulfilled on earth’
[1] Alexander Leaving by Leonard Cohen on the 10 New Songs album
[2] Was Judas Bad Or Just Disappointed? & Why Do The Gods Mess With our Heads?
[3] I took this image of ‘the mist’ from my references to C S Lewis allegory Till We Have Faces HBJ 1957
[4] Remember that truth is established in the brain down 4 dimensions, not just one. intuition and imagination are just as valid as science and reason. See McGilchrist’s work in The Matter With Things Perspectiva 2021
[5] Till We Have Faces C S Lewis HBJ 1957
[6] The literal meaning of agnostic
[7] Humus, the earth…humility, human….the more we become grounded in our tiny and special place in the eco system, the closer we get to seeing ours and others true faces.
[8] God In The Dock was the title given to a book of C S Lewis essays published in 1979 by Harper Collins
[9] Eternal Echoes John O’Donohue Bantam Press 1998