June 18, 2012
Our
potential for distinctively human presence is realized within
the transcendent horizon of our personality. As we have seen,
it can be expressed in three modes of self-transcendence:
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Self-presence: Self-awareness and
self-knowledge. It includes our pre-transcendent levels but
is more about being in touch with “what we are going
through” in the depths of our being, and with increasing
contact with our deeper spiritual identity vs. the
functional, or already-known, aspects of our identity. St.
Teresa of Avila emphasizes this mode of presence in
describing prayer as inclusive of “what we are going
through.”
-
Presence to others: This is physical
presence and may involve functional skills – parenting,
teaching, etc. However, the essential “formative” elements
go beyond the physical to include spiritual attunement to
and care for the other.
-
Presence to the Mystery: Openness to
inspirations, to the call of God to be more. . . This is a
call to embody our deepest potential for form-receptivity
and self-donation.
That transcendent
presence is the central dimension – i.e. the distinctively human
dimension – becomes evident when we consider the affects of
experiences of pain, absence and grief, which involve but call
us beyond our pre-transcendent fixations. Human trials
inevitably become spiritual or existential in nature,
challenging our vital and functional assumptions about our
life. Such trials also join us to the human community, creating
spiritual connection through bonds of suffering and empathic
communion.
We grieve on all
levels of human embodiment. If we pay attention to our
experiences of pain and grief and loss, we may find that we can
identify something of each level coming into play, for example,
in grief: we grieve for place, for bodily, physical endowment,
for ego diminishment. In these words from a review of Joan
Didion’s recently-published memoir of loss, John Banville (“NY
Times Book Review,” Nov. 3, 2011) observes that
The author as she presents herself here,
aging and baffled, is defenseless against the pain of loss, not
only the loss of loved ones but the loss that is yet to
come: the loss that is, of selfhood.
Losses in the physical, material realm
point inevitably to the inner subjective realms – i.e., to our
very sense of selfhood .
Roland Barthes’s
Mourning Diary, a journal on “scraps of paper” he kept
after his mother died in the late 70’s, provides a timely
testimony of grief’s power to penetrate to the inner depths of a
personality .
Everyone (knows) bereavement’s intensity. But
it’s impossible to measure how much someone is afflicted. (10)
Struck by the abstract nature of absence: yet
it’s so painful, lacerating. . . . the pain of absence –
perhaps therefore love? (42)
I write my suffering less and less yet it
grows all the stronger, shifting to the realm of the eternal. .
. (215)
Human experiences
of suffering and loss refer us to the central dimension of
spiritual transcendence. This is the primary locus of our
spiritual life, of prayer, meditation, our deepest reflections,
and our relationship to God, or the Mystery. Simone Weil wrote
that “contact with human creatures is given us through the sense
of presence. (But) contact with God is given us through the
sense of absence.” (The Notebooks of Simone Weil,
Volume I, p. 239.) This is why the spiritual traditions view
negation as an essential means of inner flourishing. Absence
draws us to the Mystery. Hence a teaching such as the following
from the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing:
Leave aside this everywhere and this
everything, in exchange for this nowhere and this nothing. . .
A person’s affection is remarkably changed in the spiritual
experience of this nothing when it is achieved nowhere. . . .
(Quoted in Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism,
p. xix)
Our presence is capable of being spiritualized. Our affections
can become transcendent, overcoming prior determination by
pre-transcendent motivations. This “transformation” effectively
recreates our presence, even in the midst of absence, pain, and
loss.
