The Transcendent Universe

The Packaging & Policing Thereof

Georges Méliès, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“Events, dear boy!” attributed to Harold MacMillan when asked ‘What was the greatest challenge for a politician?’ Some recent personal ‘events’ for me have brought me back to “Why do I hold on to Catholicism?”  That religion I was born into became permeated by philosophical scepticism, initially from a pantheistic Dad and then from the tsunami of Sufism and University in my late teens that both relativised, historicised and sublated my experience of what constituted the transcendent dimension.

‘Streuth!’ Well, I’ll get back to you in twenty years with that…

Mmmm… it’s somewhat more urgent than that.

GET OUT clause: like a lot of things the antinomy; the dialectic of opposites not only holds political and psychodynamic possibilities but IS an imminent location, the eponymous here-and-now, replete with possibilities; the creative explosion point the ‘end is nigh’ and ‘this moment holds the key’.

So I inhabit a place of ambivalence, nuance, angels on a pinhead, tentative, precarious, yes duplicitous, quisling, double agent, best of both worlds etc. Depends what you mean… depends what you mean…depends what you mean by ‘mean’. I just want to explore the ambivalent dimension.

There is Good and Evil in this second and the choice is ours.

Relativism of Religions and Cults

All religions must either claim exclusive hot wire to God or accept a relative position as one of competing if not equally authentic ways to engage with the transcendent; the above and beyond death reality. We’ll keep you atheists out of it for a moment BUT, just to give you the heads up, there is a trades entrance for you guys. Yay!

Perhaps overly repeated by me, was hearing from the pulpit at Virgo Fidelis in Norwood, when I was about 15, that we, ‘good’ regular church-attending catholics, should expect to see not just other denominations, not just other religions but also atheists and humanists in the queue to see St Peter. ‘Whatttt???’ This all made sense to a ‘nascent, 2^nd Vatican council, anything is possible for God’ -type catholic. Of course, it highlights the inevitable questioning of what is essential and peripheral, and, in turn, why relative truths can be no less cogent.

Just a few years later in my late teens, an introduction to Sufism made the partial and the total appear, seemingly miraculously, as intimations of a more ‘real’ reality. Such that the Rumi statements that the ‘the apparent is bridge to the real’ and ‘do not consider my outward shape but take what is in my hand’ as a unification that connected me directly across religions and none. The metaphors of ‘moths around the same flame’ and ‘the blind experts examining the elephant’, all made the universality and the particulars of my stumbling and stony path seem coherent. Nothing that contradicts what I have heard from Jesus.

There is still the Kantian Is/Ought problem; relativism can lead to asserting there is no such thing as obligation. It is all for what? A temptation to be overly glib here but we might say this side of heresy that Jesus might not be pleased with everything about his Church / Churches and people who have claimed to be on his side and represent him. This for me is enough to be both in and detached from, the Church, but still trying to be ‘on Jesus side’. There is enough coherence for me in this, even though we still work with ‘a glass darkly’.

Neatly moving on from that and yet staying there…

…between the tail and the donkey is our volition, freedom and responsibility. How are these things resolvable? The below and above, the sacred and profane, the immovability and the possibility, the everyday and the transcendent, the love and the absence of love? I have my means to help me, that have been provided by what I thought was a generous and inclusive Catholicism (yes, despite the abuses) but see a growing reactionary, retrograde behemoth in the Magisterium, reappearing. There is a word that strikes terror, from those who want to undo the progress of, not just the current Pope Francis, but undo the Second Vatican Council and the Enlightenment…and take back Galileo’s exoneration and...

The word ‘error’, the phrase ‘found to be in error’ is worthy of the inquisition. LGBTQ+ has become synonymous for the neo-conservatives of all that is wrong. ‘Perhaps stoning wasn’t that bad if someone was actually guilty’, and so on. Hello?

I have brought you from my facetiousness right up to the real. That’s where I am folks. At a precipice if not a place of no return.

More fun stuff, next time.

As a comedian of a certain generation (Dave Allen) used to say: May your God go with you.

xD