MODERN SPIRITUAL MASTERS SERIES
DOROTHEE SOELLE
Essential Writings
Selected with an Introduction by DIANNE L. OLIVER
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Sölle, Dorothee.
[Selections. English. 2006]
Dorothee Soelle : essential writings / selected with an introduction by Dianne L. Oliver.
p. cm. – (Modern spiritual masters series)
ISBN-13: 978-1-57075-640-5 (pbk.)
1. Theology. I. Oliver, Dianne L., 1963- II. Title. III.
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1
A Different Experience
Power and Mysticism
In this first section, the writings included largely focus on Soelle’s mystical vision of the nature of religious experience and her view of God as one who is vulnerable because the power of God is powerless love. “Different experience” encompasses Soelle’s understanding that religious experience does not look to obedience to dogmas or church teachings as its core, nor does it search for moments that separate us from the everyday world. She rejects the focus on a supernatural God who is separate from the world and seeks to pull us out of the world and in stead turns to a mystical vision of a God who encompasses the whole world and into whom we sink as the very ground of our existence in the world. For Soelle, such a vision of God pushes us to recognize God in the world, embracing all that is and present in everything. This also means that we no longer speak of God “out there,” but as that which is integral and connected to every single aspect of our life in the world. Nothing is secular for Soelle, for the God who is radically incarnated in our midst sacralizes everything. Mysticism is not something for the chosen few, but that which needs to be democratized so that all can see
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that of God which surrounds them and all can have the oppor tunity to express such experiences. God is involved in our lives, our loves, our work, and our politics. This involvement is not in the form of commands from on high that provide rules for us to obey, nor in the control of every event so that everything is willed by God, nor in the insistence on using the word “God” in public places, but in the form of the very interdependent web of life through which all of creation is connected. Power is re visioned as empowerment, so that good power is always shared between God and creation rather than used by an omnipotent God as a mechanism of control. Thus religious experience is about our connectedness to the very ground of our existence, our relationship with God who is bound into the web of life.
EXPERIENCE, NOT AUTHORITY
The best definition of mysticism, the classical definition, is a cognitio Dei experimentalis, a perception of God through ex perience. This means an awareness of God gained not through books, not through the authority of religious teachings, not through the so-called priestly office but through the life expe riences of human beings, experiences that are articulated and reflected upon in religious language but that first come to people in what they encounter in life, independent of the church’s institutions.
Mysticism can occur, then, in all religions; and it almost al ways clashes head-on with the hierarchy dominant in its time. It is an experience of God, an experience of being one with God, an experience that God bestows on people. It is a call that people hear or perceive, an experience that breaks through the existing limitations of human comprehension, feeling, and re flection. This element of shattering old limitations is crucial to
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the mystical experience, and it is responsible for the difficulty of communicating mystical experience: It is impossible to speak about what lies beyond the capabilities of speech, yet anyone who has had mystical experience feels compelled to speak about it. The language he or she uses will therefore be paradoxical, self-contradictory, and obscure. Or it may lead to silence, for silence is one of the modes of mystical experience.
What I would like to stress here is that we should not regard mystics as people at some great remove from ourselves, nor as people with unique experiences incomprehensible to all the rest of us. One of the greatest mystics and probably the great est German mystic, Meister Eckhart, never — as far as we are able to tell — saw visions or heard voices. He reflected on reli gious experience without reference to these specific visionary or auditory phenomena. The crucial point here is that in the mys tical understanding of God, experience is more important than doctrine, the inner light more important than church authority, the certainty of God and communication with him more im portant than believing in his existence or positing his existence rationally.
Here, too, I would like to give an example, one that did not originally come under the heading of mysticism but that illustrates the broad sense in which I understand this concept. During a class at the seminary where I teach in New York, the question of religious experiences came up. An embarrassed si lence followed, of course. No one in this generation will admit to such experiences or can talk about them. Finally, though, a young woman raised her hand, and a week later she reported on her religious experience. What she had to say made a profound impression on me.
She told how she used to read a great deal when she was fourteen, especially at night, like so many of us. Her parents did not allow her to stay up late, because she was supposed to be
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asleep and living a well-ordered life. One night she had read in bed for several hours and then, waking suddenly at four in the morning with her head full of what she had been reading, she went out into the winter night, looked at the stars, and had — as she told it — a feeling of happiness that was unique for her, a feeling of unity with all of life, with God, an experience of overpowering clarity and joy, a sense of being cared for and borne up: No ill can befall me; I am indestructible; I am one with the All. This was the kind of language she used to describe her experience. She then went on to say that she didn’t have this experience again until later in her life and in a totally different context. This other context was a major demonstration against the Vietnam War. There, too, she felt cared for, a part of the All, felt herself together with others participating in the truth of the All. For her, both these experiences belonged together under the heading “religious experience.”
If this same young woman had lived in fourteenth-century Germany, she probably would have said, “I heard a voice, and it said to me, ‘I am with you’ ” — or something like that. Or she might have said, “I saw a light.” In the twentieth century, she can’t use that kind of language to communicate her experiences to others. She has to struggle with the language and with her own embarrassment. We have no language at all that can de scribe these experiences precisely, yet she had the courage to try to tell us what she had felt. And I would guess that if you look back on your own life history, you will recall similar experi ences, states of “being high,” to use the banal expression, states related to mental and spiritual experiences for which religious language provides a kind of home or mode of expression.
Mystical experience is not, then, something extraordinary, re quiring some special talent or sixth sense. Thousands of people in other cultures have had such experiences, experiences of this happiness, this wholeness, this sense of being at home in the
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world, of being at one with God. It makes no difference — and this point has been confirmed by everyone who has ever re ported on mystical experience — whether these experiences are interpreted with the aid of a personal God or nontheistically, as in oriental mysticism. Whether we see these experiences in terms of the Tao or of God is not central to them. How we view them will depend on the culture we live in, our past ex periences, the languages we have learned. What is appalling in our culture is that most people have no language at all for de scribing such experiences. And the result of that is, of course, that these experiences go uncommunicated to others, are lost and forgotten. We are unable to tell anyone else about the most important experiences we have. — SW, 86 –89
NO HIGHER POWER
There is no room in mystical devotion for the recognition of a higher power, the worship of lordship or the denial of our own strength. On the contrary, the master-slave relationship is very often expressly criticized in mystical texts. But above all it is surpassed through creative language. Here religion is the feeling of oneness with the whole, intimate connection, not subjuga tion; human beings do not honor God because of his power and lordship, but submerge themselves in him, or, as they al ways say, in his love. He is the ground, as Meister Eckhart says, love, depth, sea. Such nature symbols are preferred where God demands no obedience but union, where a distant other does not demand sacrifice and renunciation of self, where harmony and oneness with the living become the theme of religion.
In this religion the most important virtue is then no longer obedience but solidarity. Out of the power-word “father” comes the freeing and unifying one; out of the objects which we are
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come subjects who are involved in this process. Rather than expecting something to come from above, we learn to think cooperatively. This all belongs to mystical devotion.
Emancipation does not mean only to get rid of the oppres sive colonialist and to be freed from God who imprisons us. It also has to be positively stated: We have to talk about our freedom for a different God. Mystical language is an aid to ex press a deeper devotion than patriarchal language is able to. In traditional theology and churchy talk, we talk about God’s relationship to humankind in verbs that imply human passivity, such as: direct, control, send, use, proclaim, judge, shape, con front, confirm, destroy, offer, and rule over humankind. When we reflect on the implications of this traditional language we will find it as inadequate and dangerous as the sexist exclu sives “he” and “his” in reference to humankind. Our need for a better, nonhierarchical language will then grow, and we may use verbs for God’s activity that leave enough space for human response, such as: evoke, empower, liberate, support, build, awaken, listen, nourish, summon, suffer, experience, par ticipate, rejoice, and stand within. Mystical language is full of God symbols and expressions of God’s action which are free of domination. — “Mysticism,” 183 –84
GOD HAPPENS
[In Martin Buber’s idea that “In the beginning was the relation ship,”] God is not spoken of as the supreme object, but as the mutual, significant, actively experienced relationship to life. God is not found as a precious stone or as blue flowers, as Novalis pictured, but God happens. God spent this Tuesday afternoon with me — that is a meaningful statement, an at tempt to identify the experience, the encounter, which puts us in
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relationship. The search is then subsequently often understood as a wrong road. Our everyday life, our real, inconspicuous re lationships, were all too hazy to us. What takes place in the encounter with God is that the searching ends not with finding, but with being found. God was always already standing behind me, even when I was rushing in the other direction.
A theological consequence of this approach by the God who encounters us is the linguistic form in which we can com municate God. Only secondarily can it be the principle, the awareness, the dogma. Religious language destroys itself if it talks about God in the I-It relationship. Prayer or narrative is possible talk of God. In the narratives of the New Testa ment God appears, God happens. If we tell stories of God and are concerned about the narrative method, we are telling what God does or how God conceals himself, how God acts. And in prayer we ask God to do something worth telling of, to appear, to show power for good, to change us. In these two linguistic forms we talk of God more as an event than as a substance. We speak from and to God, instead of “about” him.
The question which is often put to me, “Do you believe in God?,” usually seems a superficial one. If it only means that there is an extra place in your head where God sits, then God is in no way an event which changes your whole life, an event from which, as Buber says of real revelation, I do not emerge unchanged. We should really ask, “Do you live out God?” That would be in keeping with the reality of the experience.
Criticism of the false ontology of being-in-oneself and the theology of the God who is in himself is nowadays made from various directions. Biblical thought in its otherness, the person alism of Martin Buber, the basic Marxist idea of the priority of those who work and suffer over the needs of capital and its “material pressures,” existentialist philosophy with its attempt to deobjectify people, process theology with its conception of
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the God who develops further, who cannot remain behind the ethical level of the democratic consciousness, but above all fem inist theology with its insistence on a relational, nonpatriarchal language, which is in a position to communicate experiences with God existentially — these are attempts to overcome the ontological lack of relationship and to think of God beyond theism and atheism.
One of the most difficult problems in this connection is the question of the power of this God of relationship, this God of the life which calls and answers. Is not the God of the powerless also powerless, the God of women also pushed to the periphery and trivialized, the God of the peacemakers also unprotected and an object of mockery? So why do Christians refer to a higher being if this God is not omnipotent? What does it mean to think in theological terms of God’s renunciation of power, which shapes the story of Jesus of Nazareth?
The Christian assumption that we recognize God most clearly in this figure of someone tortured to death goes completely against our fixation on power and domination. Christ appears in the Gospels as the man for others, has nothing but his love: no weapons, no magical tricks, no privileges. It is false christology to imagine Christ as a Greek god, a figure who can do anything, and who has a return ticket to heaven. That is really a denial of the incarnation. Christ refused to do miracles if they were asked of him as a proof. He refused to come down from the cross, and the original witnesses understood that quite clearly, when they mocked him and said, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross and then we will believe in you” (Matt. 27:42). For those who mocked him, God was identical with power and rule. But the only capital with which he came into the world was his love, and it was as powerless and as powerful as love is. He had nothing but his love with which to win our heart. Perhaps the abstractness of the search for the meaning of life can
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be overcome where we do not find the back-up of a father but the face of a human being at the center of power. In fact we are not saved by any “higher being, god, emperor or tribune,” as the Internationale puts it. No higher being can save us, because the only salvation is to become love. More than that is not prom ised to us. All other deliverance is based on a mere shift from a bad state to a good state, to another place, to another time, which does not change us in the process. Such hope for power, for the intervention of an omnipotent superiority and unassail ability, has always deceived people. God is not the extension of our false wishes, nor the projection of our imperialisms.
And yet that is still not the whole story. It is possible to understand the cross of Christ in this language of powerless love, but it is impossible to articulate the resurrection as long as we regard all power as “evil,” as tyrannical, as split off and masculine. I note that tendency in a critical attitude to my own theology, which can be understood in three different stages. I had left behind belief in an omnipotent father “who rules all things so gloriously,” derived from theism. For me, the meta phor of the “death of God” meant deliberately giving up the notion of the omnipotence of God as theologically and ethically impossible. In the light of Auschwitz the assumption of the om nipotence of God seemed — and still seems! — to me to be a heresy, a misunderstanding of what God means. From this crit icism of the theistic-patriarchal God I developed a position in which the cross of Christ stands in the center, as an affirmation of the nonviolent impotence of love in which God himself is no longer one who imposes suffering, but a fellow sufferer.
The difficulty of this position is connected with the question of the power of this nonviolent God. Is power really evil, or can we say something about the good power, the power of God, the victory of life over death wishes? The third position attempts to
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think of the resurrection of Christ and our escape from death as participation in God’s power.
The transition from the second to the third position is con nected with my growth into the theologies of liberation. I slowly came to understand that outside the power to shout and shoot, outside the power of the imperium, there are yet other forms of power which arise out of our being bound up with the ground of life. The grass that grows into the light through the asphalt also has power: not power to command, to rule, to manipu late, but a power which comes to life from a relationship. How can we distinguish good power, the power of life, from evil power, the power to dominate? This question is central for a feminist and thus humane way of thinking. The most impor tant criterion for answering it is that good power is shared power, power which distributes itself, which involves others, which grows through dispersion and does not become less. In this sense the resurrection of Christ is a tremendous distribu tion of power. The women who were the first to experience it were given a share in the power of life. It was the tremendous certainty of God which now entered their life.
In the thought of a feminist liberation theology within the first world the concept of God has taken on a new significance, in that the relationship of the omnipotent God to helpless men and women is now understood in a different way. Real relation ship means that an exchange takes place and that people gain a share in the creative, good, noncompelling power of God. Above all Jewish thought has helped me to clarify this participa tion in God. In the Talmud the image of God in human beings is not understood as a spiritual image; rather, we are the image of God, which means that we can act like God. Just as God made clothes for Adam and Eve, so too we can clothe the naked. Just as God fed Elijah through a raven, so we too are to feed the
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hungry. For Christians, nothing is more false than so to stabi lize the idea of God’s omnipotence and human helplessness that there is no longer any exchange between the two. In that case a reified transcendence comes about instead of the imitatio dei which is offered us in Jewish thought.
The task of a liberating theology is to overcome just this kind of reified transcendence. Reified transcendence portrays the God who can act only as a superman, who thus acts independently, untouchably, and powerfully. I think that all three statements about the absoluteness of God — his omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence — all three “omnis” express a fatal imperialistic tendency in theology: the power of the independent ruler. This God is in fact no more than the dream of a culture dominated by males. For me that has become clear from one of the male myths of North American popular culture. It is the dream which is entitled “Go west.” The action in these films and stories usu ally follows the same pattern. A village is dominated by a brutal band of criminals. More and more people get murdered. The sheriff is powerless, and people no longer dare go out on the streets. One day a young man rides in; in a short time he gets the better of the villains and creates law and order. The sheriff promises him his daughter, who has fallen hopelessly in love with the handsome stranger. But the night before the wedding the cowboy saddles his horse and rides off. New adventures are waiting: greatness is not to be tied to anyone; independence is a central value. This myth is about independent male heroes who owe no one anything, who need no one, for whom mutual help, exchange, and community are secondary matters. His strengths lie in himself alone, and to this degree this primal story reflects a God who equally needs no one, a male God.
One cannot understand feminist theology as long as one be lieves that it is simply a change of position or an exchange of pronouns. It is in fact about another way of thinking of
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transcendence, of no longer understanding it independently of everything else and in terms of domination over all others but as bound into the web of life. — TG, 185 –89
FROM DOMINATION TO SOLIDARITY
Erich Fromm, in Psychoanalysis and Religion, distinguished be tween humanitarian forms of religion and authoritarian forms. The Jewish prophets, the historical Jesus, early Buddhists, and the mystics of most religions display a kind of religion that is not repressive, not based on one-sided and asymmetric de pendence. This religion operates with a force that springs from the inner life of the spirit. There is one creative power in God as well as in people. Obedience presupposes duality: one who speaks and one who listens; one who knows and one who is ig norant; a ruler and those who are ruled. Religious groups that broke away from the spirit of dependency and obedience cher ish different values such as mutuality and interdependence. It is precisely in the historical context of a different religion that one begins to question the social psychological implications of the father symbol and religious emphasis on obedience. The main virtue of an authoritarian religion is obedience; self-abrogation is its center of gravity. This is in sharp contrast to a human itarian religion, where self-realization is the chief virtue and resistance to growth is the cardinal sin.
From the standpoint of social history, such an authoritarian concept of religion affirms a given society and has a stabilizing influence on its prevailing tendencies. In this context author itarian religion discourages any willingness to aim at greater emancipation and any critical attempt to rise above the es tablished realities — particularly when these trends base their arguments on religious grounds: God’s love and righteousness
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are less important than God’s power. Authoritarian religion leads to that infantile clinging to consolation we can observe in the sentimentality of religious art and the history of devo tionalism. But this goes together with a compulsive need for order, a fear of confusion and chaos, a desire for supervision and control.
The dangers of the religious ideology of obedience do not end when religion itself loses its spell and binding power. The Nazi ideology with its antireligious leanings proves the point that after disenchantment of the world, to use Max Weber’s phrase, there is still domination and unquestioned authority and obedience. It is as though the worst qualities of religion survived its form. This is even truer today in a postreligious, technocratic culture where obedience is seen not in terms of charismatic lead ers but in terms of the market forces of the economy, the use of energy, and the growing militarization of societies that, without being actually engaged in war, act as if they were. Techno crats, no doubt, have long since become our priests. But even in the new situation where obedience is preferably spoken of in terms of “the rules of the game,” the structural elements of authoritarian religion persist and the remaining traces of religious education prepare the increasingly areligious masses for an obedience from which all personal features based on trust and sacrifice have vanished. When religion is dying out it is precisely this rigidity that survives; it is the authoritarian bonds that mostly persist in a life understood as dominated by technocracy. The Milgram experiment at Yale many years ago showed that a vast majority of the ordinary people included in the research were quite prepared, under scientific direction, to torture innocent fellow humans with electric current — precisely the sort of inhumanity that happens in a “culture” of obedience. Obedience operates in the barbaric ethos of fascism, but also in that of technocracy.
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But why do people worship a God whose supreme quality is power, not justice; whose interest lies in subjection, not mutual ity; who fears equality? Fundamentalism is on the rise in many places of monotheistic religions. Judaism and Islam, as well as Christianity, have developed branches of an authoritarian re ligion based on blind and substanceless obedience. Religious concepts such as “being saved” or “taking Jesus as my Savior and Lord” are used without even thinking of translating them into the context of our world, as if the repetition of pious for mulas could save anyone! If the concept of obedience to God is never spelled out, then it simply shores up the values of the status quo....
There is a third oppressive tradition, apart from my na tional and my religious identity, that made me write this book. Coming out of German Protestantism and desperately search ing for meaning inside this distorted tradition, I was not so much aware of this third power of oppression. But now I think the deepest roots to struggle with in the concept of obedience are given in my sexual identity, though I did not know this at the time the book was written. It took my American friends half a dozen years to make me aware of what I felt and wrote. When I first came to this country and started to teach at Union Theological Seminary, the faculty and students asked me again and again: What has your theology to do with your being a woman? I did not know how to respond. Of course I knew of some things I intensely disliked in male theological circles — namely, the springing from one quotation to the next in their writing without the courage to use personal discourse; the al most anal obsession with footnotes, called “scientific style”; the conscious — but much worse, the unconscious — craving for or thodoxy and the shelter it offers to the professional theologian; the neglect of historical reflection in favor of glib talk about “historicity”; the failure to evaluate and reflect on praxis.
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I also felt a certain lack of candor and honesty, and I sensed no need to be personally exposed to the truth of Scripture and tradition. The theological method almost always started with “Scripture tells us....” After this I expected a “but” that sel dom appeared. I was angry, though I did not quite understand why. When my friends exposed to me my own latent femi nism I learned to understand my anger much better. In my student years I had learned to distinguish between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This was a relevant and unforgettable insight. But none of these theologians then mentioned the God of Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel. There was silence. The “fathers of the faith” were re flected in the idea of a father in heaven, but the “mothers of the faith” were left in a limbo of obscurity. They are unre membered, forgotten — in fact, repressed. This repression not only affects 51 percent of humankind, who as a result never found their theological voice (and maybe it wouldn’t have been such an obedient voice!). It also has a catastrophic affect on the way theologians who are part of the other 49 percent express themselves.
Ignoring the female component of the soul and running down everything that has a feminine flavor has done more damage to the way theologians speak and write than any assault from the secular world. This purging and impoverishing process has led to the repression of the emphatic wholeness, awareness, and integration that marked the language of the gospel. Some of the objections to the concept of obedience that are raised in this book are clearer to me now as an outcry of a woman against a so-called scientific language devoid of a sense of emo tional awareness. Much of male theological language ignores the emotions of the speaking person; it is insensitive to what people experience; it has no interest and no appeal to change the world; it has no partisanship. It has a dull flatness because
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it leaves no room for doubt, that shadow of faith. It not only talks about obedience but also presents itself as an act of obedi ent talk: blind, insensitive, unimaginative, and neither reflecting nor projecting any form of Christian praxis.
A hidden feminist in me opposed this language, this virtue, and this religion. When I set out to study theology, I had no clear idea what the word “God” meant. How could anyone, given the historical situation after the Holocaust, talk about an omnipotent heavenly Being who obviously prefers to stay in the position of an observer? What was great about this God who saw and knew what happened to people in Treblinka and Buchenwald and did not intervene? Nietzsche’s announcement that God is dead made a lot of sense to me, and I could de scribe my position as radically Christocentric. God cannot be experienced by humans. We should cling to the powerless, non dominant Christ who has nothing more to persuade us with than his love. Christ’s very powerlessness constitutes an inner personal authority; not because he begot, created, or made us are we his, but simply because his only power is love, and this love, without any weapons, is stronger than death itself.
My difficulties with the image of God as father, begetter, ruler, and manager of history grew as I began to understand more clearly what it means to be born a woman, and therefore “incomplete,” and so to have to live in a patriarchal society. How could I want power to be the dominant characteristic of my life? And how could I worship a God who was only a male?
Male power, for me, is something to do with roaring, shoot ing, and giving orders. I do not think this patriarchal culture has done me any more damage than it has done other women. It only became increasingly obvious to me that any identifica tion with the aggressor, the ruler, the violator, is the worst thing that can happen to a woman.
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Thus I set out to find a better theological language that could eliminate the streak of domination. I was helped by the language of the mystics.
“Source of all that is good,” “life-giving wind,” “water of life,” and “light” are all symbols of God that do not imply power of authority and do not smack of any chauvinism. In the mystical tradition there is no room for “supreme power,” dom ination, or the denial of one’s own validity. This tradition often explicitly criticizes the lord-servant relationship and has super seded the authoritarian tradition particularly in its inventive use of language.
In the mystical tradition religion means the experience of be ing one with the whole, of belonging together, but never of subjection. In this perspective people do not worship God be cause of God’s power and domination. They rather want to “drown” themselves in God’s love, which is the “ground” of their existence. There is a preference for symbols like “depth,” “sea,” and those referring to motherhood and to nature at large. Here our relationship to God is not one of obedience but of union; it is not a matter of a distant God exacting sac rifice and self-denial, but rather a matter of agreement and consent, of being at one with what is alive. And this then be comes what religion is about. When this happens solidarity will replace obedience as the dominant virtue.
My use of the word “solidarity” tells you where I moved to from this attempt to go beyond obedience. Imagination and the claim for happiness are concepts I used in that time of transi tion I went through. Perhaps many people in this country may not need to hear this because the pursuit of happiness is already written into their Constitution. But there are still many others for whom the Constitution was never realized, who were told to stay in their places. Women, racial and ethnic minorities, and
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the poor are not freed from the culture of obedience and still must travel a long way from domination to self-determination. On this long road some of my friends who were Christians dropped religion and gave up on understanding it as a means of human liberation. I sadly disagree with them. . . . In this sense this book is conservative and aims to convert people to “that old-time religion.” During the last years we often sang this good old spiritual and we always added some new verses: “It was good enough for Sarah, it was good enough for Mary, it was good enough for Sojourner Truth, it was good enough for Mother Jones, it was good enough for Rosa Luxembourg, and it’s good enough for me.” — CD, xii–xx
Without weapons
Why are you so one-sided
people often ask me
so blind and so unilateral
I sometimes ask in return
are you a christian
if you don’t mind my asking
And depending on the answer I remind them
how one-sidedly and without guarantees
god made himself vulnerable in christ
where would we end up
I offer for consideration
if god insisted on bilateral agreements
with you and me
who welsh on treaties
by resorting to various tricks
where would we end up
if god insisted on bilateral agreements
before he acted
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Then I remind them
that god didn’t come in an armored car
and wasn’t born in a bank
and gave up the old miracle weapons
thunder and lightning and heavenly hosts
one-sidedly
palaces and kings and soldiers
were not his way when he
decided unilaterally
to become a human being
which means to live without weapons
— WL, 58
GOD MAKES A DIFFERENCE
One of the theological questions which I had thought about for a long time was the relationship between power and love. As a woman, I quite naturally had difficulty with the idea of a mighty — indeed omnipotent — supernatural lord, who was sometimes also called Father. I was not particularly interested in being ruled and protected by a heavenly sovereign of his kind. The idea of God which had been passed down to me by the fa thers of the Christian tradition seemed essentially “macho” — a man — God only for men. He was more interested in power than in anything else. Indeed he allegedly even wanted to be almighty. He was built up on the model of the free employer, who is independent of his workers. His titles — king, and so forth — insulted my democratic feelings, and the name “Lord” was an affront to my solidarity with the people who always had to live under some master or other.
It was a long time before I was able to free myself from this God; and my path led me to a nontheistic theology, centered
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on the sufferings of the love of Christ. It was in this context that I wrote my first book, Christ the Representative. The Son was closer to me than the Father, because he revealed what the Father was unable to communicate to me: love without privi lege, love which empties itself and takes upon itself the form of a servant, of a member of the proletariat, love which prefers hell to heaven as long as other people are still condemned to be in hell.
I have tried to talk about God in a new way. The impor tant thing for me is not merely to change the sexist language, by altering the pronouns we use for God. A world of fe male images and language can also be a world of domination and false protection. It is more important to overcome the inherited, substantial “machismo” in talk about God, which means not making the bourgeois-male ideal our master. In my view, the adoration of power, the wish for absolute inde pendence, is catastrophic, both theologically and politically. If today a central political goal for democrats is to achieve the co determination of workers and their control over what they do, how can we endure talk about God which rests on the rejection of democratization and self-determination? If God cannot give up his power, we cannot trust him. If he doesn’t want our lib eration and our self-determination, then he is no better than, at most, a liberal capitalist. The God whom we need is not a pri vate owner. There is only one legitimation of power, and that is to share it with others. Power which isn’t shared — which, in other words, isn’t transformed into love — is pure domination and oppression.
In the imprisonment of the old language, God is essentially separated from us, in the way that masters are separated from their servants, kings from their subjects, and independent em ployers from “their” workers. Our present task is to express liberation in such a way that it doesn’t take place from above
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downward — that helpless objects are not just placed in some other situation by virtue of some heavenly intervention. No one can rise from the dead for anyone else; even Christ doesn’t rise “for us,” but only as the first among many brothers and sisters.
There are times when we feel nothing of his resurrection — times of pain and torture, times of many crosses. In spite of that, let us not be among those who suppress the news of the resurrection or no longer believe in it ourselves. In times of many crosses we should go on telling what we have heard and understood. We should talk in such a way that Christ is missed, that he is even present as someone who is missing. We should express the pain we feel when we don’t perceive his victory; we should utter our longing. But to be missed is another way of be ing present. To have disappeared is a way of being there. Don’t let us yield death an inch more than it already has. Let us talk about finding again what has disappeared, about the feeding of the hungry and about the resurrection of the dead.
In Auschwitz, from September 1943 to July 1944, there was a family concentration camp in which children lived who had been taken there from Theresienstadt and who — in order to mislead world opinion — wrote postcards. In this camp — and now comes a resurrection story — education in various forms was carried on. Children who were already destined for the gas chambers learned French, mathematics, and music. The teachers were completely clear about the hopelessness of the situation. Without a world themselves, they taught knowledge of the world. Exterminated themselves, they taught non-extermination and life. Humiliated themselves, they restored the dignity of human beings. Someone may say: “But it didn’t help them.” But so say the Gentiles. Let us rather say, “It makes a differ ence.” Let us say, in terms solely of this world: “God makes a difference.” — CL, 95 –97
54 DOROTHEE SOELLE GOD IS LOVE
God and love are inseparable. It is not possible — and this is probably the gravest error of all conservative theologies — to tear God and love apart and to say that God is primary and permanent while love is some secondary, derivative thing. The gospel never tells us to believe first, then love. It describes the achievement of Christian life in terms of unity: In lov ing, we believe. In loving, we depend on something other than ourselves.
As you know, the many critics of the new theology complain that we preach “nothing but a little human kindness, nothing but love.” And they ask if that is in fact all there really is. And if it is, what comes after death? If God and love are as closely linked as I have claimed they are, these objections amount to no more than cynicism. Faced with the reality of six million mur dered Jews or the reality of a starving child, one cannot speak seriously of “nothing but a little human kindness, nothing but love,” implying that these things are too little.
But since we all, at one time or another, have to number ourselves among those for whom love is too little, we have to ask what it is beyond love that we expect. What are all those people expecting who are looking for something else, who are, perhaps, faithful churchgoers or still maintain some kind of tie with the church? I suspect they are afraid. They want greater security than love offers, the land of security that can be con veyed by words like “father,” “peace,” “eternal rest.” They want answers to their questions. Having no rest, they want rest. After war, they want to know where peace can be found. I think these needs are genuine and justified. But the gospel revises these needs for us. To all those who want a father, eter nal peace, a final home, and answers to all their questions, the gospel says simply and inexorably: “All you need is love.” You
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do not need anything else; nothing else is asked of you; nothing else counts. This is the one thing that really matters. Every thing else is peripheral; we can do without it. A yearning for security and for an eternal companion is understandable. But in Christ, we are relieved of this yearning. Christ said that our eternal companion is to be found in our earthly companions and nowhere else. To live, we do not need what has repeatedly been called “God,” a power that intervenes, rescues, judges, and confirms. The most telling argument against our traditional God is not that he no longer exists or that he has drawn back within himself but that we no longer need him. We do not need him because love is all we need, nothing more. We will have to develop this essential message of the gospel in terms of the tasks that face our generation and the next one after us. We will have to demonstrate concretely what love means. Ques tions about the nature, the degree, the spheres of influence of love will prove to be immaterial. We will be struck by the fact that love is indivisible, that it cannot be broken down into sex ual love, charity, and love in the social and political realm. We know already that those who condemn the powers of sexual love make other people incapable of the love we call charity and mercy.
If there is something we will be able to say about God in the future, it will be this: God is our capacity to love. God is the power, the spark, that animates our love. When we have come far enough to understand that, we will no longer be afraid of banality. Nor will we succumb to that heresy which says Christ addresses our superegos and demands the impossible of us, for we know once again now that he has always moved our hearts. We should stop looking for God. He has been with us for a long time. — SW, 136 –38
56 DOROTHEE SOELLE DENYING GOD...
“The ultimate cause of our salvation lies in becoming noth ing, in putting off our self.” For this “I”-lessness” (which is identical to the goal of Buddhist meditation) the German mys tics coined the term Gelassenheit. “Go out of yourself and deny yourself” (Meister Eckhart) is the oft-repeated summons to the inward journey. Such an expression was the fourteenth century equivalent of our “turn on, tune in, drop out.” The word Gelassenheit has undergone a drastic change in mean ing over the years, a change that has diminished the mystical and strengthened the Stoic overtones of the word. The word gelassen has come to mean apathy, insensitivity, coldness of feeling. Henry Suso (ca. 1295 –1366), a German mystic of the fourteenth century, who though he was not particularly original or outspoken was a tender and sensitive man, used the term in a much wider sense to include the ideas of patience, self-denial, obedience, conciliatoriness, acquiescence, self-control, control of desires, surrender to God. The term is used in contrast to selfishness or whatever lays emphasis upon the I and the self. A person filled with that emphasis must learn first of all to surrender himself. Indeed, this is the most important thing he can learn. He must learn no longer to cling to property, health, comfort, labor, the fruits of labor, and the lusts of the flesh. What is attempted here amounts to a radical dropout, com parable to certain phenomena of the drug culture, in which people reject the most highly cherished values of the age such as education and career, getting and spending, health and crea ture comforts, work and sexuality, and everything connected with these values. One must keep in mind the true picture, the countercultural point of it all, if one is to assess fairly the obvious misery of the new dependence and the ruin to which it leads.
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Unless there is a radical negation of those immanent values to which the ego is enslaved, it is not possible to abolish all self ishness and to deny oneself. “All the love in this world is based on self-love. If you had denied yourself you would have denied the entire world.” In the thinking of the German mystics we can distinguish three steps in the denial of self. The first step is to deny the world, which is also called the flesh. But at the same time this denial threatens the ego, its will, and its relationships. I must also deny myself; that is the second step. I must be able to go away from myself and not worry about it. I must not cling to anything, not even to my own feelings, especially feelings of depression — and the mystics knew a great deal about such feel ings. In this sense the expression “I am dependent upon God” has a deep meaning. I do not need to cling to these things be cause I myself am held fast. I do not need to carry a burden because I myself am carried. I can go away from myself and deny myself. To be able to surrender myself means that I can die. Thus, I go “from life into a kind of death”; I can overcome the deepest narcissism, which, according to Freud, consists of unconsciously denying the reality of our own death and being persuaded of our own immortality....
The goal of the mystics is the birth of God in the soul. As with the Greek Fathers, this means that God’s becoming man is in harmony with the idea of man’s becoming God. What is novel about this idea is its revolutionary implication that be came politically explosive in the left-wing Reformation. God can be born only in the soul that is “empty,” that has cast out all selfishness and has gone from ego to self. “I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me.” He who has denied himself is on the way to becoming a Christ.
The third and highest step in the process of denial is that of denying not only the world and the ego but even God, the conquering One, the revealed God who promises salvation.
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“Therefore I beseech God to make me have done with him.” The mystics sought to extend the limits language sets upon com munication, to shrink the sphere in which silence is the only possibility. To that end they made use of the forms of nega tive theology and of paradoxes (“Thou silent shout,” “brilliant darkness”). Repeatedly the mystics were accused of heresy, of embracing radical views. That we should “deny” God for God’s sake is one such radical thought. The meaning of such a thought is probably made clearer by Jung’s assertion that religious sym bols and words, the traditions about God, are supposed to act as a buffer against the direct experience of God. The yearning for the absolute is communicated in the religions in a variety of ways: linguistic, social, mythical, ritual. At the same time this means that this yearning has restricted itself and put an end to itself. What once was faith has become a work, a pledging of oneself to someone. “So long as you do your works for the sake of gaining heaven or for your own salvation, that is, outwardly, things are not well with you.” The Gelassenheit which denies even God destroys this circumscription. — DBA, 81–84
. . . FOR GOD’S SAKE
The God of the German mystics appears to be a God who is purely regressive. Their fascination with the inward journey, of submerging oneself, is so great that it is often comparable to a fascination with death. They appear to hold no brief for the re turn journey, for the life that is supposed to be new, reborn. But this appearance is deceptive. Even Meister Eckhart was critical of pure regression. “For in truth, if someone presumes to receive more in spirituality, meditation, sweet rapture, and the grace of God than at his hearth or in the animal shed, then you are act ing in no way other than as if you took hold of God, threw a
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cloak around his head, and tucked him under a bench.” Eck hart’s verbal imagery summarizes the regressive tendency quite accurately. God is wrapped up like a baby, its head chopped off and hidden away in a hole. “For whoever seeks God in a certain way takes that way and overlooks and misses God, who is hid den in that way. But he who seeks God by no way grasps God as he is in himself, and such a person lives with the Son who is life itself.” Accordingly then, regression is an essential way by which to seek God, but regression dare not be made into the absolute, into God.
Even the practice of the mystics contradicts the idea that they held solely to mere regression. Indeed, many of these same people were also quite active as leaders in their respective or ders who cried out against the prevailing state of affairs in their day and age. They traveled hither and yon, preached to great crowds, and labored as teachers and as physicians of souls. They founded schools and involved themselves in ecclesiastical and court politics. Some were even placed on trial and pun ished. Eckhart was one of these. Such activities always had political overtones and significance because the mystics offered their theology in the language of the common people rather than in scholarly or monastic Latin. This theology gave the masses a tremendous consciousness of their own worth: they could become one with God. And the mystics proclaimed this without mention of priest and sacraments. It is impossible to understand the many reform and sectarian movements of the late Middle Ages and their theological-political demands for the abolition of private property and autocracy apart from the theology of the mystics. Thus, the most radically heretical mys tics, often called “free spirits,” rejected the traditional doctrines of the church dealing with creation, redemption, and eternal punishment as well as the concepts of good and evil for those who thought they had attained perfection and peace through
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mystical oneness with God. Their return journey contained cer tain new ways of life and social changes; they rejected oaths as well as priesthood, sacramentalism, and private property. Like wise they rejected all forms of government that claimed to be based on greater knowledge, clerical ordination, noble birth, or masculine gender.
For them, contemplation and action, self-submersion and politics, and religious regression and progress constituted a unity. But for our understanding there is another difficulty that accompanies the mystics’ understanding of God. Their writings speak of “loving God,” “seeking God,” or — in paradoxical language — of “denying God for God’s sake.” Turning to God always means turning away from the world. This sharp de lineation between God and “the world,” which permeates the entire body of traditional Christian (as well as Islamic and Jewish) thought, would be wrongly understood if it were under stood in terms of time and space. Neither heaven nor eternity is played off out there against earth and life, even though this Pla tonic idea is what is suggested. Much more is meant by “God” and “world.” What is meant is a direction of will and of the ex istence of man. If they seek their life in contented self-assertion, in holding on, in making oneself secure, if they are bent on having, possessing, dominating, then that is what tradition calls being “of the flesh” or “of the world.” If, on the other hand, the intention of life is dedication, self-denial, and self-submersion, being instead of having, giving instead of owning, communi cating instead of dominating, then that is what tradition calls “seeking God.” This God alone, whom one should seek, is not a separate heavenly person in a delimited, metaphysical reality that would stand only in a negative relationship to us.
God means much more from a Christian point of view. To put it simply, God always means “love” and world always
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means “not love,” which expresses itself as anxiety, detach ment, security, “I-ness.” In no case does the term “world” mean human beings, what the modern age calls mankind; the human being in this understanding belongs much more on the side of God. When reference is made to seeking “something” and not “God,” this does not imply a distancing from one’s neighbor but only a distancing from whatever dehumanizes, making a thing of a human being who no longer values other people but only the possession of things. The distinction between “this world” and “God” is the attempt to draw human beings over to the side of God. — DBA, 88 –90
A MYSTICAL JOURNEY FOR TODAY
[Matthew] Fox’s way and that of traditional mysticism differ in two aspects. The first is where the way of mysticism is said to begin. In the understanding of mysticism inherited from the Neoplatonists Proclus and Plotinus, purging or purification is always the first step. The beginning of mystical piety is not the beauty and goodness of creation but the fall of human beings from paradise. That this loaded word “fall” does not appear in the Hebraic narrative of the expulsion from paradise seems not to be known. Instead, in this context, marked strongly by Augustine, there is little talk of creation, of the cosmos, and its original goodness. But does this not place the mystical jour ney at far too late a point in the course of the Christian history of redemption? One of the basic questions Fox asks again and again is whether we ought not refer first of all to the blessing of the beginning, that is, not to original sin but to original bless ing? And is it not exactly mystical experience that points us to creation and the good beginning?
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The second difference in comparison to the Western tradi tion of mysticism has to do with the vision of union with God. I agree with Fox on the matter of the via unitiva. He de fines the goal of the journey differently in this stage; it is more world-related. The goal is creativity and compassion. Creativ ity presupposes union with the Creator, whose power lives in the oneness with us. Today we understand creativity not only as the transformation of an individual soul but of the world as a whole, in which humans could live together. To speak of this via transformativa means to embed the mystical project in the context of our life, which is marked by the catastrophe of economic and ecological exploitation.
For me, mysticism and transformation are indissolubly inter connected. Without economic and ecological justice (known as ecojustice) and without God’s preferential love for the poor and for this planet, the love for God and the longing for oneness seem to me to be an atomistic illusion. The spark of the soul acquired in private experience may, indeed, serve the search for gnosis (knowledge) in the widest sense of the word, but it can do no more. A genuine mystical journey has a much larger goal than to teach us positive thinking and to put to sleep our capacity to be critical and to suffer.
As in the journeys of former times, the stages of today’s jour ney flow one into the other. The three stages are as follows: to be amazed, to let go, and to resist. The first step taken on the way of mysticism is amazement. I relate an experience by way of example: When my oldest son was learning to read numbers, he stood still one day in front of a house’s number plate and did not move an inch. When I wanted to move him on with my “come on!” he said, “Look, Mummy, what a wonderful 537!” Naturally, I had never seen it. He spoke the number slowly, tast ing it in a mood of discovery. He was submerged in happiness.
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I think that every discovery of the world plunges us into jubila tion, a radical amazement that tears apart the veil of triviality. Nothing is to be taken for granted, least of all beauty!
The first step of this mystical way is a via positiva, and it oc curs in the primordial image of the rose that blooms in God. The jubilation of my five-year-old responds to the experience of “radical amazement,” as Abraham Heschel (1907–72) calls this origin of our being-in-relation. Without this overwhelming amazement in the face of what encounters us in nature and in history’s experiences of liberation, without beauty experienced even on a busy street and made visible in a blue-and-white num ber plate on the wall of a house, there is no mystical way that can lead to union. To be amazed means to behold the world and, like God after the sixth day of creation, to be able to say again or for the first time, “Look! How very good it all is!”
But it is not enough to describe this amazement as an experi ence of bliss alone. Amazement also has its bleak side of terror and hopelessness that renders one mute. The ancient Greeks already defended themselves against this bleakness by an injunc tion against adoring things; Horace summed it up in his motto nihil admirari (admire nothing). But this prohibition, with the help of which scientific thinking once was supposed to ban ish the fear of fear, has succeeded in banishing the demons together with all the angels. Gone is the sensation of paralyz ing fright together with the ability to be marvelously amazed. Those who seek to leave behind the terrifying, sinister side of wonderment, the side that renders us dumb, take on, through rational superiority, the role of those who own the world. In my view, to be able to own and to be amazed are mutu ally exclusive. “What would it help someone, if he gained the whole world but damaged his soul?” (Matt. 16:26, in Luther’s German translation).
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The soul needs amazement, the repeated liberation from cus toms, viewpoints, and convictions, which, like layers of fat that make us untouchable and insensitive, accumulate around us. What appears obvious is that we need to be touched by the spirit of life and that without amazement and enthusiasm noth ing new can begin. Goethe’s friend Herder said that “without enthusiasm nothing great and good ever came to be in this world. Those who were said to be ‘enthusiasts’ have rendered humankind the most useful services.” This is exactly the point where the Christian religion — in a world that makes it pos sible for us human beings, through science, to create cosmic consciousness while, at the same time, through technology, also to undo creation — must learn anew from its own origin in the tradition of Judaism.
What this means in relation to where the journey takes its beginning is that we do not set out as those who seek but as those who have been found. The goodness we experience is there already long before. In an ontological and not necessar ily a chronological sense, before the prayers of those who feel abandoned and banished there is the praise without which they would not perceive themselves as banished ones. This ability for wonderment brings about consenting to one’s being here, being today, being now. “Being here is magnificent” (Rainer Maria Rilke). Like every form of ecstasy, this ability implies a self-forgetfulness that, as if by magic, lifts us out of ordinary self-forgetfulness and its corresponding triviality.
Amazement or wonderment is a way of praising God, even if God’s name is not mentioned. In amazement, whether we know it or not, we join ourselves to the heavens “who declare the glory of the Eternal One” (Ps. 19:1). “The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.” Such an understanding of the wonder of
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being is not dependent on whether the origin of creation is con ceived of in personal terms, as in the Abrahamic religions, or in nonpersonal ones. Radical amazement does not have to atro phy as scientific knowledge increases and better explains what is; on the contrary, such amazement grows in the finest scientific minds who frequently feel attracted to mysticism.
Can amazement, the radical wonderment of the child, be learned again? Whatever the badly misused word “meditation” means, it embraces a form of stopping and tarrying wherein in dividuals or communities intentionally set aside for themselves times and places other than the ordinary ones. Listening, being still, at rest, contemplating, and praying are all there to make room for amazement. “Hear this, O Job, stop and consider the wondrous works of God” (Job 37:14). The unknown name of the mystical rose reminds us of our own amazed blissfulness.
The practice of amazement is also a beginning in leaving oneself; it is a different freedom from one’s own fears. In amaze ment we detrivialize ourselves and enter the second stage of the mystical journey, that of letting go. If to praise God is the first prompting of the journey, then to miss God is an other unavoidable dimension of it. The more profound the amazed blissfulness of the sunder warumbe (the utter absence of any why or wherefore), the darker the night of the soul (via negativa). The tradition that most often places this way of pu rification at the beginning and points out ever new ways of asceticism, renunciation, and escape from desires also teaches to discern how far one is from the true life in God.
Letting go begins with simple questions: What do I perceive? What do I keep away from myself? What do I choose? We need a bit of “un-forming” or liberation before we, in the language of Suso, can be “con-formed” to Christ or transformed. In the world ruled by the media, this “un-forming” has yet a wholly other status than it had in the rural and monastic world of
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the Middle Ages when life was so much less subject to diver sions. For us who today know a hitherto undreamed abundance of available consumer goods and artificially manufactured new needs, this stage of the journey plays a different role than it does in the cultures of want. We associate rituals of purification and fasting most frequently with such puritanical “giving-up” performances alleged to be necessary in the development of in dustrial labor morality. In postindustrial consumer society, this ethics works less and less. Our letting go is related above all to our growing dependency on consumerism. We need purification (purgatio), both in the coercive mechanisms of consumption and in the addictions of the everyday working world.
The more we let go of our false desires and needs, the more we make room for amazement in day-to-day life. We also come closer to what ancient mysticism called “being apart,” which is living out concretely one’s farewell to the customs and norms of one’s culture. Precisely the fact that our mysticism begins not with banishment but with amazement is what makes the horror about the destruction of wonder so radical. Our relation to the basic realities of ownership, violence, and the self is changing. In this turning away from our rough ways (Entgröbung), the road becomes increasingly narrower. Companions and friends take their leave and the initial amazement clouds over. The sym bol of the first stage of mysticism’s path is the rose, that of the second stage is the dark night.
To miss God is a form of tradition called “suffering from God.” To become more and more empty means not only to jet tison unnecessary ballast but also to become more lonely. Given the destruction of nature that marks our context, it becomes more and more difficult to turn back to certain forms of our relationship to and with nature and to the original amazement. Mystical spirituality of creation will very likely move deeper and deeper into the dark night of being delivered into the hands
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of the principalities and powers that dominate us. For it is not only the poor man from Nazareth who is tortured together with his brothers and sisters on the cross, it is also our mother earth herself.
The horizon of ecological catastrophe is the backdrop before which today’s road of the mystical journey has to be consid ered. To praise God and to miss nothing so much as God leads to a “life in God” that the tradition called the via unitiva. To become one with what was intended in creation has the shape of co-creation; to live in God means to take an active part in the ongoing creation.
The third stage leads into a healing that is at the same time resistance. The two belong together in our situation. Salvation means that humans live in compassion and justice co-creatively; in being healed (saved) they experience also that they can heal (save). In a manner comparable to how Jesus’ disciples under stood themselves to be “healed healers,” so every way of union is one that continues onward and radiates outward. Being-at one is not individualistic self-realization but moves beyond that to change death-oriented reality. Being-at-one shares itself and realizes itself in the ways of resistance. Perhaps the most power ful symbol of this mystical oneness is the rainbow, which is the sign of the creation that does not perish but continues to live in sowing and harvesting, day and night, summer and winter, birth and death.
Being Amazed Letting Go Healing / Resisting via positiva via negativa via transformativa radical amazement being apart changing the world bliss letting go of possession, compassion and violence, and ego justice
praising God missing God living in God the rose the “dark night” the rainbow — SC, 88 –93
68 DOROTHEE SOELLE UNITY
Mysticism creates a new relation to the three powers that, each in its own totalitarian way, hold us in prison: the ego, possession, and violence. Mysticism relativizes them, frees us from their spell, and prepares us for freedom. Those powers project themselves in very diverse ways. The ego that keeps on getting bigger presents itself most often as well-mannered and civilized, even when it seeks to get rid of every form of ego-lessness. Possession, which according to Francis of Assisi makes for a condition that forces us to arm ourselves, appears in a neutralized, unobtrusive form. The fact that the very en tities with which we destroy creation — namely, possession, consumption, and violence — have fashioned themselves into a unity in our world makes no impact, whether by design or through ignorance.
When women like Dorothy Day are not fixated on their own egos, or when fools without possessions, like some of Saint Francis’s sons and daughters, live different, liberated lives, they are met with smiles of derision. But when they dare to take real steps out of the violence-shaped actuality of our condition, they come into conflict with the judiciary or wind up in jail. More than anything else, violence must hide itself and always put on new garments, disguising itself in the form of imperatives, such as security, protection, technological necessity, public order, or defensive measures.
Here is an inconspicuous example. In June 1997, a mem ber of the White Fathers, a religious community that is part of the “Order for Peace,” was fined for having demonstrated outside the chancellor’s office in Bonn with a picket sign say ing “Cancel Third World Debts.” The office had refused to accept a petition, signed by twelve thousand people, spon sored by the campaign “Development Needs Forgiveness of
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Debts.” The harmless name of the violence behind which the chancellor’s office was hiding is the law of inviolable precincts; under present circumstances it is one of the many, actually quite sensible garments of state power. But the law is abused when the office of state protects itself against democratic interven tions and expects submission to or passivity in face of economic violence rather than a decisive No! of noncooperation.
This rather insignificant example of civil disobedience illus trates how people make use of violence. For many it is no longer good enough to behave nonviolently in their personal lives and to submit to administrative regulations. For in such “nonviolence” and submission, as the powerful of this world define them, the real violence that renders the countries of the third world destitute is left untouched. To exist free of violence means much more than that: it means to think and act with other living beings in a common life. These forms of the free dom of opposition and resistance have multiplied in the last centuries also in Europe in the face of the militaristic and tech nocratic coercion. An essential and new role is played here by the basic insights of mysticism, such as those of the tradition of Gandhi as well as the Quakers.
In the eighties I was occasionally asked, especially within the contexts of civil disobedience against nuclear arms, whether I did not sense something in myself of the power and spirit of the other, the enemy: “Where is the Ronald Reagan in you?” I was in no mood to respond with a speculation about my shadow side. I do not think that a pacifist has to be complemented by a bellicist. Perhaps I did not understand correctly the serious ness of the question that seeks to grasp the unity of all human beings; to me the question seemed intent on neutralizing or mol lifying what we were about. When I ask myself seriously what the principalities and powers that rule over me as structural
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powers claim from me, the answer is that it is my own cow ardice that they seek to make use of. Those who submit to those powers also are part of the violence under whose velvet terror we live and destroy others.
Before he found his way to nonviolent resistance, Gandhi used to describe that time by saying that it was as a cow ard that he accommodated himself to violence. I understand this in a twofold sense. First, I submitted to external vio lence, which is to say I knuckled under, paid my taxes with which more weapons were produced, I followed the advice of my bank, and I consumed as the advertisers commanded. Worse still, I hankered after violence, wanted to be like “them” in the advertisements, as successful, attractive, aesthetic, and intelligent as they were. The existential step that the word nonviolence signals leads out of the forced marriage between violence and cowardice. And that means in practice that one becomes unafraid of the police and the power of the state.
The forms of resistance that revoke the common consensus about how we destroy creation have deep roots in a mysticism that we often do not recognize as such. It is the mysticism of be ing at one with all that lives. One of the basic mystical insights in the diverse religions envisions the unity of all human beings, indeed, of all living beings. It is part of the oldest wisdom of religion that life is no individual and autonomous achievement. Life cannot be made, produced, or purchased, and is not the property of private owners. Instead, life is a mystery of being bound up with and belonging one to another. Gandhi believed that he could live a spiritual life only when he began to iden tify himself with the whole of humankind, and he could do that only by entering into politics. For him the entire range of all human activities is an indivisible whole. Social, economic, political, and religious concerns cannot be cultivated in sterile plots that are hermetically sealed off from one another. To bring
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those sterile, sealed-off plots together in a related whole is one of the aims of the mysticism whose name is resistance. — SC, 259 –61
“SUCCESS IS NOT A NAME OF GOD”
How do we become free of the ego? In the twentieth century, Simone Weil provided a new instruction in preparing oneself for this work. In her endeavors she took up the notion of “at tention,” perhaps from Buddhism. In one of her most beautiful essays, which deals with “a Christian conception of studies,” she combines school and university studies, generally associ ated with scholarly, scientific thinking, with the mystical sense of dedication that integrates and focuses us. “If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer.” Simone Well explicitly brings attention and prayer together. “The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer.” Every exercise directed to our ability to be attentive changes us inasmuch as it diverts us from focusing on the self. “Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.” From this sort of understanding that hovers between concentration and attention a new freedom from the ego can emerge. It is perhaps the great est step in the “un-forming” that Heinrich Seuse speaks of in his mystical journey toward the “acquiescing” human being. It is preconditional for being “conformed to the image of Christ,”
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which Simone Weil regards as the preparation for prayer. “Stu dents must... work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any refer ence to their natural abilities and tastes, applying themselves equally to all their tasks with the idea that each one will help to form them in the habit of that attention which is the sub stance of prayer.” The purpose-free nature of Eckhart’s sunder warumbe can hardly be put more clearly. “Attention consists in suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.” In this emptiness something evil in oneself is unintentionally destroyed and a kind of inat tentiveness disappears. Simone Weil makes use of the beautiful examples of writers’ work in which one enters upon “a way of waiting . . . for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words.”
To reject the inadequate, not to be satisfied with it, is mys tical activity. Emptiness is a better condition for the soul than being flooded with orientations that turn the ego into a help mate of destructive reality. In rejecting inadequate words, we also reject inadequate feelings, images, conceptions, and desires so that in true prayer false desires vanish and others, greater and perhaps more mute ones, arise. Here the classical philo sophical distinction between activity and passivity is abolished. The ego becoming free acts and, at the same time, lets itself be acted upon.
What do ego-lessness and becoming unattached mean in con nection with today’s mystical way in the form of resistance? Concepts like asceticism, renunciation of consumerism, and us ing less and simpler ways of living make it apparent that the way of conscious resistance has to lead from ego-fixation (that globalized production requires as a partner) to ego-lessness. What is missing is a reflection that shows more clearly how
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complicit we are ourselves in the consumerist ego that the econ omy desires. I want to elucidate this in terms of a question that every nonconformist group, every critical minority wishing to contribute to the establishment of a different life has to face, namely, the question of success.
Decisions about possible actions are weighed in a world governed by market considerations by one and only one cri terion: success. Is it necessary now to boycott certain aspects of consumerism, to blockade nuclear waste transports, to hide refugees threatened with repatriation, or offer pacifist resis tance against further militarization? Whenever such topics are raised, questions like the following are regularly heard: “What’s the use of protesting, everything has been decided long ago?” “Can anything be changed anyway?” “What do you think you will accomplish?” “Whom do you want to influence?” “Who is paying attention?” “Will the media report it?” “How much publicity will it have?” “Do you really believe that this can suc ceed?” Sadly and helplessly, many people say; “I am with you, but this symbolic or real action is of no use against the con centrated power of the others.” Questions and responses like these nourish doubt in democracy, but worse, they jeopardize partiality for life. Behind questions like these lurks a cynicism that shows how powerfully the ego is tied into conditions and relations of power.
Martin Buber said that “success is not a name of God.” It could not be said more mystically nor more helplessly. The nothing that wants to become everything and needs us can not be named in the categories of power. (That is why the “omnipotent” God is a male, helpless, and antimystical meta phor that is void of any responsibility.) To let go of the ego means, among other things, to step away from the coercion to succeed. It means to “go where you are nothing.” Without this form of mysticism, resistance loses it focus and dies before our
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very eyes. It is not that creating public awareness, winning fel low participants, and changing how we accept things is beside the point. But the ultimate criterion for taking part in actions of resistance and solidarity cannot be success because that would mean to go on dancing to the tunes of the bosses of this world.
To become ego-less, unattached, and free also involves dis missing the agent of power within us who wants to persuade us that given the huge power of institutions, resisting has no chance of succeeding. To become unattached means, in addition, to correct the relation of success and truth.
I use my own experiences from the years of the German peace movement to elucidate the point. I assumed, with a cer tain naiveté, that the questions journalists put to me were motivated by an interest in truth. I thought it important to find out whether particular nuclear bombs could be used for de fense apart from exclusive use in first-strike offensives. I wanted to have figures showing what armaments cost and then to re late this to what those moneys could do for the education and healthcare of children. I believed that the connection be tween arming ourselves and letting people starve was what had to be made known. And I assumed that those who asked me questions were also interested in such often concealed truths.
It took years before I understood that the majority of media representatives had quite different interests. They did not want to know and write about who the victims of arming ourselves are; they “covered” demonstrations and protesters only from the perspective of securing viewers for that evening’s news tele cast. The interest in success, asking questions such as “who are you anyway and whom or what do you represent?” had increas ingly superceded interest in truth. Attempts to revive an interest in truth, to make the victims visible instead of mindlessly ori enting oneself to the winners, had little chance. Long years of mass movements for a peace no longer constructed on arms, for
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economic justice and solidarity, and for the integrity of creation have not succeeded. Discouragement over this is a bitter and undeniable reality.
Is what Bonhoeffer called “shoving a spoke in the wheel” something that we can do at all today? Mysticism of ego lessness helps me deal with God’s defeats in this world. To get rid of the ego means not to sacrifice truth to the mentality of success, to become unattached and not to uphold success as the ultimate criterion. An Italian mystic of the fourteenth century, at one time a wealthy cloth merchant, let himself and his com panions be bound and driven with blows and insults through the streets where once he made his money. Just as Christ had been regarded as a madman, so these friends of God wanted to be regarded as fools and idiots (pazzi e stolti).
Something of this foolishness is found in many forms of or ganized resistance. Women are met with rudeness and invective when they hold vigils for tortured prison inmates. To become free from the coercion of compulsory success is a mystical seed that is not always at the fore of consciousness but that does sprout precisely in the defiance of “keeping on keeping on.” A slogan was coined in the anti–nuclear energy movement that re flects some of this defiance of ego-lessness, Wer sich nicht wehrt, lebt verkehrt (the person who does not put up a fight, lives a wrong life). A Hassidic rabbi puts it in more pious language. Maintaining steadfast in prayer, he said: “and if you don’t want to redeem Israel yet then redeem the goyim alone.”
There are many mystical teachers who can help in satisfac torily reaching the point of no return with what they teach us concerning the unattached ego, about going out of ourselves, and about freedom from constraint. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and a leading opponent of the Vietnam War, wrote about the mystical foundation of this freedom in a letter to James Forest in 1966: “Do not depend on the hope of results. When
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you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truths of the work itself.” He advises the younger pacifist to become free from the need to find his own affirmation. For then “you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.” Living in mystical freedom one can say then with Eckhart, “I act so that I may act.” Being at one with creation represents a conversion to the ground of being. And this conversion does not nourish itself from demonstrable success but from God.
Years ago, American friends persuaded me that the best way to remember the infanticide of Bethlehem, when King Herod ordered all children under the age of two to be killed (Matt. 2:16 –18), was for peace activists to go to the Pentagon on the second day of Christmas, which is dedicated to the remembrance of those innocent children, and pour blood on the white pillars there in order to give witness to what is planned and commanded there. I went along, but with many doubts. Was it only a gesture, a kind of theatrical production? What success would it achieve? The clearer that question became to me, the more astounded I was that my friends in this mystical peace movement, shaped by the Catholic Worker movement . . . , had left this question behind them. They had become free of it and their freedom seemed greater to me than my own. — SC, 228 –32
EVERYTHING DEPENDED ON THEM
To which God are we really speaking? At a conference there was a group of women conversing about religious questions.
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One asked where God had been at Auschwitz. A young woman from the evangelical camp, who described herself as a believer, answered with the sentence: “Auschwitz was willed by God.” Everyone was appalled and wanted to know how she meant that. “Quite simply,” she said, “if God had not willed it, it would not have happened. Nothing happens without God.” The Wholly Other God has so determined it, and though we cannot understand it we must accept it in humility. God’s au thority, lordship, and omnipotence may not be placed in doubt, it is not for us to inquire after God’s providential will. The God who is completely independent from all God’s creatures has willed everything that happens. God and God alone could have hindered it. But God’s ways are not our ways. This man ner of speaking about God sounds pious, but it doesn’t really get anyone anywhere. It solidifies hierarchical thinking into au thorities and power. It makes us into impotent nobodies on whose lives nothing actually depends. In reality everything de pended on the lives and behavior of people in Germany for the victims of our actions. In reality everything relating to the preservation of this earth depends on the lives and behavior of people in the rich world. We are involved; we are respon sible. The belief of the young fundamentalist woman is in fact not very different from the apocalyptic doomsday belief of my taxi driver.* In both modes of thinking our role as vic tims of an inscrutable giant machine is the same.... Submission without a say in the matter is common to both. Both are fix ated on power and cannot think in terms of shared power, which we can also call love. For the young woman God is the sovereign Lord who would have intervened from above, had God so willed. Since God did not intervene, God must
*See p. 179.
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have willed Auschwitz. The most important thing about God is God’s power.
I am reminded by this way of thinking about God of a cheeky song from Vienna, in which a young man from a wealthy home carries out all possible mischief at the expense of others and then in the refrain sings reassuringly: “Papa will set things right.” Many believers have never gone beyond this childish image of God; they have never learned to assume responsibility themselves. Their relationship to God remains childish; they do not want to be friends of God but want to remain subordinates and dependents.
But must we really speak in this way? God is mighty, we are helpless — is that all? A few years ago I had a meeting in a church congregation near Hamburg in which we recalled Kristallnacht, the night when Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were vandalized in 1938, prefiguring and inaugu rating the full terror of the Holocaust. A woman turned up and introduced herself as an outsider. She told how she had strug gled for years with the Jewish-Christian problem because she wanted to know how it came to the point of Shoah, the extermi nation of European Jews. She ended her contribution with the words, “When I had understood Auschwitz, I joined the peace movement.” In this statement I found a different God from the omnipotent Lord of heaven and earth who is completely inde pendent of us. This woman had understood that in the Nazi period in Germany God was small and weak. God was in fact powerless because God had no friends, male or female. God’s spirit had no place to live; God’s sun, the sun of righteousness, did not shine. The God who needs people in order to come into being was a nobody.
This woman did not look up to heaven in order to be com forted by an Almighty Father. She looked within and around herself. She found “that of God,” as the Quakers often say, in
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herself, the strength for resistance, the courage for a clear no in a world that is drunk on the blood of the innocent. And she found another gift of the Spirit, the help of other broth ers and sisters. She was not alone. She did not submit herself to a God who was falsely understood as fate. Nor did she consider living without God and in complete assimilation to the values of this world — career, prestige, income. Instead she held firm to the God who is in us as the power of liberation. Her God was small, a minority, laughable, politically suspect and, from a pragmatic viewpoint, unsuccessful. God is practically irrelevant for the great majority precisely because of God’s noninterfer ence. But God is (to use an expression of American theologians) no “interventionist,” who interferes by intervening, but an “in tentionist,” who makes the divine will and intention discernible. I could simply say: God dreams us, even today.
But, I hear someone object, doesn’t this way of speaking about God only make sense if God embodies some kind of power? If something in our lives changes through and with God? Who is this God who has caused a woman not to let Auschwitz rest, not to let fate be fate, not to give way to the ordinary fatalism of subordination to the wolves that howl the loudest. Does such a God have any kind of power, then, or is this form of divinity as powerless in the face of the forces that control us as any child in Bethlehem? I think the question whether God is the one who holds everything in hand and can intervene or whether God is small under the forces of this world cannot be decided rationally, but rather existentially. “When I had understood Auschwitz, I joined the peace movement.” That is to say: I did not rid myself of God like many who had handed over responsibility to God alone; rather I grasped that God needs us in order to realize what was intended in creation. God dreams us, and we should not let God dream alone. In the words of a Latin American song:
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One day the earth will belong to all people
and the people will be free
as you, God, have willed it
from the very beginning.
This song speaks to God, not about God. It liberates us from the idol of fate in whose power everything happens simply as it happens. It binds us together with God who is not the all powerful conqueror but stands instead on the side of the poor and disadvantaged — a God who is always hidden in the world and wants to become visible. — TS, 13 –17
PEACE, NOT SECURITY
If we really want peace, we must begin disarming where we are on one side, which is neither better nor worse than the other side, but has the advantage of being our side. It is ra tionalistic stupidity to suppose that mutual death threats can be abolished from the world through a kind of business deal. Both partners give a little, and then we have a nice balance again. Those are deceptive hopes, nourished by the idea of security and constituting a betrayal of any real hope of peace. Change can happen only when one of the partners to the conflict be gins to relinquish his or her threatening attitude and makes a tiny step forward alone. Unilateralism contains an existential moment when the rationalism of business sense is abandoned. Change happens at the level of action that contains risk.
The illusion of bourgeois concepts of security lies, I think, in the expectation that peace can come from business dealings, from rational agreement. Behind this idea lies a rationalistic op timism that flies in the face of the genuine despair of peoples subjected to the ideology of security. The history of religions —
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I include here the history of the nonviolent martyrs like Mar tin Luther King, Steve Biko, and Oscar Romero — teaches a very different lesson. It says: It doesn’t happen without victims. It doesn’t happen without risk. Life that excludes and pro tects itself against death protects itself to death. If the “window of vulnerability,” as it is called in military language, is finally closed and walled up, the supposedly secure people inside the fortress will die for lack of light and air. Only life that opens it self to the other life that risks being wounded or killed contains promise. Those who arm themselves are not only killers; they are already dead.
One of the U.S. peace movement’s posters shows a kind of altar standing in a desert landscape. The altar is built on three steps. On top of it stands a bomb, with its nose pointing to the skies; people kneel around it in adoration. The scene is a copy of the biblical story of the golden calf: the bomb is the golden calf from whom the people beg security.
The Reformers’ tradition teaches that people always have some kind of god because there is always something they “fear and love above all things” (Luther). Even atheists have a god in this sense, to whom they bring sacrifices, for whom they work, and from whom they expect security. The correct theological question is thus not whether someone lives with or without a god, but rather which god is worshiped and adored in a particular society. Under the sign of global militarization, as it is now being practiced in and from the Western world, the God-question is easily answered: The god of “this world” is the bomb.
The bomb as symbol has a variety of meanings, on different levels of relevance for our culture. It has an economic meaning, especially evident in the analysis of the connection between mil itarization and underdevelopment. At the request of the United
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Nations, a study was prepared showing the negative conse quences of armaments for the developing nations. This research report, completed for the 1982 special session of the UN on disarmament, treated the interconnection of weapons, develop ment, and global security. The document is often referred to as the Thorsson Report, after Inge Thorsson, who directed the research. It considers how financial resources, raw materials, energy, and human work are put to use for military purposes. The balance of the report, in light of the never-ending demands of the military sector, is devastating. Appended to the report is a list of products needed by the developing nations in those sectors necessary to sustain life: agriculture, production and dis tribution of energy, medicine, transportation, and the like. All these products could be manufactured and effect real changes in those countries if military industry were converted to peaceful purposes.
The calf in Israel’s history was made of gold. It was a symbol of security and welfare. As the calf was forged from the people’s jewelry and ornaments, the Israelites said: “This is your God, O Israel who brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (Exod. 32:4). When I listen to the courtly speeches of West German politicians, I hear them saying exactly the same thing: it is the bomb that protects us from the Communists and brings us pros perity, security, and power. Whoever wants to retain prosperity and security must adore the bomb and must fear, love, and trust it above all things.
The bomb as symbol has another meaning in the field of sci ence. In 1980, 42 percent of all scientists and engineers in the United States were doing military work. In their research and development of new means of mass destruction they are, often without knowing it, adoring the bomb. On a world scale, the majority of all individual projects in scientific research and tech nological development are devoted to military purposes. That
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also means that the majority of scientists and technicians, im mersed in their adoration of the bomb, are completely out of touch with reality. Millions of people lack both clean water and the technologies to make water usable. Millions are with out shelter and have no technical means for making houses out of the local raw materials. Millions are starving and have not learned how to produce nourishing food where they live. But science, untouched by the real suffering of humanity, persists in its fascination with death and seeks to create more and better instruments for killing.
The bomb-symbol also has sexual significance, and not only because of its shape. In patriarchal culture, the man’s sexual po tency is thought to be connected not only with happiness, but also with violence. The German word Vergewaltigung for rape (Gewalt means force or violence) clearly expresses the fact that men can experience sex as violence, conquest, humiliation, and degradation of other persons. The golden calf was, from its ori gins in the Canaanite cult, really a golden steer. The adoration of the bomb is adoration of violence in every form.
The women’s movement has repeatedly uncovered the con nections between male dominance and war, between maleness and self-identification with the warrior, between lust and vio lence. The adoration of bombs made by men is only logical in this sense: In a culture that defines the human as a man and makes of woman an unknown, publicly invisible, irrelevant be ing, the bomb, which is the ultimate weapon, must necessarily become the most important cultural symbol. Just as the desire for security does not rise above the moral level of the bour geoisie, so also the political culture of the present, whose heart and soul are fixed on the bomb, cannot surpass the level of the men who are its rulers. The bomb prohibits any kind of transcendence. It is God, the final, unquestionable reality. The precedence that so-called defense takes over all other political
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interests makes that quite obvious. In the day-to-day speeches of politicians who serve the military we can clearly hear the refrain: “You shall have no other gods besides me.” Defense takes absolute precedence before all other political and social priorities.
In this sense the symbol of the bomb has religious meaning. If I am correct in my observation that political conflicts are be coming more and more obviously religious, that they more and more clearly express absolutely different worldviews, that they are less and less capable of being liberally smoothed over and rationalized, then the bomb is in fact the god of “this world.” The people who adore the bomb carry it within themselves and feel themselves secure in its shadow.
In Toronto, Canada, there is a Center for Culture and Tech nology that collects and continues the work of philosopher and communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, who died in 1980. Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove, director of the McLuhan Program, recently expressed the idea that the atomic bomb, considered as a medium of information, was a good thing. He said in support of the stationing of new nuclear missiles in Eu rope: “I’m absolutely delighted the bomb is there. It’s about time we had something to bring us together.” The essential thought of this successor of McLuhan was that the bomb is a modern myth holding power over the culture’s thinking sim ilar to that formerly possessed by religion. “That myth has become a physical part of everyone’s brain and is now acting as a strong unifying force.” The bomb is “the ultimate infor mation medium . . . the more bombs the better!” De Kerckhove “is sorry that [Pershing 11 and Cruise missiles] are not widely distributed in public places, such as markets.” The bomb is a universal myth; “it... binds people together in a way they have not been linked since the Middle Ages” (New York Times, Feb ruary 12, 1984). It is clear that, as far as McLuhan’s successor is
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concerned, the bomb will not be used. Disarmament is therefore unnecessary. The medium is the message.
I mention this because I consider it more than intellectual nonsense. It is in fact the intellectual and scientific expression of the religion that militarism is propagating on earth. The real, practical adoration of the bomb has found its ideology. One characteristic of this religion is that it cannot distinguish God from Satan. That is also true of the fundamentalists who pre dict the end of the world as God’s will and promote it through their politics. God, for them, is neither love nor justice, but pure power. Militarization of the whole world is the accomplishment of this God: strength is his highest ideal, violence his method, and security his promise.
The peace movement has freed itself from this god. That lib eration involves a “conversion”: turning away from false life, turning toward another form of life. In recent years I have again and again met people who have told me, with tears in their eyes, that they have been only “involved” in the peace movement for a few months, and that it has changed their whole lives. “Now I know why I am here.” Those are the conversions that are hap pening, in huge numbers, before our eyes: the turning from a violent society to a peaceful one in which conflicts are carried through bloodlessly and without weapons. The image the Bible uses for this conversion is drawn entirely from materials and technology. It does not speak simply of a change of heart, but rather of a conversion of the armaments industry to a peaceful industry: swords into plowshares.
Thanks to the massive disruption, or rather destruction, of religion by the dominant churches in our country, many people do not even know that the conversion from security to peace is the most important religious event in their lives — just as our bishops fail to comprehend that people are seeking God when they fasten stickers proclaiming “Fight Atomic Death” on the
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doors of their houses. When they do this, they have converted the bourgeois desire for security, mediated by possessions and property, into the universal longing for peace, a desire that in cludes the other members of the human family as well and that is mediated by another way of being, namely, being for others.
This is only a start. Someday this movement will be so strong, so unmistakable, so ready to renounce and to suffer, that everyone will be able to see the other God within it. Today it is plain that whoever continues to arm some people is working toward the death of all. Why did God make us as weaponless beings in the first place? The movement to disarm the human being is just beginning. — WV, 7–11
A SPIRITUALITY OF CREATION
In my own search for a new language of celebration, I am struck by the fact that verbs, not nouns, spring to mind. I need to won der, to be amazed, to be in awe, to renew myself in the rhythm of creation, to perceive its beauty, to rejoice in creation, and to praise the source of life. Listing these verbs reminds me of people who believe that God has created them and all creatures, who trust in the goodness of creation. I cannot forget, however, all my brothers and sisters who have never learned to wonder, to be amazed, to renew themselves, and to rejoice. I think of those whose experiences do not lead to a deep trust and a belief in the goodness of creation. In German there is a colloquial ex pression for the people I have in mind — he or she is a kaputter Typ. He or she is broken, tuned out, kaput, without meaning or function. The German word kaputt refers to a machine or a thing, not to an organic whole. In the world of the kaputter Typ, there is no sense of relatedness to other people. Relation ships are disturbed or even nonexistent. The language of the
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broken one cannot reach another person. She is unable to ex press her feelings, and her perception of the world is absurdly reduced. Her action does not make use of her capacities. The broken person has no trust in creation, no sense of her created ness or the possibility of empowerment. The broken person has been socialized in a culture that threatens all the capacities of human beings to take in creation in wonder and in awe, in self renewal and in appreciation of beauty, in joy and in expressions of gratefulness and praise. Who then is the kaputter Typ? I will not answer this question, because we know him too well. You know him as I know her. After a long talk with a depressed student, I, exhausted from listening to him, finally asked, “Was there anything in the last year about which you felt some joy?” His response was that even the word “joy” had not come to his lips for two years, and he added that, objectively speaking, he had no use for such a word. He had never learned how to wonder or to be amazed.
Philosophy began with wondering, thaumazein. Wondering is part of our day-to-day experience as well. I recall when my youngest daughter learned to tell time. One day, in utter joy, she exclaimed, “Look, Mom, this is a truly wonderful five be fore half past six!” Perhaps children are the greatest conveyors of amazement. They do not bypass anything as too trivial or mundane. They free us from our banal and dull perspectives. To affirm creation means to enter into the freedom of amazement and delight. Nothing is simply available, usable, or to be taken for granted. The broken person will counter, “What is so special about it? It has always been that way.” His capacity to trivialize everything has surpassed his capacity to wonder. He is crippled by a “dryness of the heart,” as the mystics termed it. He no longer wonders about the wonders of the world. Children and artists are teachers of a spirituality of creation. They recombine created things into a new synthesis, and they change triviality
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into wonder, givenness into createdness. Through them we un learn triviality and learn amazement; we again see the magnolia tree, and we see it as if for the first time.
Another element essential to a spirituality of creation is the human capacity to perceive beauty. We are able to notice, to ob serve, to perceive in a purposeless way that we call aesthetics. In German, the verb “to perceive” is wahrnehmen. Its literal mean ing, which is “to take something as true,” demonstrates that perception is related to truth. Our aesthetic perception lures us into truth. When “the doors to perception are cleansed,” as Blake put it, we see more and we perceive the created world in a different way. The world appears no longer as disposable dead stuff but as a vital growing organism. In aesthetics we are all animists who believe that there is a soul in every living be ing. Our perception of aesthetic objects makes them responsive. A dialogue ensues between the perceiver and the otherwise in animate object. We grasp the interrelatedness of creation in this dialogue between the sun and me, the birch and me. Perhaps then we see as God saw in the beginning when she said, “It is very good.” The Hebrew word for good, tov, also means fair or beautiful. Thus God said on creating the universe, “Behold, it is all very beautiful.” To love creation means to perceive its beauty in the most unexpected places. An aesthetic education that deepens our perception is not a luxury for the elite but a cultural necessity for everyone. To believe in creation is to per ceive and to engage in the aesthetic mode of perception. One cannot love God if one does not know what beauty is:
Ernesto Cardenal,
questioned on how he came to be a poet, a priest, and a revolutionary,
gave as his first reason
love of beauty.
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This led him, he said,
to poetry
(and beyond);
it led him to god
(and beyond);
it led him to the gospel
(and beyond);
it led him
to socialism
(and beyond).
How weak a love of beauty must be
that is content with house beautiful;
how trivial a love of poetry
that stops with the text;
how small a love of god
that becomes sated in him
not hungrier;
how little we love the gospel
if we keep it to ourselves;
how powerless are socialistic yearnings
if they fear
to go beyond what will be.
The most terrifying quality about the life of the broken per son — both the one I meet and the one I am — is the absence of joy. In the Jewish tradition, joy was understood as the most natural response to our having been created, while sadness was deemed a rejection of the gift of life. In this metaphysical sense, joy is not derived from special events or the presents we receive; it involves the mere delight in being alive and gratefulness for the gift of life. But for an increasing number of people in secular culture the expression “a gift of life” does not make too much sense: If the giver disappears, why should we see life as a gift
90 DOROTHEE SOELLE
at all, why should we not understand it instead as a biological accident, a casual event, an unforeseen occurrence that neither has nor requires an explanation? When life has lost its qual ity of being something given to us, it turns into a mere matter of fact. People grow up in this culture without any education for joy. Does the deep, reasonless joy of being alive die in a world without religion? Does it make a difference with regard to our capacity for enjoyment whether we live in a world we think is made by human beings or in one we believe to be cre ated by God? I do not know the answer to these questions, yet I observe a remarkable absence of joy in secular, industrialized cultures. At the same time, my own spiritual experience teaches me that to recall creation, to be reminded of our createdness in a community of people who struggle together, enhances my own awareness of joy — of how much I need it, how much I yearn for it. A spirituality of creation reminds us that we were born for joy.
These elements of a creation-centered spirituality — wonder, renewal, a sense of beauty, and the capacity to rejoice — are integrated into the act of praising creation. To love someone is, among other things, to praise the person we love. To laud is another purposeless action of which only the human being is capable, at least consciously. The early church fathers said that even animals laud God, but without awareness. If we are in love with someone, we are seized by the need to make our love explicit, to speak about the beloved one. We rush to dis cover a language in which we can praise the beloved. Could it be that we are in love with creation, as God is according to James Weldon Johnson’s poem? If this is true, then it is not enough to think about nature’s beauty; we have to articulate it. Our feelings become stronger and clearer when we express them. We become better lovers of the earth when we tell the earth how beautiful it is. It takes time to learn how to praise
A Different Experience: Power and Mysticism 91
the beauty of creation. On the way, we rekindle our gratitude and shed the self who took creation for granted. We recover the sense of awe before life; we recover the lost reverence and pas sion for the living. This is not a saccharine, superficial form of spirituality....
In her novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker presents a con versation between two black women about God, which is one of the best texts on religion in contemporary literature that I know of. The exchange between Celie and Shug has a dual thrust. On the one hand, it is a critique of traditional religion, its God-talk and its God-image; on the other hand, it is an attempt to affirm God in a new manner.
Celie has lived her life with a God-image that she now rec ognizes is dubious in the extreme. When Shug asks what Celie’s God looks like, she sheepishly replies, “He big and old and tall and graybearded and white. He wear white robes and go bare footed.” His eyes are “sort of bluish-gray. Cool. Big though. White lashes....” This God represents the power that white people have over blacks and that men have over women. With the awareness that the God she has been praying to all her life is a white man comes the shocking realization that she detests, and no longer needs, this God who “sit up there glorying in being deef....” Just as “white people never listen to colored, period,” so this God has never listened to the cries of the black woman Celie, whose father was lynched, whose mother was de ranged, whose stepfather raped her repeatedly, whose life, prior to meeting Shug, was stunted by unrelenting toil and humil iation. And yet Celie struggles with God. Her need for God persists past her burgeoning rejection of an outworn white male deity: “But deep in my heart I care about God. What he going to think. And come to find out, he don’t think. . . . But it ain’t easy, trying to do without God.”
92 DOROTHEE SOELLE
Shug has already laid to rest her once negative and empty concept of God: “When I found out I thought God was white, and a man, I lost interest.” This realization, however, signaled the beginning of her religious journey, not the end. Inspired to move beyond “the old white man,” Shug now challenges Celie with a full-blown conception of God that departs radically from white, patriarchal definitions:
Here’s the thing . . . the thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit.
Hers is a creational spirituality. The dialogue between this God and Shug, who refers to God as “It” because “God ain’t a he or a she,” flows out of her awareness that everything in creation is of God. “Listen,” she says to Celie, “God love everything you love — and a mess of stuff you don’t.” Shug’s God-talk is grounded in her experience as a woman and in her love of life.
Shug’s exceptional reflections on the relationship between God and humans climax in a passionate affirmation of the source of all life: “But more than anything else, God love admiration....I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” God is not syn onymous with omnipotent control; rather, God’s power lies in sharing life with others. The admiration God loves is our sense of connectedness with the whole of creation. We all have diffi culties with praising the God of creation. We all often walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it. But God does not give up trying to lure us into oneness with all creation.
— TWTL, 46 –52
Photo Mircea Ruba
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