In spiritual life we know these Relationships by substantial identification in the Spirit of love.” R. M. Benson, quoted by Martin L. Smith, “The Theological Vision of Father Benson,” in Martin Smith, ed., Benson of Cowley (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1983) 30–31.
3. By “the HOLY” I mean roughly what Rudolf Otto described using the term—or more specifically his conception of the HOLY as “nonrational.” I cannot follow him in his concept of the HOLY as an a priori category, since this mingles elements of the HOLY (as I am using the term) with elements of the sacred (see below, chapter 2). I see the sacred as a category of religion and therefore externally related to the HOLY, not truly integrated with it. See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958) 1–40, 112–42.
4. I have chosen to set names for the substance of the arcana in small capitals, both to help the reader relate them to one another as equivalents and also to remind us that they cannot be understood in an entirely literal way.
5. “We must use names because we are speaking about a God who is personal, not an ‘it.’ We speak to God as Father, Mother, Friend, Lover, because we are speaking to one who is closer to us than we are to ourselves, one who has in Jesus become one with us. Yet we also know that our speaking to God is not like speaking to a father, mother, lover, or friend, because we are speaking to one who utterly transcends all of those descriptions.” James Griffiss, Naming the Mystery: How Our Words Shape Prayer and Belief (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1990) 83.
6. To some extent, even the most ordinary words share in this complex relationship with their referents: “All names, whether of God or anything else, are interpretations of a reality that is ultimately hidden from us, and they all fall short of the reality they would name. For that reason they are sacramental; they direct us to the reality, but are not to be confused with it” (Griffiss, Naming the Mystery, 63).
7. Exodus 3:14, Septuagint.
8. “I would say that most of the time we are for all practical purposes withdrawn from that sharpness of being, and only at rare intervals does one suddenly realize the distinctive tension of being alive. It is as if a machine were just quietly turning over, when suddenly it speeds up with almost unbearable acceleration and the pitch of its whine becomes almost excruciating to the hearing.” Ralph Harper, On Presence: Variations and Reflections (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991) 93–94.
9. Fredegond Shove, “Revelation,” in Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956) 20.
10. “Attention to the ordinary tends to be in conflict with contemporary experience with its emphasis on the dramatic, the violent, and the shocking. . . . The sacred character of the ordinary things of life is prominent in [Barbara] Pym’s novels. It will continue to be so in contemporary life within and outside the church because the ordinary permeates all human experience. No human life is devoid of the ordinary, and any attempt to dispense with it is a move in the direction of meaninglessness and non-being.” Belinda Bede, “A ‘kinder, gentler’ Anglican Church: The Novels of Barbara Pym,” Anglican Theological Review 75 (1993):395–96.
11. “Ironically, or perhaps very appropriately, it is a harder side of nature that often grounds me. Nature is not only beautiful and bountiful; at times it is devastatingly destructive, and at others, exquisitely indifferent. We can’t blackmail nature. We can’t wheedle or cajole it into perpetuating illusions we hold about ourselves. . . . Nature’s indifference leaves us quietly to face our own truth, while in constancy it stands at our side. Its very indifference creates an environment at once unrelenting and gracious.” Jean M. Blomquist, “Barefoot Basics: Yearning and Learning to Stand on Holy Ground,” Weaving 8/5 (September/October 1992): 11.
12. “[The] completeness of emphasis on first-hand solitary seeking, [the] one-by-one achievement of Eternity, has not in fact proved truly fruitful in the past. Where it seems to be fruitful, the solitude is illusory. Each great regenerator and revealer of Reality, each God-intoxicated soul achieving transcendence, owes something to its predecessors and contemporaries. All great spiritual achievement, like all great artistic achievement, however spontaneous it may seem to be, however much the fruit of a personal love and vision, is firmly rooted in the racial past. It fulfills rather than destroys. . . .” Evelyn Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986) 118–19.
13. This is the insight expressed in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. “If God were alone, there would be solitude and concentration in unity and oneness. If God were two, a duality, Father and Son only, there would be separation (one being distinct from the other) and exclusions (one not being the other). But God is three, a Trinity, and being three avoids solitude, overcomes separation and surpasses exclusion. . . . Through being an open reality, this triune God also includes other differences; so the created universe enters into communion with the divine.” Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society, trans. Paul Burns (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988) 3.
14. “Ultimate Reality confronts us in such a way that we are addressed. By being addressed we encounter One who is other to ourselves, but the otherness disclosed in this manner is one of communion and not separation.” Christopher Morse, Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1994) 91.
15. The border country connects the “surface” or ordinary reality with its deeper roots. We will imagine it best if we think of the border not as dividing “natural” from “supernatural” or “this world” from “the world to come” or even “creation” from “God,” but rather as connecting the “everyday” with the “transcendent.” The “transcendent” may as easily be “within” the everyday as beyond or under or over or next to or otherwise “outside” it.
16. “Our ministry [in the AIDS pandemic] is a theology of redemptive and sacrificial acts, expressing through deed—and through loss—what the Gospel proclaims in words. What we do, what we experience, and what we liberate others to do animates the new Law: We love God. And we love our neighbor. We are purified by our experience, and everything else is secondary. Our experience seems sometimes to be devoid of beauty, but it is never devoid of truth.” Warren W. Buckingham III, opening plenary address for National Episcopal AIDS Coalition “Hope and Healing” Conference, Santa Monica, Calif., February 3, 1994.
17. “[Charles Williams’s] ‘doctrine of substituted love’ requires each of us to carry the burdens of others. . . . This may fly in the face of our very modern insistence—and pride—that we should do everything ourselves. To try to do everything ourselves, however, is to fly in the face of the laws of the universe, and it results in what Kierkegaard called ‘sickness unto death.’ [Gabriel] Marcel and Williams were convinced that only exchange or substitution can be a realistic antidote to despair. But first, ‘you must be content to be helped,’ and that is sometimes harder than to carry someone else’s fear. And yet it can be done.” Harper, On Presence, 44.
18. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978) 12–13. Cf. Rowan Williams, Christian Spirituality: A Theological History from the New Testament to Luther and St. John of the Cross (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1979) 62–67.
19. “Perhaps [Gabriel] Marcel’s single most important insight, more important than his distinction between problem and mystery, or his sense of being as presence and presence as mystery, is his insistence that what truly makes a person human is his or her capacity for being open to others.” Harper, On Presence, 43.
20. “Already in everyday human speech we
