What are you thinking?

My cello teacher has a way asking me what seems, a first sight , to be a simple question. “What are you thinking when you …?” The question could refer to my bow hold, or how I draw it across the strings, or what my left hand is doing, or what are my fingers doing when they encounter the strings. Provocative! And informing. What I am thinking, what my mood happens to be, or what my state of mind is at any given moment, how I am sitting – all feed into the quality of the sound my darling cello produces. That sound accurately portrays something about my state of being. I mean Being with a capital B.

The possibilities provoked by this mode of questioning are endless. The question, “What do you think about when …”, is a valuable entry into profound reflection.

What do you think about when you enter the church, when you sit, perhaps, in a moment of silent preparation prior to enjoining the mysteries of our faith? And if you think about God, what are you thinking? What do you think about when you take the host into your hand?

Long before he was a saint or bishop, the 4th century Cyril of Jerusalem said

In approaching … make your left hand a throne for the right, as for that which is to receive a King. … [and] after having carefully hallowed your eyes by the touch of the holy body, partake of it … [1]

A practice to which many of us still adhere. But what are you thinking as you do that? And what are we doing when we hallow our eyes. We hold God in the palms of our hands, both literally and metaphorically. That is the nature of sacrament. Impossibly possible.

Richard Kearney suggests that “one of the most telling ways in which the infinite comes to be experienced and imagined by finite minds is as possibility – that is, as the ability to be.” That is a curious phrase to adopt for God. But Kearney does not offer us some recently discovered ‘Master Word by which we might unlock the ancient Secret of divine nature. [2] Rather it is a kind of poetic conjecture with which to exercise our spiritual muscles.

Many scriptural passages inform us that what is impossible for us is possible for God. John’s prologue tells us that our ability to become sons of God in the Kingdom is made possible by God: ‘Light shone in the darkness and to all who received it was given the possibility (dunamis) to become sons of God.’ Here, it is crucial for us to keep in mind that the Greek term dunamis translates as either power or possibility, a device of semantic ambivalence that is similar to John’s use of the Greek pneuma which translates as either wind or spirit.

And the Gospels are full of metaphors, images, parables and symbols deployed to communicate the eschatological promise in which the “God of small things,”[3] is vibrantly active. Yeast in flour, pearl of great price, mustard seed growing into the largest tree in the world (poetic licence) in which the birds of the sky can roost, and, of course, an infant. Big things grow from little things, minute things.

The little things are imbued with possibility, a possibility only realised when some other agency cooperates. The baker crafts the dough, the pearl is sold at market, the farmer plants the mustard seed and nurtures its growth, the mother nurtures the infant from the very genesis of conception, the cellist plays the cello. There is, as it were, a gift exchange, the mystery of growth, between the human agent and the little thing.

Christ became a little thing, ‘the least of these,’ when he emptied himself of absolute power (kenosis) echoing Isaiah’s striking phrase, ‘a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.’ (Isaiah 42.1-4) Gospel also hath it that the Judgement of the Kingdom is related to how we respond in history, here and now, to ‘least of these, elakhistōn (Matthew 25.40).

Which brings us to the paradox that although the Kingdom has already come – and is “incarnate here and now in the loving gestures of Christ and all those who give, or receive, a cup of water – it still remains a possibility yet to come.” ‘As “eternal,” the kingdom transcends all chronologies of time.’ Christ indicated this when he said, ‘before Abraham was, I am.’ John (8.58) ‘In short, the Kingdom is (1) already there as historical possibility, and (2) not yet there as historically realised kingdom “come on earth.”’ [4]

Now, I am taking merciless short cuts here, but I am steering towards the idea that creation may be depicted as an endless giving of possibility.

Shortly before her death in Auschwitz, Dutch born Etty Hillesum wrote:

You God cannot help us but we must help you and defend your dwelling place inside us to the last.[5]

Centuries before her, Nicholas of Cusa (1404-1464), inter alia, declared that “God is all he is able to be,”[6] a phrase that needs unpacking. Kearney’s words.

Unlike the God of metaphysical omnipotence, … which seeks to justify evil as part of the divine will, … [the] notion of God as an “abling to be” (posse or possest) points in a radically different direction. … Since God is all good, God is not able to be non-God – that is, … defective or evil. In other words, God is not omnipotent in the traditional metaphysical sense[7] … The Divine is not some being able to be all good and evil things. That is why God could not help Etty Hillesum and other victims of the Holocaust: God is not responsible for evil. And Hillesum understood this all too well when she turned the old hierarchies on their head and declared that it is we who must help God to be God. …

If Hillesum and others like her had not let God be God by defending the divine dwelling place of caritas within them, even in the most hellish moments of the death-camps, there would have been no measure of love – albeit as small as a mustard seed – to defy the hate of the Gestapo.[8]

Many figures in literature echo this way of thinking about God, that the possible God relies on human beings to become God.

The immortal Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, wrote:

Why don’t you think of Him [God] as the one who is coming, one who has been approaching from all eternity; the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from projecting His birth into the ages that are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don’t you see how everything that happens is again and again a new beginning, and couldn’t it be His [God’s] beginning, since, in itself, starting is always so beautiful?

If He is the most perfect one, must not what is less perfect precede him, so that he can choose himself out of fullness and superabundance? – Must not He be the last one, so that He can include everything in himself, and what meaning would we have if He whom we are longing for has already existed? As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him.

So, as Evelyn Underhill wrote,

I COME in the little things,

Saith the Lord:

Not borne on morning wings

Of majesty, but I have set My Feet

Amidst the delicate and bladed wheat

That springs triumphant in the furrowed sod.

There do I dwell, in weakness and in power;

Not broken or divided, saith our God!

In your strait garden plot I come to flower:

About your porch My Vine

Meek, fruitful, doth entwine;

Waits, at the threshold, Love’s appointed hour.[9]

Doug Bannerman © 2021

[1] St Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 23.21 see CHURCH FATHERS/ Catechetical Lecture 23 (Cyril of Jerusalem).webarchive

[2] Richard Kearney “Re-imagining God” in John D Caputo and Michael J Scanlon Eds. Transcendence and Beyond: A Postmodern Enquiry (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2007) pp51-65

[3] The God of Small Things is the title pf Arundhati Roy’s wonderful novel

[4] Kearney op cit p 53

[5] Etty Hillesum An Interrupted Life (New York: Owl, 1966) p 176

[6] Nicholas of Cusa Trialogos de Possest, in J. Hopkins A Concise Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1978) p69. The original Latin is: Deus est omne id quod esse potest.

[7] As understood by Leibnitz and Hegel

[8] Kearney op cit p 69

[9] From the poem Immanence, by Evelyn Underhill, Nicholson & Lee, eds. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse 1917