By Beatrice Bruteau

[Guest guest]

Spiritual life, especially as contemplative life, follows a kind of

cycle, or spiral, in which we first leave " the world, " which is

experienced as interfering with our contemplation. We " go apart for a

while, " even far apart from the world, from everything formed and

finite, everything that can be spoken or conceived. We follow the via

negativa, the way of not-using, not-speaking, not-knowing. We aspire

to, and may eventually enjoy, the apophatic experience.

 

But the apophatic experience itself disabuses us of the notion that

we have any such thing as " our contemplation, " or even any separate

substantiality. In the Night of the Absolute, everything is empty.

Having reached what we yearned to possess, we find that all

distinctions have vanished, including the selves that had thought

they could possess anything or desire to possess anything. Thus, for

us there is nothing left to defend, nothing left to augment, nothing

to prefer to something else, nothing to which to accord privilege.

 

At this point the distinction is lost between the Absolute itself and

the world which we had " left " in order to go to the Absolute by not

speaking, by not thinking of any form, by not identifying ourselves

with our particular egoic point of view. We discover the paradox that

the very distinction of the Absolute from the world, carried to the

limit, destroys the distinction of the Absolute from the world. The

contemplative, having attained union with the Absolute, discovers

that the Absolute is engaged in creating the world; and so, the

contemplative too, as united with the Creator, must engage in self-

emptying into the world. Once coincided with, the Transcendent--

initially set over against the relative, the embodied--reveals itself

as self-expressive as the relative, the embodied, the world.

 

In religious language, this turn in the contemplative's development

may be called " the resurrection of the body. " Having lost " the body, "

the finite and the relative, for the sake of the Infinite and the

Absolute, we find ourselves again in the finite and the relative, as

glorified by conscious recognition of their being the Body of the

Divine.

 

We have come back to where we started, but as T. S. Eliot said, we

now know the place for the first time. The mountains are again

mountains, but now we know what mountains are. Like everything else,

they are Buddha-Nature. The story is told of the monastic disciple

who asked the Teacher about enlightenment. The Teacher

inquired, " Have you had your dinner? .... Yes, " replied the

disciple. 'Then wash your dish. " The disciple was instantly

enlightened. Why? Because the disciple already knew what the question

was, to which this apparently trivial conversation was the answer.

The question is (always is): " Show us the Father (Source, Origin,

Ultimate Cause or Ground), and we will be satisfied. " And the

Teacher, as bidden, showed. The Teacher did not talk about, or

explain, but invited the disciple to enter a place in which the

disciple would answer the question from the only point of view from

which it can be answered. As the Fourth Gospel reveals (John 14:9-

10), the Absolute is not available to us in terms of the third

grammatical person, nor even of the second, but only in terms of the

first.

 

That One, which is initially sought as the Cause, the Protector, and

the Final Goal, is found in an inexpressible union with the one who

sought. Consequently, the seeking one is revealed as transformed: not

merely finite, relative, erring, wounded, and helpless. As united

with the Sought, the Seeker now participates in the Infinite, the

Absolute, the true, the whole, and the omnipotent; and, as united,

they freely and spontaneously express themselves as the relative

world. Thus the separation between what we had called " relative "

and " absolute " is healed. God and the world are reconciled.

 

part 1...................bob