Community shattered. Obliterated! And what would it be like without community? That is the metaphor this evening. And what does the metaphor point toward? What truth, what reality beyond the limen does it open out for us?
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The Imaginal
Several months ago I stumbled across the notion of the imaginal I recall not where. I Googled it and came up with three articles, which, I must confess, is all I’ve read on the topic. But I must also confess that the notion fascinates me, and I suspect it is one, if not the primary, gateway into the world of mysticism. Briefly the notion is this: that the faculty of the imagination enables us to enter, be in relation to, communicate with, be educated by non-physical cosmologies which are every bit as real as the physical/material world in which we live this material life. The articles I read, one by Dr. Gerald Epstein, a psychiatrist who uses the imaginal in his practice, and two by Henri Corbin, an interpreter of Arabic and Persian texts (perhaps an authority on Shi’a, Islamic mysticism, certainly conversant with it) introduced me to a strange new world.
The imaginal is very difficult for me; I am very much dedicated, both by psychological make-up and by ingrained training, to the left-brain, rational, linear kind of mental life. My personality type (INTP in Myers-Briggs) is such that if something is not logical, then it is nonsense. But the imaginal is the mental life of the right-brain. And I think I may have missed something potentially very significant for my life. I will not pretend that I understand this term “imaginal.” I only know it seems to make sense to me.
Evidently we of the western world have been trapped and held captive by René Descartes (1596-1650) when he proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am!” (though I was taught in Philosophy 101 “Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum”). And ever since we have locked ourselves into a thought system in which the linear, the logical, the left-brain is dominant, and right-brain processes are largely discarded as dealing with unrealities. In the West it is thinking alone that is important and worthy of being worked with (and it must be logical, linear thinking, dealing with the empirical, the hard-data stuff of this material life). “Imagining” and “imaging” are considered illogical, irrational, non-linear and therefore fictitious, unreal, and not useful. We bear this burden of logicality, perhaps to our souls’s detriment and ill-health, and maybe even death. In consequence we have carefully learned that our imagination is the gateway to fantasy, fiction, the unreal, “made-up stuff,” but not possibly to anything in any sense real or worthy of serious consideration, certainly nothing that should influence our lives.
I’m told that most of the peopled world do not feel so limited. In Eastern cultures they proclaim existence by saying simply, “I am,” (i.e., not compelled to prefix it with a condition of rationality). That includes the imaginal as well as the logical. And that, in turn, opens worlds hidden from us Westerners by our insistence of logicality. In particular the Chinese, Tibetan Buddhist and Islamic (Shi’a) cultures are open to and make much use of the imaginal. Epstein suggests that linear (left-hemisphere) thought processes deal primarily with factuality and the past, and cannot effectively cope with the future, whereas right-hemisphere (gestalt) processes, can deal effectively with the present and future, and are therefore much more potent and realistic for dealing with some kinds of psychological issues. Corbin is quite clear that imaginal processes open to us vast universes, very real universes of knowledge, experience and possibilities not apprehended through linear processes.
William James saw a progression for a religion evolving from the mystical experience of a seer, through a codification stage which begins to develop logical constructs for the mystic’s vision, and on to a final institutional stage which is constructed for the consumption of the masses attracted by the mystic’s vision. It is the mystic’s vision which is enervating, exciting, life-giving. But his vision can not be apprehended by the rest of us. His vision must be captivated, and shaped into something translatable for the rest of us. And finally it is institutionalized into a form which, while fixed, stable, and in a sense dead, the rest of us can cling to, something we can ingest without getting indigestion. Jesus was the founding mystic whose vision so captivated the masses; and Paul was the initial codifier (though perhaps he was himself a mystic with his Damascus road experience and his ascent into the third heaven) who began the process of shaping Jesus’ vision into something the rest of us could grasp and cling to. And the bishops of the third and fourth centuries were the institutionalizers who built it all into a church that Constantine and the rest of us could live into. In essence, only the mystic, the visioner has the deeply religious experience, the face-to-face encounter with The Other, which the rest of us, in whatever insipid ways, attempt to emulate, in the light of which we warm ourselves.
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Reciting the creed
Every Sunday we stand up in unison and recite together the creed. The Nicene Creed of course, that ecumenical statement of what we, the whole church universal believe. That tersest, densest, briefest definition of the faith constructed by the bishops of the early church at the behest of the emperor to unify the church. That hedge which protects the church from false beliefs and divisiveness, that says, “To believe inside this hedge is safe, okay; adhere to this; but if you believe outside this, you perish, eternally.” It tells us that believing is what this religious stuff is all about, holding tight onto a linear (more or less) statement of facts (some material, some immaterial) about the construction of this metaphysic. That is what is crucial, clinging onto THIS basket of words, lined up in THIS order. Knowing God, having intercourse with God does not enter into it.
This credo was composed in the fourth century, phrased in the metaphors and imagery of the fourth century, with all the metaphysical and physical and biological assumptions of the fourth century built into and standing behind it. The earth is flat and has four corners. There is water underneath, land and water here, and above the dome of the sky more water. Hell is a physical place somewhere down there, and heaven an equally physical place up there somewhere in which God lives. And this earth is the center of the universe, and man the most important creation in it, the apex of all God’s creation. And the male carries the seed, is the sole procreator, while woman is only the incubator, has no part in conception, is a mobile uterus to house the seed until it grows able to live outside the uterus. All of that comes along with this basket full of creedal words, some of which I cannot even pretend I understand. So, when we stand up to say the Creed together, professing that this is what we, all we, believe, can I do that without biting my tongue? Or am I allowed to cross my fingers so that I do not perjure myself?
Marcus Borg covers himself by saying that he understands this creed to be an historic statement made by the church at a certain time and in response to certain circumstances; and he recites it along with us in that context. And in response to the question, “Is Jesus the second person of the Trinity?” he would answer both “No” and “Yes!” And I think I must nod my head in painful agreement as he speaks. You want a simple, straight-forward answer where I think there is none. I cannot even conceive of what you mean by a Trinity, which is what the Nicene Creed is supposedly about. How can one God be three? The math doesn’t work for me. (And to call it a “mystery,”i.e., not to be solved, makes it no more apprehensible or useful for me; been there, done [or tried to do] that, didn’t work, at least for me.) How can Jesus have been fully man (which necessarily entails mortality, and all the other human limitations) and fully God (which we have always understood to mean immortal and unlimited). These two things cannot be one and the same. So I covertly step across the aisle and stand alongside Borg, and mutter the words with my fingers crossed. If you intend these words to mean precisely what they say and nothing else, then I have to quietly confess, “No.” But if you might allow that they comprise a sort of window that offers (in ancient language that is almost entirely incomprehensible to the twenty-first-century Western mind and with a whole set of assumptions that I know to be quite inaccurate and inadequate for today’s world and metaphor) a sort of window that will give the merest vague and ephemeral glimpse of the Eternal which is in reality far beyond our scope of vision and power of comprehension, then I can quietly nod the slightest
