Loving A Hidden God

THE NEED FOR AN OPEN MIND

Consider, my friends, how difficult it is for people to go home when they have a disruptive home. They rush downtown with enthusiasm but when the time comes for them to return to their own house, they get terribly depressed. Going to their home means facing aggravation, recriminations, fighting and turmoil. When there is no peace at home among those who live there, the house is disorderly and there is a natural desire to run away. Well, if people are miserable going home, afraid to face their family's wrangling, how much more miserable are those who are reluctant to face their own conscience, afraid of being overwhelmed by the strife arising from their sins.

Commentary on Psalm 33/2, 8.

There is no use pretending to sit "quietly" and piously "listen" to the "Divine Teacher" within if we do not listen with an open mind, a mind that is receptive to any message that is given even if it is disturbing. It is not an easy thing to do. As Augustine remarks above: when our life is not as it should be we tend to try to hide from the truth.

Of course, it is impossible to have a completely "open mind". There is an axiom that I seem to remember from philosophy that warned: "Omnis recipitur secundum modum recipientis" that is, "All that is received by a hearer is received according to the circumstances of the hearer." Augustine repeated the same truth when he wrote:

Whatever is understood through knowing is limited by the specific powers of understanding possessed by the one who knows.

City of God, 12.19

If you pour water into a cylinder it will take the form of the cylinder. If you pour it into a rectangular tub, it will appear rectangular. If you pour it into a vessel with a faulty bottom, it will rush through with no lasting effect. So too the messages received and understood by our mind are to some extent formed and shaped by the extent of our knowing powers and by our history. Through our overly passionate past reactions to our lusts and prejudices and fears and hatreds we learn that there are certain areas where the best principle for us to follow is "not to go there again" lest we lose control of what might happen.

Even in ordinary matters, each of us listens and understands messages a bit differently. Knowledge is not a process where all the listeners are like homologous wax waiting patiently to receive exactly the same imprint from a common experience. We are not ponds of soft wax but pools of living spirit, amorphous globs created individually and separately and then shaped and molded by the different experiences of our lives, our history, our actions and reactions to the stimulus of the world beyond ourselves.

These different perceptions of the world outside provide the raw material which the Divine Teacher within uses to reveal the truths that we need to know to achieve our eternal destiny. As Augustine frequently told his listeners, we may all hear the same words but we understand them in our own way. The story of the blind men asked to describe an elephant brings out this truth. The one who held the trunk thought the elephant was like a snake. The one who embraced the leg thought it to be something like a tree. The one who felt its side thought it to be like a wall. The one who held its tail thought it to be like a vine. In each case what they said was true but their experience was too narrow to see the whole truth. Their judgment was influenced by where they were in life and what their condition was. So too when we listen for the truth about reality, we may hear the truth but it will always be incomplete. Only God can see the whole picture.

This is why the "Divine Teacher" does his teaching from inside each of us, revealing to us the truth, the message, that is important specifically for us at this moment in our life. Augustine was not surprised by the possibility that a group of human beings could read the same passage of Sacred Scripture and take a meaning from it that was different for each, indeed even different from the intention of the writer. Speaking to God, he asks:

What harm is there, O God, if the words of Scripture convey different messages which may well be true for different people? How I am I harmed, I ask again, if I think the writer had one meaning and someone else thinks there is another? We both believe him to be a speaker of the truth. Each of us is trying to understand what the writer meant. What harm is done if one hears a message which you, O God (the Light of all minds seeking truth), show to be indeed true, even though the author of the passage did not actually mean to convey that message? The writer's meaning in the words may be different from what I take from them, but both are true.

Confessions, 12.18

Thus, the story of the Jesus curing the blind man may be an interesting event to one who can see, but to the blind it is a message of hope. Those who are involved in an adulterous relationship may read the story of the woman taken in adultery and forgiven by Jesus as an encouragement to turn their lives around. For the confessor innocent of that failure (but guilty of many others) it may be seen as an instruction on how to deal with the penitents when they come and ask forgiveness.

Augustine himself experienced such "learning through stories". The first of these was through a conversation with his friend Simplicianus who told him the store of the conversion of Victorinus, an intellectual like Augustine with much to lose by public proclamation of his Faith but who bravely went ahead and declared it anyway. For many who heard the story it was just a story but for Augustine it was a message which filled him with enthusiasm to follow Victorinus' example. (Confessions, 8.5) The second story was the story told him by Ponticianus about the hermit Anthony who had turned his back on the things of this world to pursue God wholeheartedly. (Confessions, 8.6) Once again, for many others was just a story, but the special message Augustine heard was life-changing.

Augustine listened to such stories with an open mind, ready to receive the inspiration from the God within, and the message changed the direction of his life. As he says:

O Lord, you were turning me around, forcing me to look at myself. It was as though I had been hiding behind my own back, refusing to see myself for what I was.

Confessions

To hear the message that God is sending to us in the midst of our quiet listening, we must be open to whatever it says, even if it tells us to do something extremely difficult. As the introductory quote from Augustine suggests, it is hard to go home again when the house is in turmoil. So too, it is hard to sit quietly in a soiled life and listen and accept the inspiration of the God within to look honestly at that life and deal with it. It is hard to sit quietly and listen to a message that we have perhaps been avoiding for years, a message to accept a new way of life that has never before been considered and has about it all of the fright of the unknown. It is hard to sit quietly and listen to God's whisper deep inside telling us over and over again::

... you do not have all the answers: listen to others, seek guidance!

... the one who you supposed was to be the love of your life does not love you: move on!

... your mind and your intentions are not as pure as you pretend them to be. You do lust! You do hate! You are addicted to things that will destroy you! Be conscious of your weakness and fight against it!

... you will not live much longer; you must make preparations to die well so that you can live well eternally!

It is no good to excuse our perversions by saying "Well, I only think such things I would never do them! I would never kill those I hate! I would never abuse those whom I lust after." As Augustine warns, God judges evil not simply by deeds done but also by perverse thoughts entertained. (Sermon 170, 3) Our hidden aberrant tendencies may not get us arrested but they may close our ears to the internal teacher's shouted warning: "Don't be complacent! You are not as good as you think you are."

Externally we may seem to lead a quiet life worthy of respect but inside we may still entertain desires that are not fit to be seen. Thus, the law tells us not to lust after another's goods (be it their property or their spouse) and as long as we covet them but don't grab them, the world thinks of us as fine people. But inside, where we nurture inflamed desires for the person or property of others, desires seen only by God and ourselves (if we have the courage to look at them in the face), we are not as fine as we sometimes pretend to be. (Sermon 170, 5.)

Certainly none of us who have lived any length of days has a completely pure inner self. For all of us (who have any honesty and sense) there will be some guilt for the past evil freely chosen. For all of us (who have still any remnants of passion within) there will be embarrassing desires that escape arrest only because they are not acted out. We may still feel the delight that comes from the presence of some sexually attractive "other" even when our delectation is somewhat morose due to our inability to pursue it. For all of us who have not lost completely a sense of self-worth, there will be fetid pools of pride-filled hurt feelings that bubble with periodic eruptions of envy, anger, and desire for revenge. Of course when we look inside our selves, there are usually some good things to be found also, but the bad we find seems to capture our attention more. Perhaps it is because when you slog through a swamp it is difficult to appreciate the clear blue sky above.

It may be charity sometimes to hide a truth from another fearing that it may destroy them. It is kindness sometimes to go along with a dying loved one's fantasy that soon they will be better. But it is stupidity to refuse to listen to a disturbing truth about ourselves coming from the Divine Teacher within. In the search for my real self, ignorance is not bliss. It is foolishness. I am what I am whether or not I face up to it.

Attempting to lie about myself to God goes beyond foolishness. It is insanity. God already has the truth about me, and the only reason why he wants me to admit that truth (be it bad or good) is for my benefit. When you think about it, the reason why we are sometimes unable to say "I'm sorry!" is not because we worry about shocking the Divine Teacher. Rather it is because we do not want to admit our malice to ourselves. Once proclaimed we can no longer ignore it and must then do something about it. Perhaps this is part of the therapy of the sacrament of reconciliation. In speaking our sins anonymously to another human being, we are not exposing our selves to that other person so much as exposing our warts and wounds to ourselves. In confessing we no longer avoid the bad parts of being ourselves, we hang them out for ourselves to see and in that action demonstrate our sorrow more powerfully than any words can express.

God must smile when we do it because he knows better than we do that knowledge is the beginning of contrition and that contrition is the beginning of perfection. He forgives us because we have taken the first step in forgiving ourselves. We no longer are playing the game "liar, liar" and have finally moved away from fantasy into reality. We have opened our mind to hear the message of the Divine Teacher within.

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