Iacocca and bishop #4
“The most beautiful
emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and
science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger..is as good as dead. To know
that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the
highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can
comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is
at the centre of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only,
I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.”
We are all trying,
however haltingly and experimentally, tentatively and resolutely, to bring
about some kind of appreciation of our weaknesses and our perceptions of our
place in a vast universe, not merely by adopting disciplines and rituals,
liturgies and donations, but even more importantly by finding the attitudes and
perspective that encompass and celebrate our human-ness and our limited grasp
of both eternity and holiness and any deity worthy of the name. It is in the
sense of fullness that Einstein’s words depict that I find both comfort and
allegiance. I wonder why such an expansive, comprehensive, challenging and
inspiring perspective seems absent from the experience of many, including me,
in our relationship with the church. And while the premise of “emotion” is
fraught with disdain in many quarters, especially among many male colleagues, I
would argue that the ‘mystical,’ categorized as an emotion, is foreign to most
men, at least of my acquaintance. Further, I would suggest that such a default
position is rare and even more rarely acknowledged, whether by estrangement,
alienation, fear, assumed and presumed superiority or inferiority, or by the
minimal acquaintance they might have had through their limited reading, not to
mention the dearth of such words, attitudes and perspective inside the church
itself. Is there something so threatening, so dangerous and so off-putting to
suggest that the church would do well to consider not only such depictions of
the religious “attitude and relationship” by bringing such challenges into both
the pulpit and the education programs within its purview?
I have noted that, in his acceptance address
for the 1921 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Einstein also uttered these words: “A
human being…experiences himself..as something separated from the rest---a kind
of optical delusion of his consciousness…Our task must be to free ourselves
from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature.
Here is another
word-depiction of the paradox of being a human….experiencing ourself as a “kind
of optical delusion of (our) consciousness”….If, as it seems, Einstein might
mean that we are limited by the ‘delusion’ of our own consciousness, that could
mean that our consciousness embraces only or exclusively, the empirical, the
senses, and the demonstrably evident and that such a consciousness while not
necessarily excluding the unconsciousness, to which Jung and Freud gave voice
and support to and for. Encircled and engaged and often even obsessed with and
by what we consider our “duties,” and our “responsibilities” and the demands
and exigencies of each hour and each day, in the perception that those ‘to-do’
lists both justify and define our existence, leaves us both in fact and in
concept, denied access and openness and vulnerability to those experiences
which takes us ‘out of ourselves,’ into another state of mind and heart and
emotion and sensation and wonderment and awe, what in contemporary vernacular
might be called the “aha” moment. Such moments as the birth of a child, the
majesty and mystery of both a sunrise and a sunset, the intricate and complex
beauty of a flower, and the cocked head of a furry pet, fully grasping whatever
we might be thinking and/or feeling. A friend once told me about a moment when,
as part of his training, he attended an autopsy; resisting at first because he
had never crossed that threshold previously, he was ‘coached’ by his supervisor
to attend, ‘and give himself permission to leave at any moment he felt that
need’. Not only did he attend, but moved physically, emotionally and intellectually
further into the experience as it progressed. Assigned the task of writing a
theological reflection on his experience, he wrote almost entirely about how
both the complexity and the inter-connectedness of the human being over-awed
him with both wonder and humility. For him, this ‘moment’ will remain one of
his most memorable and impactful moments in his life. And, for him, it seems to
have ‘brought’ him closer to the ineffable, the inexplicable and what we would
call God. Have you had such an experience, in your pilgrimage prior to, during
or following your path to the Christian ministry?
Bishop: Talk of
mysticism, and the optical delusion of consciousness, while compelling and
engaging, connecting and exciting, is not what I have found to be the central
current of conversations within the church. The ‘aha’ moment, from my limited
experience over the last three or four decades, in Christian churches, has
become that moment, captured by Paul in the New Testament, that while on the
road to Damascus, he saw a great light and was ‘converted’ to becoming a
disciple of Jesus Christ, after having lived a life of intense criticism and
disdain for the faith. There have been a plethora of paths, strategies,
tactics, including sermons, hymns, retreats, classes, prayer sessions, Bible
study sessions, in which the primary object of the exercise was to ‘enlist, or
at least to enrich’ the notion that God in and through the life and death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ saved each of us from our sin through forgiveness
made available through the grace of God. Incarnating such a faith “premise”,
embodying such a “belief” has taken ‘centre-stage’ amid the competing
strategies to attract and to retain adherents, hopefully members, and thereby
the cash that keeps the bills paid. Celebrating inspiring art, as, for example,
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or even the architecture of our many
cathedrals, or the elevated talent and skill and musicality of the more
inspiring vocal solos, all of these being ‘part of the ethos’, nevertheless
receive must time or attention. Conversion to a formal belief that requires
both public acknowledgement and personal commitment has become the ‘bottom
line’ of our business, to put the matter into corporate/business terms. Monks,
nuns and ‘the religious’, I suppose, are considered to have both the time and
the inclination to reflect upon the things of the mystery, the awesome in the
daily lives of their people. The rest of the church seems pre-occupied with
those secular concerns of most contemporary organizations. And, a reasonable
and substantial case can be made that, in that regard, the church has lost much
of the potency of the religious and spiritual potential of our calling. There
are specific experiments, like Cursillo, which you may have heard of, that have
some minimal comparison with what we are calling the mystical, that, perhaps we
could explore in another conversation. In the meantime, however, the irony of
having this conversation with a corporate tycoon is becoming so engaging,
challenging and even awesome, from my perspective that I cannot fail to thank
you for participating. It is the kind of conversation that has not been
available in my term as bishop, and I have considerable doubt that it will be
something to which I can look forward to as an expectation during my
episcopate.
Until next time….
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