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God has a million faces.
—Baghavad Gita
The one Being the wise call by many names.
—Rig Veda
I Am. I Am that I Am.
—Yahweh to Moses, Exodus
A disciple spoke to his Teacher. “Master, do not refer to God in any way beyond our religion.” Asked the Teacher, “In other words, I am to hide part of the partial means of looking into the Wholeness that is God, and, thus, you want me to be faithful to our faith by being unfaithful to God?” “Oh,” said the disciple, “I guess I did not mean that.” He left, wondering what he had meant. The Master knew.
A church member visited her pastor. “Pastor, why do you not speak against the persons whom we say God has judged as wrong?” Replied the pastor, “As the Sun discloses the nature of the darkness it illumines, Truth illumines falsehood by simply being Itself, Truth.”
Hafiz, like all mystics, one of my favorite poets of mystical Islam, the Sufi Path, warns us not to settle for an image or language of God that presents too small a god, or God. God is Infinite, thus, as Infinite many different names and images can call attention to part of the Immensity of the Divine, like a single ray of light on the Ineffable Three-in-One.
This frustrates the religious who are not of a spiritual mind, though of a mind educated in religious facts and teachings, for the relationship with God that arises within the spiritual man or woman, and the detachment from worldly images, cannot even be understood by the purely religious man or woman, though he or she presents herself as religiously devout and orthodox. Indeed, he or she can no more understand the Depths that Hafiz and Jesus spoke of as I can understand the experience of being an amoeba. Indeed, such a one may be devout and orthodox in belief and feeling, but not in the depths of Spirit, through but beyond both belief and feeling, where spirit is one with Spirit in sacred matrimony. So, Hafiz says:
Dear ones,
Beware of the tiny gods frightened men create
To bring an anesthetic relief
To their sad days.
—Quoted in Matthew Fox, One River, Many Wells
Thomas Merton, in his Journals, speaks of the return to the Father as showing us the “nonentity and insufficiency of all other concerns” (A Year with Thomas Merton, March 31, March 22, 1961 Journal entry, Ed. Jonathan Montaldo). This means, he writes, “A going clear out of the midst of all that is transitory and inconclusive.” Indeed, faith leads us to honor our faith, but in a way that it is no longer spoken of or defended as absolute, for we, in Christ, are in union with the Absolute, the sole Absolute, if we choose, maybe better dare, be led by the Holy Spirit over the precipice of our little, grasping brains and into the Heart of Inexpressibleness Itself.
Contemplative Christianity is not for the persons who seek a god that fits need for solace and “anesthetic relief,” persons who have a need to feel special in contrast to other persons. This Christian expression of in Christ, in experience, Spirit to spirit, is not for the man or woman who does not long to go to that point of the nonentity and insufficiency of his or her most cherished images of God and doctrines, too, into God Himself as the One, as the Trinity of Mystery. Indeed, such a person will not even understand much of what is written in writings like OneLife. For mystical Christianity honors the spoken and written and painted and danced … references to God, but sees them all as references to the Absolute Referent, ultimately insufficient and to pass with time, as all insufficiencies will pass with time and into Sufficiency Itself. Only God is sufficient, all references and acts pertaining to faith in God are insufficient, ultimately, and will pass. And this insufficency itself is the witness to the sufficiency of God; without this apparent insufficency no one could worship the Sufficient as sufficient.
The synthesis of the known and cannot-be-known in Christ, as one Truth and by Grace, rather than the one-sided rejection of either the known or cannot-be-known, is the perfection of thought and faith in Christ. Merton writes, “To go beyond everything, to leave everything and press forward to the End and to the Beginning, to the ever new Beginning that is without End.” This only the man or woman devoted through-and-through to the Flame of Love, allowing Christ to consume all lust for religiousness, religious belief, and God-image can understand. Such a man or woman falls in Love with Love and finds Love to be all his or her faith hinted at, but could never take in or express. All other persons remain outside the veil of the experience of union in Christ, leaving the potential experience of in Christ as a status capability, not a lived Oneing-In-Love in blissful and rejoicing Union.
Of course, True Christianity is not an opiate for anyone, even though some have created a religiousness that fits a need for comfort above sacrifice, and knowing above the faith that enters unknowing, Pure Faith. Certainly, such religiousness can serve well many persons, at the level of conventional faith, but not the spiritual man or woman moving into beyond conventional faith. These smaller “gods” do not deserve the sustained attention or devotion of men and women who grow to embrace Truth above truths and in Christ, and in Love for all peoples. The little attention the spiritual man or woman gives to these truths far from Truth is an attention given in Love to help those not yet prepared but desirous to enter the Truth that is the Beginning and End. As for those who have no intent on Truth, while they worship truths as idols, as small gods, the spiritual man or woman speaks words and lives a life that itself judges the smallness of such idolatry, while inviting those seeking the God With A Million Faces.
Therefore, the Immensity of God, as Truth, judges all lesser truths, even as the Immensity of God judges as insufficient all lesser gods, even though these may be called God, and this judgment arises from the All-Sufficiency of God. The spiritual man or woman never needs to judge, therefore, for Truth, or God, judges in and by Itself, even as the Sun is judge of the darkness by simply the Sun being what it is, the Sun.
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