I m interested in a theology of emergence and so I’m grateful for a space that has opened up during Lent and which has developed – some sort of meaning seems to have emerged, despite various challenges and issues we’ve experienced along the way. In my first talk in Lent I spoke about the roots of the word paradise: listen to this etymology as poetry:
The word “paradise” entered English from the French paradis, inherited from the Latin paradisus, from Greek parádeisos (παράδεισος), from an Old Iranian form, from Proto-Aryan*parādaiĵah- “walled enclosure”, whence Old Persian 𐎱𐎼𐎭𐎹𐎭𐎠𐎶 p-r-d-y-d-a-m /paridaidam/, Avestan 𐬞𐬀𐬌𐬭𐬌⸱𐬛𐬀𐬉𐬰𐬀 pairi-daêza-.
Paradise is the space we discover at the opening of Genesis, a created order in which it is good for life to flourish. An ecosystem requires substantial boundaries to flourish. But paradise carries within it the seed of the wild. And it is into the wilderness that the naked humans are banished. The oscillation from order to chaos is illustrated by this image of garden and wilderness and the pendulum swing recurs throughout scripture. The waters rise to collapse order, the order of Egypt is disrupted by the wilderness journey.
We mark Lent by remembering the retreat into the wilderness at the outset of Jesus ministry, and we close Lent by remembering Jesus entrance into the city of Jerusalem, with the Temple of orderly religious life at its centre; the symbolism is abundantly clear when you choose to attend to it; Jesus brings chaos into the city of order, overturning the tables of the existing structure and representing the opposite of what we might expect him to represent from our comfortable perspective of institutional Christian church.
This duality – where the seed of the opposite is found in the heart of the other, like wilderness at the heart of paradise, is beautifully captured in Eastern religion in the symbol of the Yin-yan. But it is there in plain sight in Jesus ministry too – Jesus teaching is exemplified by the use of opposition and inversion: you gain your life by losing it Mk 8:35, the first one now will later be last, Mk 9: 35, and the parallel sayings of the sermon on the mount/plain variously expressing that the poor are rich and the rich are doomed. Such a teaching style which invests in paradox also emphasises ambiguity and foregrounds interpretation, openness and possibility.
The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has spent his academic life puzzling over duality and in particular what has been described as the divided brain: we have two brain hemispheres which work together and it was thought for a long time that one side does emotional thinking and the other does abstract thinking, one side does numbers and the other colours and so on. This version of neuroscience has been discredited but McGilchrist says: Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does – they are both involved in everything – but how it does it, that matters. And the prime difference between the brain hemispheres is the manner in which they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (in humans and many animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. https://iainmcgilchrist.com
In our prayers today I said that if we are able to set down defensiveness, put off the armour that everyday life in a competitive commercialised society imposes on us, what is revealed might be open; vulnerable, gentle and tender – as we set aside defensiveness we engage instead with curiosity – because just as one part of the brain manages the narrow focus and the other manages the wide, so also one is developed to defend and the other to locate, on to grasp and one to explore; one is defensive and one curious – and the curious side, the side with engages with uncertainty and discovery, is also the side which attends to what is described as the numinous: the awareness or sense of the sacred or divine. The word Numinous was used to express its current meaning by Rudolf Otto (see The Idea of the Holy 1923).
He defined numinous as a “non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self.” This experience “presents itself as wholly other, and incomparable to any other thing” – it is, for us humans, a state of awe. The numinous cannot be defined in terms of other concepts or experiences, cannot, be taught, we can’t be led to it, the numinous can only be evoked, awakened in the mind. This is the rare quality we experience in Jesus teaching by paradox and parable, and we find it too in the acknowledgement of wilderness as a space of possibility, not to be dominated but embraced … In our desire to create stablility we always concrete over wilderness, and this is especially true in religious life; onto a fluid and ambiguous understanding which was expressed as a way of life, a lived spirituality, we superimposed a systemic structure of belief. The early Christian movement was ossified and became a symbolic carapace, but be aware that this happens to every successive radical disruption of the systemic, it happened to each reform tradition, and even today Humanism and the New Age collapse back into dogmas and doctrines, acknowledged or not. Real religious insight though would encourage us to be braver than that: “Psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity in us for the toleration of anxiety and ambiguity. The capacity to accept this troubled state, abide it, and commit to life, is the moral measure of our maturity.” writes the psychologist James Hollis
I think that while we may hesitate at the edge of the numinous, the possibility exists to breathe with the sense of the sacred, and not just as an inner experience of our own self, even our deepest self as the evasive dogma of humanism would propose but to set down our defensiveness and live fully into the scared, lean in with tenderness and curiosity to participate in awe, and live fully; beyond the boundaries of the known…