14

Imagine yourself just being in the midst of the universe. Just there, looking around, looking in every direction as far as you can look.  You look with your senses, your mind, any means available, you look as far as you can, as deep as you can, as high as you can, and eventually you can go no further. You have come to the end. But there is no end.  In material terms you have reached the edge of the universe, but there is nothing beyond the edge.  Strictly speaking, there is not even an edge. Just nothing. In philosophical, aesthetical, imaginative, and emotional terms you  come to the same thing. You have reached as far as you can reach. Beyond is nothing that you can put a label on, but you cannot understand what nothing is so you say beyond is the great unknown, the final mystery.

If you want to, you may call that final mystery, God, a name that means many different things to different people, but  whatever name is used and in spite of the difficulty, people insist on thinking and saying that God is there, outside the universe, and what is thought and said about God ranges everywhere.  Sometimes it is a  cartoon picture of a bearded old man on a cloud or at the pearly gates. At other times, there is the  AD 1200 remark by the French philosopher, Alain of Lille, who said “God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.” (The remark is sometimes attributed to others, but Alain will do.) Neither of these, however, is much help. The former is a joke, the latter is unimaginable, that is, the words bring up nothing in the mind, at least, nothing in my mind, nor, I bet, in yours. Maybe smarter people (There are many.) or mathematicians can provide some kind of substance to the thought,  but that doesn’t help me or you.

Let’s look at this a little more.  If I ask you to think of a wheelbarrow, a picture of a wheelbarrow comes into your mind. If I ask you to think of cruelty or love, a picture of a person or a group of people doing something comes into your mind.  If I ask you to think of the universe, a picture of black sky crowded with stars will come to your mind.  But if I ask you to think of “an infinite sphere”, what do you see in your mind? I see nothing in mine. Nothing. Maybe a blank, white flat surface that I know is not there.  I cannot imagine or visualize an “infinite sphere.” Neither can you.  I don’t think anyone can. I have no idea what Alain of Lillle saw or did not see in his mind, and therefore I have no idea what he meant. But he tried.

For the moment all we can say about our ideas of God is that they range from a cartoon to inconceivable mystery. In between are ideas which we may call anthropological. Not an easy word but it will have to do.  It means man-like, and I think that sometimes causes some error.  We carelessly think that while God does not have a mortal body, He does have mortal thoughts and mortal emotions. The error has been strengthened with some words in an old hymn: “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.” Even the most literal of believers does not think God the Father or God the Holy Spirit are persons, but we do tend to think that God thinks like us, that He ‘grieves’ over our sins, that He ‘wants’ us to behave better, that He ‘hates’ sin, that He ‘loves’ us.  Do those words that we use tell us anything about God? I don’t know. They do tell us about ourselves, but that’s as far as we can go.  We have to think that God thinks like us because that’s the only way we can think. In our mind, God’s vocabulary must be our vocabulary.

(On this matter I refer you to a marvelous book by Dorothy Sayers. The title is The Mind of the Maker. A weak summary is in the website non-fiction column, Dorothy Sayers and the Trinity.)

Now of course no one, no one who is reading these words, thinks that God is a physical entity, no one thinks God is a physical creature of any kind. However, we do talk about ‘The mind of God,’ but what does that mean? We don’t even know much about our own mind which is not, by the way, the same thing as our brain. Mind and brain are not synonymous. Our brain is a lump of flesh and blood within our skull. Our mind is a mystery that calculates and imagines. And the mind of God?

 God has no physical brain but we believe that somehow there is a mind of God and therefore there is God, and therefore there is our world and everything else. God, however defined or not defined, is the cause, the source of everything. God is all. The mind of God is all.

Can we humans ever know anything about God? Alain had his notion. There are others. Ancient Greeks did have a lot of gods who were creatures like us up in the sky, but the Greek philosophers went further.  They had a word for the mind of God. The word was logos. It is a hard word that suggested reason and order, the rational principle in the universe, and it seems to me that everyone will have to admit that the Greeks were on to something with their word, that our world is indeed ultimately rational and orderly, as logos claims.

Some go from there in the direction of what is called ‘materialism,’ which is the view that all there is, from proton to galaxy, is linked into a great, connected natural system, a material universe. There is no need for God, no need for a supernatural force. We are quite capable of running our own lives, thank you. But we don’t seem to be doing such a good job of running our own lives, for human experience is a parade of pain and suffering, of disorder. Obviously, something is wrong, or at least undesirable, and most of us want a better way of life.

And there is a better way, but it is not in the direction of materialism, for human experience seems to include experiences that transcend rationality, not irrational  experiences at all, just, somehow, more than natural. Materialists don’t have a problem. They can just deny that those outside-of-material experiences exist, and in their little intellectual cocoon they prevail. But the rest of us must accept that there are cracks in the materialist world because there is evidence that the material universe we live in does hold some mysteries, and we sometimes use the  word, ‘miracle’  for such inexplicable mysteries that present themselves to us and do lead to a better world. There might be a better word for such mysteries. Other languages might have a better word. Sometimes English speakers will say ‘signs and wonders’ or ‘revelation’.  Whatever they are called, however, they are there.

There are, for example, the countless instances of physical healing. Television is full of frauds who claim to heal, and seeing that, many will too quickly presume that any claim of miraculous healing is also false. But down through the years there have been instance after instance of some physical cure or healing taking place, a healing that overrides materialist cause and effect.  Often, but not always, healings are preceded by some kind of prayer. True, fervent prayer often makes no difference at all, but sometimes there seems to be a connection, and after we rule out fraud, error, wish fulfillment, fanatical behavior and every other possible explanation, we may conclude that miraculous healing, prayer or not, has taken place. There have been cracks in the material universe. There have been ‘signs and wonders’.

Many healings are recorded in the Gospels. They come about for all kinds of reasons in all kinds of circumstances.  For some that means they are false from the start, but if you are willing to read carefully and look into the Gospels and some of the books that have been written about the Gospels, you will find that it is not so easy to dismiss those many stories or parts of them as fabrications.

And there are other strange things to deal with, not physical healings but mental experiences, not material phenomena but mental phenomena. I refer to the countless instances of people having visions and mystic experiences. Again, the event is an inexplicable reality. Those who experience these never doubt that for a moment they have moved into a world which they could not imagine. For them time stops or disappears. They enter into a world which Ancilla finds to be “totally other”.  For her experience, look into Whispers # 46.

At this point we must deal with the ‘paranormal.’ I suppose there might be such. We can first dismiss most of the instances as fraudulent as the televangelists claims of healing. Fortune tellers and psychic card readers   Why not? A dollar made from deceit is worth as much as a dollar made honestly, but there may be more to that other world than we would like to think. After all, the Catholic church has had and still does have exorcism rituals for people who are ‘possessed’, and healings by Jesus sometimes involved “casting out demons.” We are again confronted by ‘signs and wonders’.

Like it or not, there are many inexplicable events and experiences that tell us about a world that is other than the one we live in day after day, but the greatest and most important instance of something coming out of that other reality into our material reality is Jesus.  As John put it, “the Word (logos) became flesh and dwelt among us.” Jesus is, very literally, the Word of God. Here Sayers will be greatly helpful, for she holds that the unfathomable mind of God, the logos, the Creator of all, brings forth or embodies the Son and the work of the Son is to bring the Mind of God to our world.  Which He did.

Jesus lived about 2000 years ago in a little, faraway land. We know nothing about most of his life, but the last three years of his life were a spiritual volcano that tore apart our material universe of fantasy, pride, and error. As Jesus moved about teaching and healing, he enabled us to see past our grey, selfish selves. He moved us to look out past the edges of our little world and see, as Dante saw, “The love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Jesus showed us that love in His Crucifixion and Resurrection. He showed us that love by leaving His “Infinite Sphere”, by becoming a human, by living, suffering, dying and living again so that we might live, suffer, die and live again.

We may not be able to explain away what appear to be miraculous cures and healings, “signs and wonders.”  We may not be able to understand what people who claim to have mystic experiences are talking about. We may not be able to understand God. But we can live a better life.  We can aim to live a life shaped by The Sermon on the Mount, that collection of imperatives recorded by the writers of the Gospels. We are to love our enemies (Think of that! Love your enemies!) We to do good to those that hate us, forgive those who trespass against us, to let our light shine before men. Guided and strengthened by logos, we can step out into the light of that ‘infinite sphere’ and let Jesus be our life and our guide, our God.