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Wisdom Quote
Why do you prate of God? Whatever you say of Him is untrue.
*Meister Eckhart
Wisdom Story
A spiritual Teacher refused to talk of God anymore.
A befuddled follower inquired about his silence.
The Teacher said, “I now teach you by Silence.”
The disciple said, “What do you mean? That sounds ridiculous?”
The Teacher said, “Truth lifted me beyond reliance on truth, and, then, truth led me beyond reliance on truth.
Now, I live in reliance on truth.”
*Brian K. Wilcox
Comments
When we say “truth,” we might assume the word refers to one matter always. Such is not the case. And these distinctions of meaning are essential to mature religion, especially any spiritual understanding of religion.
1) Truth refers to Reality, or God. When I say, “God is Truth,” this is the meaning. This, then, is ultimate in meaning and any other meaning of truth is true only in relationship to this Eternal Fount of veracity. Here is what Jesus means by saying He is the truth, in St. John’s Gospel. He is substantially Truth, not truths or truth, but Truth: Reality. Christ is Truth of truths, Word of words.
2) Truth refers to direct apprehension of spiritual fact. This is opposed to second-hand knowledge. This unmediated realization is, nevertheless, subordinate to Truth as God. This is apparently what St. John’s Gospel means when it says we are to worship in “spirit and truth.” Our worship is to flow from the center of ourselves, our spiritual core, and is to be a direct apprehension of spiritual fact. This excludes all intellectual hypocrisy, or facile piety, all play-acting in worship.
3) Truth refers to language as symbols that correctly mirror the claim to which they refer. This appears to be what St. Paul speaks of when he refers to the faith handed down.
The descending nature of truth from “as Reality Itself” to “language as symbols” is clear. Each becomes less spiritual, or farther from Truth.
Eckhart refers to the contemplative meaning Truth. The contemplative is led up the ladder of truth; meaning, contemplation is the fruition of a mature relationship with truth as symbol and truth as realization.
This leads us to three expressions of faith. Again, the expressions are from higher to lower, or lower to higher.
1) Faith as a trusting and loving relationship with the Love beyond all form; this faith is a formless expression and a dark faith to the senses and intellect, even the spiritual intuition. This is pure contemplation, wherein grace is infused in the soul, or center of the self, apart from the senses and intellect, even the spiritual capacities of knowing and sensing.
2) Faith as direct intuition of spiritual truth, or truths. This is spiritual knowledge, or spiritual intuition. Here, one discerns immediately and by the inward awakening to the factuality of an assertion. A person may have been told some religious or spiritual affirmation was true, but one day he or she is awakened within and literally feels the truth of it within the self. This faith is reliant on the first, the union with Truth, a Truth that makes possible the dark faith of trusting beyond all significations of form, signs, and symbols.
3) Faith as intellectual assent to certain beliefs. This is a propositional faith. Here, a person relies on what he or she has been told is true. There is no direct experience here of truth or Truth.
The ladder of truth leads us upward to the pure, unmediated apprehension of fact. However, this is not yet pure contemplation, or the summit of the spiritual path. The summit is the dark faith, which St. John of the Cross refers to in Ascent of Mt. Carmel. At this summit anything one speaks of God is untrue, that is, in the sense that God alone is True, or Truth.
In this life we will likely never reach a pure state of living in simple Truth and consummate faith, that is, faith as dark faith. Rather, we live within all three meanings of Truth and, so, the meanings of Faith.
The contemplative, or mystic, while knowing God as Truth, experiences direct intuitions of truths and has intellectual assents that likely have not matured to direct apprehension or beyond to rest in Truth Itself, or God’s Self.
Likewise, those who have contemplative grace still are likely experiencing faith as direct intuitions of truths and intellectual assent to supposed facts religiously that he or she has never truly come to know directly or transcend beyond into Faith as dark faith.
What is vital is not to try to be a so-called super spiritual person? Growth from beliefs to abiding in God in dark but loving trust is a process. If one tries to be in Truth as Reality without truly growing by Grace to that consciousness, then, he or she will only appear foolish and will likely fool no one. Likewise, we need to be honest about what we believe to be true but have not yet directly experienced as true.
Yet, the opposite extreme pervades the churches. Too many Christians have not been informed of this graced growth from the lower to the higher in Christ. Why? Largely because those who claim to be the spiritual leaders of the churches are usually not spiritual leaders, not in the sense of growing themselves in this ever-ascending, or ever more whole, pilgrimage with and in Christ.
A Buddhist poem, by Hui Neng, speaks of the confusion and conflict resultant of the lack of appreciation of the matter of Truth.
Wishing to entice the blind,
The Buddha playfully let words escape from his golden mouth;
Heaven and earth are filled, ever since, with entangling briars.
As often, William Law, the contemplative Protestant, speaks clearly and directly, as well as attractively, on this contemplative fact of Truth~though he echoes a plethora of Christian theologians prior to him and is a forerunner of a myriad afterward:
To find or know God in reality by any outward proofs, or by anything but by God Himself made manifest and self-evident in you, will never be your case either here or hereafter. For neither God, nor heaven, nor hell, nor the devil, nor flesh, can be any otherwise knowable in you or by you but by their own existence and manifestation in you. And all pretended knowledge of any of these things, beyond and without this self-evident sensibility of their births within you, is only such knowledge of them as the blind man hath of the light that never entered into him.
Spiritual Exercise
Breath Prayer…
Breathing in: Truth …
Breathing out: Fill me.
*Cited materials are from Aldous Huxley. The Perennial Philosophy.
©Brian Wilcox 01-09-08
Brian will respond to requests pertaining to seeking a Spiritual Mentor. He offers retreats, workshops, and classes in such subjects as Contemplative Prayer (he trains in Visualized Praying, Centering Prayer, Christian Meditation, The Jesus Prayer, ...); Contemplative Living; A Spiritual Understanding of the Lord's Prayer; Philippians and Spiritual Community; Spiritual Growth From Matter to Spirit; Spiritual Use of the Scripture.
See any major on-line bookseller for his book An Ache for Union.
For replies and biographical information, and submission to "The Light Shines" daily devotionals ~ a ministry of Christ Community United Methodist Church, Punta Gorda, FL, see next page:
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