The Eye Through Which God Sees Me
From abyss to embrace (Parts 4 and 5 of "My Search for Certainty")
Dear Living Dark reader,
Following on from “The Abyss of Doubt” and “Stumbling across God,” here is the third and final installment of “My Search for Certainty,” the essay that I wrote nearly thirty years ago, at age 25, to articulate my own philosophical and spiritual beliefs to a friend who had challenged me to do this after listening to me quote from a host of books for months on end. Remember, the first installment contains a full introduction, newly written by me for you, that explains the essay’s origin.
In “The Abyss of Doubt,” younger me detailed the years-long experience of philosophical schizophrenia that had led him to a state of agonized inability to believe anything while longing to believe something. “Stumbling across God” recounted his discovery of an initially disorienting but increasingly fascinating and eventually pivotal capacity for a special kind of self-awareness that seemed to link up with what he had read in various books about mystical awakening. “It wasn’t long,” he asserted, “before I made the connection and understood that I had stumbled across God.”
This final installment delves even further into younger Matt’s intellectual and spiritual outlook during that formative period. Here, you will see him—or rather, you will see me (to drop the third-person shtick)—grappling with specific theological concepts, including the notion of forgiveness through Christ’s substitutionary atonement, the doctrine of the resurrection, and the relationship between theism and pantheism, that were central to my ongoing conversations with that friend in the context of the Southern Baptist church in the rural Missouri Ozarks where we had met several months earlier. In a sense, this third installment serves as a more direct window into those discussions than the previous two installments did, as the topics it addresses clearly indicate some of the specific questions and ideas that had fueled our interaction. I haven’t generally written as much about Christianity in the context of my own beliefs or outlook as I did in this essay, though in my journals you can see me returning to it repeatedly over the years. And of course some of my books and stories have grappled with Christianity in a subversively horrific way.
Before handing you off to the 25-year-old version of myself, I’ll point out that while the core understanding expressed in this essay still resonates with my current outlook, the passage of time has inevitably brought a deeper understanding and a broader perspective that plays more in a general nondual direction (as reflected in some of the things that I have published here at The Living Dark). Back then, armed with my youthful enthusiasm, an overheated intellect, and a bookshelf full of well-worn volumes, I plunged into the writing of this piece with a kind of heedless zeal. Today, with three decades of continued living and learning standing between me and that former self—including, in a formal vein, a master’s degree in religious studies and a Ph.D. in leadership with a dissertation written on a historical religious subject—I can see that my enthusiasm was also accompanied by the limitations inherent in a less mature mind and a limited cultural vantage point. That perspective had been formed and informed largely by American evangelical Protestantism. This shows up in, to name just one example, the essay’s broad-brush references to the relationship between Christianity and Jewish religious beliefs and practices in the first century C.E., which were clearly, though unconsciously, a bit under-informed, or at least lacking in nuance, and which were planted firmly within the theological and conversational soil of the essay’s precipitating Southern Baptist social relationship.
I’m also now also able to recognize that the mystically inclined take on Christianity and religion that I explicated to my friend, which felt so bold as I was stating it, was actually only that way within the context of the church environment where we were interacting. It wouldn’t have seemed quite as revolutionary to, say, the many mainline Protestants and other Christians of a more liberal theological persuasion whose thoughts and company I had not yet been exposed to.
That’s one of the things that stands out most to me when I reread this piece after so many years: that its overall thrust and tone illustrates James Hillman’s insightful observation in The Soul’s Code that a person’s daimon thrives on opposition. Hillman focused mainly on the influence of parental opposition or incomprehension to a child’s native, budding interests and inclinations, which serve to sharpen and clarify what the daimon really wants. But I think broader social and cultural circumstances can also serve the same function. For me, the fact of being isolated, as it were, within a social-religious circumstance where my native interests and inclinations went far beyond the attitudes and understandings that were considered conventional—and remember, this was back in 1995 and 1996, when the internet was still new to most people (including me) and had only just begun to form new real-time social communities that were not dependent on geographical location—this fact, I say, had an effect that was exactly what Hillman described. Writing this essay, to explain not only to my friend and to myself but to a wider invisible audience that I was unconsciously positing as I wrote it—perhaps an audience consisting of the writers, thinkers, and sages whose company I craved, and whose society seemed cut off from me by my then-present social environment—was a significant formative experience for me.
I hope the whole of this text has provided something of interest for you as well. What have been your own most important, most pivotal experiences in a philosophical or spiritual vein? Who are the people, and what are the events and circumstances, that you can recognize in retrospect as having helped to define you by spurring you to define yourself? It’s worth considering.
Warm regards,
My Search for Certainty
Part 4
“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”
—Meister Eckhart
“For it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.”
—Philippians 2:13
In retrospect I can see that I did what I had to: I reconstructed my relationship with God from the ground up. Considering where I was coming from, this was the only way I could do it. I had reached such a point of skepticism that I could accept no statement, no claim, no belief, let alone a comprehensive theory, without asking at each and every point, “Why?” My college career might have been easier academically if I had majored rather than minored in philosophy, for I seem to possess by nature the skeptical cast of mind that university philosophy programs seek to inculcate.
Asking questions is not the problem, of course. The refusal of most middle Americans to question their own presuppositions is a source of never-ending irritation to me, and a dose of philosophy would do them some good. But the point of asking questions is to find answers, whereas the American university, as I experienced it, seems designed to induce students to ask questions without knowing how to answer them. I wasn’t even taught to expect an answer in my colleges classes.
It has taken me too long, but I’ve finally found one.
It should be quite evident that my idea of God is mystical through and through. An excellent definition of mysticism is given by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy, which is simply another name for the mystical insight. Huxley defines the perennial philosophy as
the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine reality; and the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.
Separating this definition into its three divisions, I can see that it more than adequately describes my new vision of life. My recognition of an invisible reality of real importance corresponds to the first part. My quest for my own identity, culminating in the discovery that God lies at my center, corresponds to the second. The third part is the natural outflowing from the first two, for the recognition of a divine Reality cannot be filed away for future reference like a unit of factual knowledge. It demands a response from the whole person. Huxley’s description of this point is simply a restatement of the traditional Christian assertion that “the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” This has given my life a meaning that it lacked. As Huxley said, knowledge of God is the final end. I do not seek it with something else in mind; rather, everything else that I seek is sought with it in mind.
Regarding God’s nature, I count myself among the many who maintain that we can know nothing about Him. I don’t mean that we cannot know Him, but to know and to know about are two different things. We cannot know about God because He lies by definition outside the realm of our ability to conceive or describe. As I found in my own inner exploration, the fact of God’s location at the center of our being precludes our being able to directly apprehend Him. In the Bible this is expressed in the rhetorical question, “Who has known the mind of the LORD, that he may instruct him?” and in Isaiah’s recognition that His ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8,9). Throughout the Bible there runs a current of understanding that God is beyond the capability of our mind.
Other religions have a lively grasp of this as well. Hinduism, for example, has taught this truth for thousands of years. In the Upanishads we find the following: