Monday 25 January 2016

Immanence and transcendence

Sometimes something small that you see or hear, despite all the distractions that fill up the day, sticks in your mind and gives you cause for reflection.

Not so long ago I went walking in the bush with a friend I hadn’t seen in many years. It was a mild summer’s day, our boots kicking up the quartz stones as we tramped over part of the hill country in central Victoria.

Several times we stopped to look at particular plants or inspect the sweeping lay of the land and met passers-by coming the other way. On a couple of occasions we spoke to the strangers and each time my friend in parting wished them a good day in a pure, heartfelt way.

I was moved by the way she spoke those words. It seemed their quality was spiritual, in the way that a pure heart expresses the life of Spirit, which was fascinating given my friend is a scientist and an avowed atheist. I was reminded of religious goodbyes along the lines of "May God be with you".

It’s a very contemporary development to be able to speak about spirituality and religion as separate things. Once it was thought that organised religion, with its beliefs, rituals and sacraments, provided the only frame through which the inner life could be expressed. Now there is an emerging realisation that spirituality can be autonomous and that for each person it may or may not be expressed through established religious means. Some atheists, like the philosopher AC Grayling, are happy to call themselves spiritual but strongly reject religion.

In this change there is a powerful move towards immanence, where the depth and meaning of life is located through the experience of the individual in the elements of life itself, without reference to a powerful Other – be it God or anything else considered “supernatural”. This shift has occurred alongside the decline of Christianity in the West, which has insisted on belief in a transcendent God no longer relevant to modern culture and upheld only one Truth in an age of multiplicity of beliefs.

The spiritual immanence that is putting down roots in our time appears in a rationalist culture that so often seems inimical to the sacred. And yet people like my friend are able to see and appreciate spiritual quality in nature, in beauty, in relationships and in many other ordinary instances that elevate life beyond basic materiality and make it worth living.

What has happened, then, to the transcendent principle, if we can call it so, that was so important to humanity for so many thousands of years? Where has God gone? Has he disappeared entirely or just in temporary recess, waiting to surface eventually in another guise?

It all depends on the future of the scientific rationalism/empiricism that is so central to the modern West. If over time its exclusivist orientation (mirroring that of the Judeo-Christian tradition) breaks down, as it might with the help of a maturing process of immanence, a new spiritually charged worldview could develop. Immanence and transcendence are really just two sides of the one reality, and ultimately neither is sufficient without the other if the aim is spiritual wholeness.

Transcendence is fundamentally about mystery. It is the great Unknown attached to life, death and ultimate purpose that is also experienced as the generative force of the universe. It is other to created forms but linked intimately to them. It is invoked in the dark, expansive reverence of places of worship. It is Spirit ultimately unnameable and unspeakable that has been given many names throughout history – God being one of them.

The divine is both contained in material form and other to it, imminent and transcendent. God’s downfall has left a tragic void in the Western psyche, felt most acutely by the artists and mystics of our time, those "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night" as poet Allen Ginsberg beautifully described them in Howl. Many such souls (Ginsberg included) fled the Judeo-Christian tradition to Eastern spirituality – Buddhism and Hinduism – to find transcendence there.

The spiritual challenge of our time is two-sided: recognising and acknowledging the process of immanence, the desire for the in-dwelling sacred; and finding suitable new forms for the urge to transcendence.

Some people are already doing this work, away from mass culture on the fringes of society. They may be coming together for new moon rituals or other neo-Pagan ceremonies that relate humans to the cycles of nature, or meeting in small affinity groups to explore shared spiritual directions, or weaving new ways of understanding the dynamics of plants, animals and the cosmos as a whole. What they share is a calling for the sacred, an orientation towards wholeness, and the capacity to be explorers in the creation of new syntheses of immanence/transcendence.

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