Belonging

Got a call yesterday from a friend who asked: What does it mean to belong, and what is belonging? Among the more important questions we can ask ourselves, given that belonging is what each of us longs for and sacrifices so much to find. I managed a few sentences on the phone but after hanging up decided to write out some thoughts in search of clarity.

There seem to be different kinds of belonging.

First, there’s biological belonging. This has to do with family relations. These relations are biologically based and irrevocable. Regardless of how good or bad the relationship is, a biological relationship can’t be revoked. I’m not sure if this makes it the least or the most interesting form of belonging because, as I’ll suggest in the end, the truest realizing of personal belonging is indeed belonging which is irrevocable and indissoluble.

Second, recreational belonging. This would be based on shared interests and abilities. You may belong to a chess club or a local choir. The terms of the belonging are your ability to perform the skill that defines the group. So here belonging is performance based. If you can’t do what defines the group, you don’t belong.

Third, there’s vocational belonging, not all that different from recreational belonging. You work for a company and so belong to the company or to this or that department within the company. The terms of the belonging are spelled out in your contract. This belonging is also performance based. Fail to abide by the terms of your contract and you fail to belong.

Then there are deeper more meaningful forms of belonging.

Fourth, marital belonging, a belonging which is, at its best, based on mutual love and respect and shared values and purposes. This belonging realizes itself far more deeply in us, and as us, than recreational or vocational belonging. The terms of this belonging are the love that unites the two who are married. In the end, however, where love and acceptance are conditional (as divorce makes painfully clear), marital belonging becomes performance based as well.

Fifth, there’s what we might call relational belonging. Two people develop an emotional or life bond that unites their hearts. It is based on mutual and unconditional love and respect. Here one belongs not to a team or a company or even a vow or contract of marriage, but to the other. Such belonging can certainly occur within marriage, but it needn’t require marriage, nor is is always present in marriage. This belonging is the heart and soul of true friendship. It was Aristotle, I think, who defined a friend as “another self,” a copy or separate version of one’s own soul. You see yourself in the other and they see themselves in you. Each values and loves and cherishes the life of the other unconditionally. Friendship, when it realizes its deepest potential, is the truest form of relational belonging. Its terms are unconditional love.

Now for the controversial part. Human beings all fail to love others in some measure. No human being loves (or even can love) another as truly and deeply as that person deserves and needs to be loved. I’m going to suggest in a moment that only God can love us in this unfailing and fullest sense. But when it comes to belonging as we know and experience it among ourselves, we are always in state of some failure. However truly one may realize the love and value of another, that other person’s value will always exceed whatever one has done to affirm and celebrate it. Belonging – as far as we can know it among ourselves – is always partial and broken, however deeply we may feel it at the time. There always remains a deferral of desire, value, and longing which anticipates the more, the truer, the final, etc. This is because human desire, like human value, is immeasurable and limitless, and can rest finally only in an immeasurable and limitless object. This, it seems to me, is why all forms of belonging mentioned thus far (except biological belonging) are performance based and tend to dissolution under the pressure of human weakness and failure.

Finally, ontological belonging. All the forms of belonging described here, with the exception of biological belonging, are approximations of the truest belonging imaginable, ontological belonging, the belonging which is ‘Being’ itself. For me as a Christian this is the belonging which is God in the fullness of his own being, in whom immeasurable and limitless value, on the one hand, and existence, on the other, are one and the same, suffering no deferral of desire or its satisfaction. Perhaps this trinitarian belonging could be listed first above, since all other forms of belonging are lesser reflections or approximations of it.

What else might we say about what it means to belong? I suggest relational belonging is humanity’s highest form of participation in the belonging which is God’s own life. This belonging involves:

Knowing. To belong truly is to know truly, and to belong fully is to know fully. One does not belong (with/or someone in the relational sense) if one does not know the one to whom one belongs and if one is not also known by the other. Truth and transparency make relational belonging possible. If you don’t really know the other, or are not really known by them, you don’t belong. It is one thing to say you love another when you don’t know the other. It’s another thing to truly know the other and still love them. Marriage teaches us this. We start out madly in love but not always knowing as fully as we feel. As we come to know our partner more, our love is put to the test.

Accepting. This includes loving, affirming, valuing, celebrating, being present to the other and inviting the presence of the other – all unconditionally. If once you really know someone you reject them or are rejected by someone when they come to know your faults, weaknesses, and struggles, then you didn’t belong to them, nor did they belong to you.

Sharing Life. If someone really knows you and accepts you as you are but doesn’t share his/her life with you, there’s no realization of belonging. To belong is also to participate in the life of the one you know and accept, and to have that person participate in your life. Sharing life, I suggest, is sharing our histories, dreams, fears, hopes, values, and desires. It’s what we’re made for but seldom find.

Lastly, we can only belong to God. No human being can be all this to another, not perfectly. Only God can know us completely, know every condition, and so only God can love us absolutely without condition. And since this is so, we can only belong to God. We say we belong to each other, but as I take it this just expresses the measure to which we participate in and approximate God’s knowledge and love of us.

Live instead

 

I guess it finally happened. I’m gone. I lost my mind,
But I’m mindful, never mindless, and I stay on the grind
For the Invisible – (S)he and me, we indivisible.
Any created reality coming between us is inadmissible,
Dismissible. The whole world comes to zero,
And I just sit on the hill and watch it burn, like I’m Nero;
Not a Caesar, I’m just a Jesus pleaser;
No longer an Ebenezer with a heart cold as a freezer, no!
I’m on fire, full of the Messiah,
When I’m on the pyre I keep my spirituality higher;
I face the Void with the Spirit at my back,
Wind in my sails, protection from any attack.
The Reaper’s gotta grin ‘cause he knows about ‘tipping points’,
But I stay calm with the Balm, as the dripping anoints
My head. I’m dinin’ off the Living Bread.
I die before I die so when I die, I live instead.

(Dwayne Polk)

Living prepositionally

As you know, I’ve recently returned to the importance of prepositions, of living prepositionally, as these prepositions are used in Scripture to describe the relationship between God and creation.

I thought I’d mention a few key prepositions and how I engage them. I daily rehearse their importance by confessing them in prayer to God: “I am – of you, from you, in you, through you, for you, to you” is a kind of mantra I employ. And I try to take time to say what each involves, usually by expressing gratitude for the reality of God’s presence held out in each preposition.

One could explore more prepositions, I suppose. The important thing to remember is not to reduce God to the spatial limits implied by such language. One cannot get “behind” God, or “under” or “over” God, or move from being “outside” God to “in” God. Language will and must fail us. Prayer is ultimately being at a loss for words.

As Denys Turner points out:

…the way of negation demands prolixity; it demands the maximization of talk about God; it demands that we talk about God in as many ways as possible, even in as many conflicting ways as possible, that we use up the whole stock-in-trade of discourse in our possession, so as thereby to discover ultimately the inadequacy of all of it…

and

…it is the encounter with the failure of what we must say about God to represent God adequately.

“All in Christ” and “Christ in all.” Not a contradiction, but the single and undivided intimacy of God’s presence. From the perspectives of discrete beings contemplating their individual existence, we can say Christ is “in all things” the principle of their diversity, giving each its own life. And when contemplating the shared origin of all things in God, the undivided source and ground of the being of all things, we can say all things are “in Christ” the principle of their unity.

Christ exceeds us in every possible direction as more inward than our inmost and higher than our utmost. For me, the point in contemplating faith and life in Christ intentionally in prepositional terms is to experience myself exceeded (saturated) by, inseparably related to, the presence and purposes of God. And it has been absolutely important to me to engage these as prayer, that is, to contemplate their reality in the second person.

So, consider a few ways we live prepositionally.

Of you. To say I am “of” God is to say I owe my existence to God’s creative act. His being is the source and ground of my being. His life, my life. My existing at all is a creative expressive act of his own existing.

From you. To say I am “from” God is similar to saying I am “of” him, except that while “of” speaks purely of origin, “from” adds to this the immediacy and constancy of God’s creative act. A deist may agree God is the origin and source of the world’s being the way a clockmaker is responsible for making a clock. But a clockmaker may let go his clock and the clock operate independent of its maker. That we are “from” God dispels this kind of independence. It means we exist continuously from the immediate presence of God and his creative will. We are not only “of” God (in the remote sense of God’s being our origin), we are continuously “from” him.

In you. To say I am “in” God is to say I am inseparable from the intimacy of his presence and creative will, that he is more intimate to me than my inmost and higher than my upmost, that God’s presence is the first reality and truth of every other reality and truth.

Through you. To say I am “through” God speaks of God’s immediate presence as means and provision for my life. One may grant one is of and from God but suppose God is an uninvolved observer, not also intentionally pursuing my highest good in him. That I am “through” God suggests that God is present is also the empowerment of ongoing transformation, meaning-making, and life/service.

For you. To say I am “for” God is to say God is the end for which I exist and act. I live and act for his pleasure and glory.

To you. To say I am “to” God is to say not only that God is the end for which I exist and act but that he is also the object of all my acts. I do what I do “to” Christ who is in all things as their life just as he is in me as my life. How else can Paul instruct us (Col 3) to do all we do “as to Christ, not to others”? Christ is served when we serve others. How else is it true (Mat 25) that in feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and caring for the sick we in fact feed, clothe, and care for Christ? To learn to see all our acts this way is the struggle of faith. To intend Christ in all we do is the transformation we call the Christian faith/life.

I am yours, but where are you?

I continue to contemplate how my faith engages the truth and presence of Christ while practicing silence and mindfulness. I earlier shared here how important prepositions are in defining one’s contemplative approach. St. Paul reminds us that “from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom 11.36). We possess ourselves and make-meaning prepositionally, understanding that we are from God, in Christ, and live for him.  However, it’s one thing to agree that “all things” are from and through and to God. We may even appreciate the relation to God which these prepositions describe. That is, after all, the point. But it is far more radical to, intentionally and personally, integrate these into one’s fundamental Self and meaning, at which point they become prayer: “I am from you, Lord, and through you, and to you.”

In my last post I described a conversation I fell into during a time of attempted silence and how it further clarified my sense of the exchange of love and meaning-making that silence opens up, at least as I encounter it. “I am yours and you are mine” expresses a reciprocal recognition and affirmation of acceptance and belonging. Christ alone offers it, personally, and we constitute our truest Self as faith’s response to him, at which point we are not just praying, but rather we become prayer.

I’d like to share still another moment I had during my practice of silence. I wish I could say I always succeed at silencing the traffic in my head, but I’m still just a novice. Let me preface by saying that the moments I share here are part of an extended period of personal suffering, grief, and loss. We all suffer, sooner or later. I’ll just say that all the talk about the Void which I’ve engage in here is no academic exercise for me. It is a matter of life and death. We all must confront the truth of our finitude, mortality, and nothingness. Faith must navigate the journey through the Void. There’s no getting around or under it. If you haven’t stood in it, then what I’m describing may make me seem a bit crazy. But if you’ve encountered it, you know of what I speak.

The moment I’d like to share is a follow-up to my previous post relaying a conversation in which Christ clarified his presence and my existence as a true Self of his own creation. In the past months, my faith has engaged itself in simple terms. “I am yours, and you are mine” has become a touch-stone of truth and grounding for me. I have invariably ‘felt’ the truth of this exchange too. Whatever emotional chaos may grip my heart and mind, this particular exchange has provided help as I have felt Christ exchanging these simple truths with me. I know it’s impossible to provide a third-person account of how the mind and soul touch and are touched by God, but I don’t know how else to describe it.

In the days following that conversation, however, the very next day in fact, my faith reached out and engaged Christ as I regularly do: “I am yours and you are mine.” But this time it felt empty. No sense of encountering his presence as I offered myself. No intangible voice of Christ speaking its truth to me. Only the empty sound of my own voice. I showed up. But where was he? I confessed and called, observed and waited. But I felt no presence. And so it continued for days. Actually, if I’m honest, it still continues. I grew doubtful, even desperate.

Some days later another conversation ensued. A voice, a presence, doubtless Christ’s, though perhaps in and through my own voice, spoke.

Christ: Tom, when you say “I am yours and you are mine,” how are you able to say it?
Tom: Because I feel or sense you saying it.
Christ: And if you don’t feel it, as you haven’t been feeling it?
Tom: Then I fear it’s not true.
Christ: Can it not be true in the absence of such feelings?
Tom: I suppose. It’s been my own source of real belonging and identity.
Christ: You suppose rightly. Think about what it is in you, what it is about you, that makes it even possible for you to cry out “I am your and you are mine.” Where’s your desire for it come from?
Tom: It comes from you. No movement I make in your direction could be possible without you wanting me to move.
Christ: That’s right.
Tom: Your Spirit has first to give the grace of desire and empower the confession that ‘I am yours and you are mine’. Your “You are mine” creates my “I am yours.” If I was not yours, I could not desire to be yours or desire you to be mine.
Christ: Exactly. So what happens to all this when you don’t particularly feel it, or when your feelings positively abandon you to the grief and pain you’re in?
Tom: It means feelings can’t always be trusted to tell the truth. It means that the absence of particular feelings doesn’t mean you are not fully and lovingly present with me. If my voice is the only voice I sense speaking, I can know your love is inviting my confession.
Christ: Yes.
Tom: But why nothing but darkness? Why such absence?
Christ: So that when life’s sufferings and losses at their most intense consume your world, and you see nothing but darkness, and feel nothing but pain, you will know that I am yours and you are mine, that I am in you and you are not alone.
Tom: Unspeakably beautiful. But it sucks that such pain accompanies it.
Christ: What’s your favorite NT passage?
Tom: Rom 8:18-39.
Christ: So there’s your answer. Faith must ultimately constitute itself as absolute trust, not a feeling. And such trust is born in the absence, not the presence, of comforting feelings. That is where faith apprehends me as the source and ground of undying, indestructible life.

I am yours and you are mine

I earlier shared here an experience I had during my practice of (well, I call them “attempts” at) silence, mindfulness. In that post I slightly opened a window onto how I try to practice mindfulness. I’d like to share another episode from my attempts, a brief conversation I had last week as I sat silently.

Me: I’m here for you.
Christ: And I am here for you. I am yours and you are mine.
Me: I am yours, and you are mine.
Christ: [Piercing and loving stare.]
Me: Lord, all I have here inside me are false and selfish selves – afraid, alone, lustful, angry, lazy. There’s nobody here but these.
Christ: I am yours and you are mine.
Me: OK, but just so you know, there’s nobody home here. I see you here looking around for…
Christ: Looking around?
Me: Yeah, looking around for the real me, the true self. I can’t find him.
Christ: Well, first of all, I don’t “look around.” But do you actually see me in your mind ‘looking around’, lifting up furniture, opening closet doors, ‘looking for’ someone?
Me: Well, not like that, no. But I look around and all I see is emptiness. So I assume…
Christ: Exactly. You assume. So what do you actually see/imagine me doing? What’s the basic form my presence in you has taken since you first noticed I was here?
Me: Your eyes – like the icons I contemplate – lovingly viewing me, seeing me. Your unchanging gaze fixed on me.
Christ: That’s right. I don’t “look around.” I simply “see” – truthfully, hopefully, creatively, lovingly.
Me: Then you see that there’s no one here but false selves.
Christ: So who am I talking to?
Me: What?
Christ: Who am I talking to? Who is speaking to me? Who is it that sees the false self and confesses that it’s false? Who’s doing that? You choose to sit here in the silence. Who chooses that just to see me seeing him? Just another false self?
Me: Couldn’t be. False selves only seek to hide from you.
Christ: That’s right. And I don’t engage them, don’t see them the way I’m seeing you right now, and, in seeing you, invite you into Our company.
Me: [Silent]
Christ: Well, there you are. And have you ever not seen me seeing you?
Me: No. Your gaze has always been the fixed horizon of my every waking moment, even in my darkest hours. Even when I was hiding, failing, running – your face and gaze were always front and center seeing me.
Christ: That’s right. I am yours.
Me: And I am yours.
Christ: And you are mine.
Me: And you are mine.

That Shekinah smoke

So…
Me and the Lord, we close, tighter than the tightest,
Stay in that Shekinah smoke, higher than the highest, the
Abyss of the Void doesn’t frighten in the slightest, ‘cuz
In the darkest times, that’s when the Light shines the brightest.

See,
Nothingness is our nature, ‘being’ is a Grace-gift,
From the Lifter of our Heads, a holy face-lift,
Made over in the Maker, not the Makeshift,
Journey through the Infinite in time without a spaceship.

Don’t get it twisted, though, I still know how pain feels, my
Dreams walked in and out of my life in the same heels,
Tried to chase ‘em but kept slippin’ on the same peels,
I lost it all, life went off the rails like some train wheels.

I even had the thought of just ending it,
But the Voice of the Lord came suspending it:
“Ok, you asked for more Grace, and I’m lendin’ it, but
Till you die, Christ-Crucified, and you keep defending it!”

So I lost a dream or two, but I got the Prize,
I went to school of Unlearning and forgot the ‘Wise’,
My mind is blown daily, but I bet the Lord is not surprised,
He said a broken heart with contrition he would not despise.

So, I stand, broken and yet I’m still whole,
for my Beloved, soft-spoken and yet I’m still bold,
Blazing with the Flame of Glory, yet I’m still cold,
Stayin deep in the Pocket of Presence like a billfold.

(Dwayne Polk)

Desire, Worship, & Idolatry

 

Interesting thought I recently ran across in George MacDonald (GM, the Scottish writer/mystic/Christian universalist) in a passage examining Christ’s temptations, particularly where Satan offers Christ all the kingdoms of the world and their glory if Christ would simply bow and worship him. GM suggests Christ is here offered a vision of what he knows will be manifestly his eventually – the whole world, but it is here offered to Jesus on different terms. GM says here was have an example of good and right things being pursued on false grounds.

GM ends the passage with something that shocked me a bit, but with which I could only agree:

“Not even thine own visions of love and truth, O Savior of the world, shall be thy guides to thy goal, but the will of thy Father in heaven.”

One can possess the God-given forms of things, but possess them falsely. Only the Father’s will (God himself) can be truly, rightly, desired. This may explain the distinction Paul realizes in 1Cor 13 when he says one can perform any of the common acts we associate with doing rightly or well, or serving God (i.e., exercising spiritual gifts, giving all we have to the poor, sacrificing our lives to save others, etc.) without these acts being right and good if they’re not intended by, or as, love. The same act (giving to the poor) can be false or true depending on the love with which it is performed, for the end we intend defines our actions (as loving, meaningful, etc., or as worthless). This has to stand within Paul’s admonishment in Col 3 that we do what we do with all our heart “for Christ, not for people.”

Christ had to bring his (our) humanity to God in the same terms. GM’s point is that while the whole world was bound to come to Christ, to be his in all its glory, nevertheless to pursue this end as such, to intend it and not the Father, is equivalent to worshiping Satan. One needn’t sacrifice a goat and bow down within a pentagram to be beholden to evil, for desire (when it takes shape within intention) is worship. Idolatry, then, isn’t just a form of worship that involves images other than God. It is desiring anything other than God.

A phantom kingdom

Hell is with us at all times, a phantom kingdom perpetuating itself in the wastes of sinful hearts, but only becomes visible to us as hell because the true kingdom has shed its light upon history. In theological tradition, most particularly in the East, there is that school of thought that wisely makes no distinction, essentially, between the fire of hell and the light of God’s glory, and that interprets damnation as the soul’s resistance to the beauty of God’s glory, its refusal to open itself before divine love, which causes divine love to seem an exterior chastisement. Hell is the experience (a possibility in each moment) of divine glory not as beauty, but as a formless sublimity; it is the rejection of all analogical vulnerability, the sealing off of the “self” (or the cosmos) in univocal singularity, the “misreading” of creation as an aboriginal violence. The “fire” of hell is that same infinite display of semeia [signs] by which God is always declaring his love, misconstrued (though rejection) as the chaotic sublime rather than the beautiful, not susceptible of analogical appropriation, of charity; it is the soul’s refusal to become (as Gregory says) the expanding vessel into which the beauty of God endlessly flows. For exile is possible within the beauty of the infinite only by way of an exilic interiority, a fictive inwardness, where the creature can grasp itself as an isolated essence. Hell is, one might almost say, a perfectly “Kantian” place, where the twin sublimities of the star-strewn firmament above and the lofty moral “law’ within remain separated by the thin tissue of subjective moral autonomy: where this tissue has become impervious to glory, the analogy of the heavens is not the transforming voice of God but only a mute simile, an inassimilable exteriority, and so a torment. Hell is the perfect concretization of ethical freedom, perfect justice without delight, the soul’s work of legislation for itself, where ethics has achieved its final independence from aesthetics. Absolute subjective liberty is known only in hell, where the fire of divine beauty is held at by, where the divine apeiron [limitlessness] miraculously divests itself at the peras [boundary, end, extremity] that, in Christ it has already transgressed and broken open, and humbly permits the self to “create” itself. True, though hell is the purest interiority, it is also by contagion a shared interiority, a palpable fiction and common space superimposed upon creation, with a history of its own; but still, it is a turning in, a fabrication of an inward depth, a shadow, a privation, a loss of the whole outer world, a refusal of the surface. For Eastern Christian thought, in particular, it makes no difference here whether one speaks of death, sin, or hell: in each case on speaks of the same privation, the same estranging history, the same limit shattered by Easter; and hence there can be no aesthetic explanation of hell (something that few of the Fathers occasionally foolishly attempted) that would make of it a positive moment in the exposition of divine beauty, a part of the universe’s harmonious ordering of light and darkness. Hell cannot serve as an objective element of the beautiful—as source of delight—because it is an absolute privation of form and quantity; it has no surface, nor even a shadow’s substance; its aesthetic “place” is the sealed outside of an inside.

(David Bentley Hart, Beauty of the Infinite)

Reppin’ the Kingdom

Heard this beat and I had to get it pronto,
Eat it like steak with potatoes and cilantro,
The Lord’s the Lone Ranger, I’ll be the Tonto,
Reppin’ the Kingdom from Texas to Toronto,

I Am aka the Head Honcho,
Raining down Grace, betta get yourself a poncho,
I’m Ricky Ricardo and this beat’s my bongo,
Runnin’ it like OJ in a white Bronco.

Bump it, Ima keep goin’, the Spirit’s in me, Livin’
Water, let it keep flowin’, no fear in me, Givin’
Love, let it keep showin’, deep in the focus
Like mud, but I keep growin’, like a lotus.

So I’m standing tall in Imago Dei,
You can have the world, baby, I’m OK,
I got my mission, and I’m stayin’ in position, so when
God starts to wishin’, I listen and obey.

(Dwayne Polk)

Free-falling

Free-fall in ivory black of night with not a soul beside,
No wind to pace my sure descent, no echoed cry to mark the ride,
No shout of warning from below, nor from above a last Adieu,
No compass and no map in hand, no starlit sky to see me through.

No memory can ease the fear as Shame’s grip ever tightly holds,
And I, recounting all the steps by which I hid within its folds,
Cried out for help and strained to hear only Winter’s silent voice,
And so am falling ceaselessly, the consequence of my own choice.

But when all hopes at last expired, and I still falling through the dark,
A face appeared and, falling with me, made no gesture or remark,
But only saw me, and I in seeing knew, I was beheld and known,
And being seen could only mean that I in fact was not alone.

His eyes and voice were one and fixed as to my fading form his glance,
Undisturbed and free of threat from all my loss and circumstance,
Spoke faith and love and hope within my thinning ghostly mortal frame,
Assured me he would never leave, and as he spoke he said my name.

What poetry then can reproduce his presence which in me construes
Falling into friendship and from loss my liberty renews?
Would I give up such brokenness if it meant milder grace to gain?
I’d say surely not, and recommend to you the same.