Well-Being and Ontology

Part 6, Seen and Forgiven

In the last post I described Karl Rahner’s description of making contact with our ontological ground. And recall, Rahner argues that this encounter is available to everyone always. God’s offer of himself is constant and universally available. We only have to listen.

But what might that involve? The line that struck me in Rahner’s description of God’s self-communication was this: “it is this person who experiences himself as one who does not forgive himself, but who is forgiven.”

That line echoes a passage I used in The Shape of Joy from Francis Spufford’s book Unapologetic. In The Shape of Joy I wanted a religiously skeptical and agnostic reader to make what I call the “outward turn” toward transcendence. But not transcendence as propositional belief but as an encounter with our ontological ground. Describing how that ontological encounter might be achieved and experienced is difficult to put into words, but I think Spufford does a great job at getting at it. Which is why I share it in The Shape of Joy. And what’s interesting for this series is how Spufford echoes Rahner’s description of how this encounter is experienced as one of forgiveness.

Here is the passage from Spufford, longer than the one I share in The Shape of Joy:

We live in a noisy place, inside and out, and the noise we hear pours into the noise we make. It’s hard to listen, even when misery nudges you into trying.

Fortunately, the international league of the guilty has littered the landscape with specialized buildings where attention comes easier. I walk in ... The calm in here is not denial. It’s an ancient, imperturbable lack of surprise. To any conceivable act you might have committed, the building is set up only to say, ah, so you have, so you did; yes. Would you like to sit down? I sit down. I shut my eyes ...

... [W]hen I block out the distractions of vision the silence is almost shockingly loud. It sings in my ears. Well, no; metaphors are inevitable here but we might as well try to use them accurately, and to prune out the implications we don’t want. The silence has no tune. It doesn’t sing. It hisses; it whines thinly at a high constant pitch, as if the world had a background note we don’t usually hear. It crackles like the empty grooves at the end of a vinyl record ... Which is welcome, because it’s the unending song of myself that I’ve come in here to get a break from. I breathe in, I breathe out. I breathe in, I breathe out. I breathe in, I breathe out ... and so far as I have to have something to concentrate on I concentrate on that ... I breathe in, I breathe out. The silence hisses, neither expectantly nor unexpectantly.

And in it I start to pick out more and more noises that were too quiet for me to have attended to them before. I become intensely aware of small things happening in the space around me that I can’t see ... I hear the door sigh open, sigh closed. I hear the creak of the wood as someone else settles into a pew ... The audio assemblage of the world getting along perfectly well without me. The world sounding the same as it did before I was born, the same as it will do after I’m dead.

I expand. Not seeing, I feel the close grain of the hardwood I’m sitting on ... My mind moves outwards, to the real substance of things that are not-me beyond the church walls. I feel the churchyard grass, repeating millionfold the soft green spire of each blade ... the scratchy roughness of each suburban brick. Out and out ... receding higher and higher ... the limb of the planet, shining in electric blue; the ash-colored moon; the boiling chemical clouds of the gas giants; the shining pinprick of our star; the radiant drift of the Western Spiral Arm; the plughole spin of one galaxy ... Breathe in, breathe out. Yes, time. Expand again, not from this particular place, but this particular moment, this perch on one real instant in the flood of real instants. Breathe in, breathe out. Day opens the daisies, sucks carbon into every leaf, toasts the land, raises moisture in the clouds. Night closes flowers, throws the protein switch for rest in mobile creatures, condenses dew, pulls the winds that day has pushed. Breathe. Dark cycles into light ... this cycle measured in hours spins inside others timed in weeks and years and eons ... The forests ebb and flow. The hills themselves melt like wax. The ice advances and retreats ... This instant at which I sit is as narrow a slice of the reality of the whole as a hairline crack would be in a pavement that reaches the stars ...

But now it gets indescribable. Now I register something that precedes all this manifold immensity that is not-me and yet is real; something makes itself felt from beyond or behind or beneath it all. What can “beyond” or “behind” or “beneath” mean, when all possible directions or dimensions are already included in the sum of what it so? ... Beyond again: but I’m not talking about a movement through or out of shape altogether, yet not into vacuum, not into emptiness. Into fullness rather. Into an adjacent fullness, no further away than the thickness of everything, which feels now as if, in this direction that can’t be stated, it is no thickness at all. It feels as if, considered in this way, every solid thing is as thin as a film in its particular being, and is backed onto some medium in which the journey of my attention’s been taking, toward greater and greater solidity, richer and richer presence, reaches an absolute. What’s in front is real; what’s behind is the reason for it being real, the source of its realness. Beyond, behind, beneath all solid things there seems to be a solidity. Behind, beneath, beyond all changes, all wheeling and whirring processes, all flows, there seems to be flow itself. And though I’m in the dark behind my closed eyelids, and light is part of the everything it feels as if I’m feeling beyond, so can only be a metaphor here, it seems to shine, this universal backing to things, with lightless light ... It feels as if everything is backed with light ... And that includes me. Every tricky thing that I am, my sprawling piles of memories and secrets and misunderstandings, float on the sea ... [I]t’s not impersonal. Someone, not something, is here. Though it’s on a scale that defeats imagining and exists without location ... I feel what I feel when there’s someone beside me. I am being looked at. I am being known; known in some wholly accurate and complete way that is only possible when the point of view is not another local self in the world but glows in the whole medium in which I live and move. I am being seen from the inside, but without any of my own illusions. I am being seen from behind, beneath, beyond. I am being read by what I am made of.

On one level I can feel that this is absolutely safe. A parent’s safe hold is nothing compared to this ... But on another level, it’s terrifying ... Being screened off by my separateness is all I know in my dealings with somebodies who look at me. This is utterly exposed ... It takes no account, at all, of my illusions about myself. It lays me out, roofless, wall-less, worse than naked. It knows where my kindness comes checkered with secret cruelties or mockeries. It knows where my love comes with reservations. It knows where I hate, and fear, and despise ... It knows all this, and it shines at me. In fact it never stops shining. It is continuous, this attention it pays. I cannot make it turn away. But I can turn away from it, easily; all I have to do is to stop listening to the gentle, unendingly patient call it stitches through the fabric of everything there it is. It compels nothing, so all I have to do is stop paying attention. And I do, after not very long. I can’t bear it, for very long at once, to be seen like that. To be seen like that is judgment in itself. As a long-ago letter writer put it, someone who clearly went where I’ve just been, it is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God. Only, to be seen like that is forgiveness too--or at any rate, the essential beginning of forgiveness...

Call it our ontological ground or the light backing all things, this encounter is, as I said, available to everyone always. And at the heart of this meeting is an experience of being both seen and forgiven.