The God beyond

...It has meant turning attention from the collapsing structures to the reality of God in direct personal experience...

...The times we are living in are such that all of us, if we would lead lives of responsible integrity, must more frequently and more profoundly deal directly with our Creator and Lord...

...Everything is changing...

...Now there is a direct correlation between the way in which we relate to God and the way in which we exist and have our own being, between the qualities we see in our God, and the qualities which grow in ourselves, if God is for us the Holy Mystery within, our own inwardness and inner wealth unfolds...

...FATHER DANIEL J. O'HANLON, S.J., teaches systematic theology at the jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, California...

...God alone is changeless...

...He acknowledges the mystery of God by speaking of him in parable and paradox, and by frequent use of questions rather than statements...

...The popular notion of GOd, especially when it is connected with national loyalty, still contains strong echoes of the powerful war God who is on our side and will violently destroy those who oppose us...

...Graduating from high school and going on to college...

...But God need not vanish in the process...

...Many of us remember a time, for instance, when the vernacular liturgy seemed quite inconceivable...

...So this kind of meditation, in which we put aside our own images, concepts, words, and judgments about God and expose ourselves patiently and directly to his incomprehensible but intimately present and powerfully working reality, is a healthy counterbalance...

...First, then, consider the collapse of structures, a many-sided phenomenon...

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...Most of the structures in our society and church were shaped by a male culture, so that for men the structures, even when they became shaky, still provided a bridge or a foothold while moving to something else...

...I will be reckless enough to name a few of what i consider masculine traits: rationality, aggressiveness, competitiveness, power, and control...

...Do we even notice how much aggressive violence is taken for granted as a component of our recreation, entertainment, and our national life...

...So many new situations now arise and so many new questions are being posed that moral theologians, like ordinary religious men and women, are now frequently forced willy-nilly to a first-hand examination of their experience, both personal and communal...

...The Hero broke through, refused any longer to be "Momma's boy," and asserted an independent ego...

...Here is the briefest of sketches of what some well-known scholars have told us...

...We are also faced with the subtle task of sorting out and evaluating our experience, in any case, we end up, it seems, when speaking of the divine, talking out Commonweal: 272 G RADUATING can be disconcerting...

...There was a time, and perhaps it has not yet disappeared, when no one in Western Christianity dared claim to be doing theology if he or she failed to use the accepted mode of abstract rational conceptual discourse which was honored as serious theology...

...Furthermore, the massive outpouring of blood in human sacrifice that accompanied the cult of the Great Mother should not be forgotten in romantic nostalgia for a pre-patriarchal age...

...Although this prayer has antecedents in the Christian tradition, especially in the Eastern church, it is more typical of Hindu and Buddhist meditation...

...But now we see a greater variety of approaches...

...Through the impact of the Second Vatican Council, the ecumenical movement, the charismatic renewal, basic communities, the diminishing number of priests, and the new developments in ministry brought about by all this, church structures which we used to regard as divinely established no longer seem so absolutely sacrosanct...

...Over and over again he warns against attachment to old strucures, to idolization of the law, and is radical in calling us back to direct experience of God...

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...which the women's movement is bringing about...

...In their need, not a few people have been drawn to passing fads.But for others, the experience has been more positive...

...T HE SECOND INFLUENCE which in our time is shifting our understanding of God is the women's movement...

...to her desire not to be Master and Lord, but intimate companion and friend...

...Now and again, particularly in the context of group prayer, when I hear words like, "We pray to God that in her lovingkindness she will console and comfort us," I realize clearly, from my own personal response, that the gender we use in addressing GOd does make a difference...

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...As these structures have been increasingly relativized, some people have simply lost their bearings, and God himself (or herself) has faded from view...

...These important new developments in the prayer of large numbers of Christians are of a piece with the shifts we have already enumerated, in which specific structures of social and religious reality have yielded to more simple and direct experience...

...Let me spell this out in more detail...

...And when that project is seriously undertaken, God is always a part of the process...

...Something other than aggressive, competitive rationality is called for...

...If God has been for us too closely identified with these structures, then when the structures vanish or significantly change, our idols are smashed, and our God is in danger of vanishing with them...

...It alerts us to the never-to-be-forgotten fact that God is always beyond our best words and concepts...

...Since 1924, Commonweal has kept the faith burning from one generation to another...

...The more we accustom ourselves to images of God which counteract this destructive kind of power-God, the better...

...Story and metaphor, archetype and koan are being explored more sympathetically as possibly legitimate modes of theological discourse...

...Civilization at this stage, they tell us, was woman-centered, and men were, as Joseph Campbell puts it, one jot away from insignificance...

...For in such times (fourteenth century Europe would be another example), everything else, including our words and concepts about God, is clearly revealed for what it is: changeable and impermanent...

...Aristotle observes (curiously enough, in his treatment on the parts of animals) that even a little of knowledge about the highest reality is more valuable than a computefful of data about trivialities (my own free translation...

...So the situation to which we have been brought through an overemphasis on masculine traits clearly calls out for some kind of counterbalance...

...We need to develop intuition and alert but passive awareness as we yesterday needed to develop assertive logic and an active mentality...

...Transcending the Great Mother is one thing...

...We must relate to this divine presence not merely as the custodian of a set of fixed regulations, but more and more as the source of our clarity and guidance in difficult and complex choices...

...S TRUCTURES OF PRAYER are changing too, as we can see from the sudden worldwide popularity of Anthony de Mello's Sadhana book (which has been translated into nineteen languages and has seen twelve editions in English...

...At present I notice a tendency to deal with the matter of gender in addressing God by simply eliminating both genders...

...And concurrently with all this, direct experience itself is once again highlighted as an essential, even the primary theological source...

...This shift, thought to have taken hold somewhere in the second millennium B.C., initiated the period in which we still find ourselves, especially in the West: the age of patriarchy and the Father God, of the aggressive, competitive, independent, controlling ego, an ego no longer simply a part of the community living a common halfconscious myth, but now rational, cerebral, aware, and in charge...

...to her sensitive intuition, which tunes in perfectly and is empathetic to our every need...

...My point here is not to either defend or criticize this phenomenon, but to note again what it is doing to our understanding of and our relation to God...

...to her presence to and reverence for our whole selves, body, soul, and spirit as one...

...How did we come to the present state of an overmasculinized culture...

...Many of these structures formerly had a kind of inviolability, and attention was given largely, if not mostly, to the structures themselves...

...Often when we deal with God "personally," we are unconsciously projecting on God our own limitations...

...In some cases it surely is, but what we need to realize is that there is a dimension of ourselves, and of out awareness of God, which is not rational, not prerational, not subrational but transrational or contemplative...

...Nmue Street City, State, Zip New D Renewal D Name Street City, State, Zip New [-I Renewal D Name Street City, State, Zip New l-] Renewal D Mall Gift Cards: l"7 to me D for me Name Street City, State, Zip New D F-] Check enclosed [-] Bill me Renewal D 5~/~ 4 May 1984:273 of both sides of our mouth: he is far, she is near...

...As the decades have rolled by, more and more of the traditional church structures for ministry, for teaching, and for organizational direction have come to be seen as means to an end, means which can be changed even 4 May 1984:271 radically...

...she is empty, he is full...

...In social structures such as marriage, family, and relations between the sexes, older norms and standards which once came from church, family, and friends have lost much of the social pressure which supported their observance...

...normative structures like moral principles and structures of personal prayer...

...God is death, God is life...

...We need a new hero myth.The dragon we must now fight is one-sided aggressive egocenteredness itself...

...One way to put it is that in all these areas we have been moving from a God who was there largely to vouch for the structures as they stood, simply to impose them and to guard them...

...One could hold back a little more and a little longer from immediate experience...

...Let nothing upset you," St.Teresa of Avila tells us, "Let nothing frighten you...

...unarticulated conceptual and symbolic structures like beliefs and prejudices...

...Such prayer is also a concrete expression of our conviction that God always stands at the door and knocks, that the first initiative comes from God, that if we can come to him with unobstructed openness and freed from attachment to our own petty thoughts and desires, the divine Presence will invade us as the sea surrounding an empty sponge...

...However, i think it is well worth the trouble, since it will make us aware, in God and in ourselves, of qualities that are badly needed in our competitive, aggressive, indeed obscenely violent world...

...One final example of how we in our times have been experiencing the collapse, or at least the relativization of structures, is theology...

...The very earliest sculptures which archaeologists have unearthed in probing the origins of our race are feminine figurines, the first objects of worship of Homo Sapiens...

...ritual structures like liturgy...

...Emboldened by all this, let me proceed to comment on two contemporary phenomena which, I believe, are pushing us toward an expansion and enrichment of our understanding of God...

...We suffer from a lack of the feminine, and speaking of God in exclusively masculine terms supports and perpetuates this imbalance...

...Because of the patriarchal character of the cultures in which God has manifested himself to us -- and by us I mean here especially the so-called "religions of the Book": Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, beginning with Abraham -- our understanding of GOd has suffered from one-sidedness...

...H0wOuR IjNDERsTAN'I)iNG iirabti is BEING RESHAPED The God beyond DANIEL J. O'HANLON W HO CAN SPEAK of God without becoming ridiculous...

...The Western ego did not just gain freedom from the Great Smother, if we can invent that name for the side of her that needed to" be suppressed...

...and corresponding feminine traits: intuition, receptivity, a wholistic grasp of reality, empathy, and communion...

...We see in Jesus that our God is not the commander-in-chief of an army that achieves its ends by brute force but one who wins us by the gentle but strong power of unconditional love...

...it also severed its deep interconnectedness with her...

...It seems that ages like ours, ages of chaos and radical change, are normally accompanied by direct and primary experience of the reality of God...

...We can address GOd as father, mother, brother, sister, friend, lover, divine child, eternal rock, and no one of these titles is adequate, yet each one provides yet another window on the endless riches of God that lie beyond naming...

...We need liberation, in Merton's words, from "our inordinate self-consciousness, from our monumental self-awareness, and from our obsession with selfaffirmation...

...it will take us a while, with some trial and error, to get used to the idea of addressing God with female names, titles, and images, particularly in public, shared worship...

...Do you think that Jesus would recognize as his Father the immensely popular God of Star Wars, the Force, Commonweal: 274 whose principal function seems to be to help us to blow to colorful smithereens all those who are not on our side...

...What effect is that having on our understanding of God...

...And there is no guarantee that the Jesus we visualize and re'create in our imaginations is always the real Jesus, that he is not to some extent the creation of our own distorted fancy...

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...In addition to a variety of devotional styles and modes of praying with the imagination, a great deal of emphasis is placed in this book on nonconceptual and nonverbal awareness meditation, which relates us to God in quite a different way...

...Can we not hope that as the male once rescued consciousness from the earthbound matriarchate, so today the female might help rescue consciousness from the patriarchate...

...I can remember publishing a short popular piece in a Catholic magazine around the time of Vatican II and having the editor, not a closed or narrow person by any stretch of the imagination, cautioning me against writing of Catholic theologies in the plural...

...All these structures, and this list is incomplete, have been radically shaken up in the last couple of decades...

...This too corresponds to the kind of God we come to know through Jesus...

...Nevertheless, the move was not made without considerable loss...

...They are, first, the disintegration and even the collapse of many structures which shape our human existence...

...Something similar is happening as ecclesiastical institutions have become increasingly relativized...

...But women, for the most part, as women, did not have this kind of bridge for themselves...

...N OW THAT WE have taken a look at these two current trends which are reshaping our understanding of God, one final question: are these shifts leading us toward or away from an authentically Christian understanding of God...

...Feminine images of God can be helpful here...

...To create appropriate structures for themselves, whether linguistic, ritual, symbolic, or normative, was largely a matter of starting from scratch...

...Women tell us that this element has been an especially strong one for them...

...Jesus himself, as the window through which we see and feel God shining on us, is no warrior king, but a humble empathic friend who serves us, nurtures us, lays down his life for us, and feeds us with his own body and blood...

...We were tempted to feel that this was a more accurate way of speaking of God than the rather primitive parabolic language of Scripture, full of metaphor and myth, story and parable...

...Not that all theologies are equally satisfactory, but we rather generally recognize now that there is more than one legitimate way to speak theologically about God and the things of God...

...And paradoxically, even our very awareness of the way we stutter and squirm in our efforts to speak of God is a step forward...

...Can we not then recognize that developments in our understanding of God, and particularly those which make us aware of her nonviolent feminine qualities, challenge us to begin to catch up with the understanding of God which was already exemplified in Jesus, but which, for man)~ reasons, never had a chance to come into its own...

...ecclesiastical institutions such as dioceses, parishes, basic communities, forms of ministry, and the like...

...Unfortunately, when we think of something that is not rational, something that is not an independent ego, we, echoing the fears of Freud and most orthodox psychology, think that this is necessarily a step backward...

...No cap and gown required...

...But now it is quite ordinary to talk and write that way...

...And yet, when what is at issue is the deepest meaning of our lives, and when, like it or not, important shifts are taking place which shape our understanding of God, is not that ridiculousness worth risking...

...He addresses God as Abba, no macho title, and he sees his Father as a tender God with a motherly concern for all, sending his rain on all alike, counting the hairs on our heads, caring for us with more concern than for the birds of the air or the lilies of the field...

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...And that experience, I think, has helped all of us to return with greater confidence to God as the one we find when we open ourselves up to our own personal and communal experience...

...to her nourishing and life-giving care for us...

...One can react to this phenomenon in two different ways...

...I use the word "structure" not in the strict sociological sense, but in the large sense, large enough to include social institutions like marriage and family and the relations of the sexes...

...The theme, words, and structures of the Great Mother corpus are simply left out of subsequent Western mythology...

...But now the stakes are higher...

...Ignatius, in his Spiritual Exercises, when he is guiding those who make them toward a decision about their life, wants them to deal directly with their Creator and Lord...

...What about the enrichment of our understanding of God 4 May 1984:275...

...We theologians, whether we called ourselves dogmatic, scholastic, or systematic theologians, have consistently asserted that speaking of God is analogical talk, and falls infinitely short of the reality itself...

...To move from an earlier consciousness submerged in the Great Mother and all she represented to an independent ego was at that time a step forward...

...Before Vatican II it was considered daring to speak of a pluralism of theologies...

...This is especially evident in the attitude of the younger generation...

...If the God into whom we let ourselves drop is beyond words and concepts and gender, our own spirit loses many of its restrictive boundaries of thought and feeling...

...God was there, certainly, but seen more out of the corner of our eye than directly head-on...

...Of course, as we choose what Peter Berger has called the inductive option and turn more directly to religious experience, it becomes more and more difficult to find satisfactory language to speak of God...

...and second the impact of the women's movement...

...verbal-conceptual structures such as theology...

...Then in time the myth of the Great Chthonic Mother, a myth in which no one succeeds in breaking free to independence of her, was overcome by a new myth, the Hero Myth...

...For in this kind of prayer, in which we address God person-to-person, we enrich our understanding not by diminishing but by multiplying titles...

...Silent awareness contemplation is another matter...

...The test for us Christians is always found in the person of Jesus, since he is for us both the face of God, and the exemplar of the right human understanding of and attitude toward God...

...All the words we use about God are, of course, incomplete and inadequate, but each one we use evokes in us an awareness of different aspects of that inexhaustible reality...

...This concern is familiar for Jesus as we see him in the Gospels...

...But even professional moral theologians, who formerly, when pressed to solve a difficulty, used to reach routinely for an encyclical, now are compelled to dig deeper...

...So experience, their own personal experience, almost necessarily became a primary resource...

...One concluding observation about the women's movement: in discussing the ways in which the disintegration of structures has been pushing us toward a more direct and immediate attention to God, we noted the renewed significance given to religious experience...

...One effective way to move in that direction is to allow ourselves to acknowledge and relate to the feminine traits of God, to her compassionate and unconditional love for us, to her dimension of mystery, which can be touched by no rational effort but only by loving contemplation...

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...Correspondingly, the qualities which have developed in ourselves, in our cultures, and in our churches have been too one-sidedly masculine...

...The lead in this new development can come most easily from the female, since our society is already so strongly masculine...

...But to me, although neutering God in the kind of prayer in which we address God as person may be a necessary initial tactic, it is not the goal...

...Not legal prescriptions, not ritual forms, not rote prayers, but direct contact with the Father, and openness to the Spirit who enlivens our loving relationships to each other -- that is what Jesus preaches and shows as the fight human attitude toward God...

...But once we had made all the necessary qualifications and acknowledged our limitations in speaking of God, we sometimes forgot all that and acted as though we were constructing precise and fairly complete accounts of what God is really like...

...Such an experience can help us to attend more fully to the reality of GOd, which, after all, is why such structures are there in the first place...

...What about the shifts occasioned by the disintegration of structures...

...There was no longer harmony with the Heavens, but a "conquering of space," no longer a respect for Nature, but a technological assault on Nature...

...It is distinguished from the prerational or subrational not by being less aware and awake, but more so...

...Repressing her is another...

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