Attaining Fullness

"Hell" by Hieronymus Bosch

In an attempt to make myself smarter I am reading Charles Taylor’s massive tome A Secular Age.  Given the fact that I am only on page 31 of 776, I will obviously not be addressing the broader argument of the book (though I am reasonably aware of what it is).  Rather, I want to concern myself with a two page passage from the introduction that is a rather beautiful look at the need to find a space in our lives in which there “lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it should be” (Taylor, p. 5).  Taylor does not necessarily mean this in a religious context, however, he says that “the change [he wants] to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others” (Ibid., p. 3).

It is reminiscent of Lucien Febvre’s argument in The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais in which he responds to Abel Lefranc’s assertion that Rabelais was an atheist.  Febvre counters with the claim that in that time period it was impossible for Rabelais to have been an atheist, regardless of what one might glean from Rabelais’ writings (which I highly recommend).  It was impossible, as both Febvre and Taylor argue, because God was simply present and that belief in God was axiomatic.  Febvre writes that “the mental equipment available in the sixteenth century made it as good as impossible for anyone to be an atheist” (Febvre, p. xxiii).  Taylor calls this mode of living, this form of belief, if you will, an “immediate reality” in which “moving to fullness just meant getting closer to God,” however, “what has happened in our civilization is that we have largely eroded these forms of immediate certainty” (Taylor, p. 12).  This move from a “naïve framework,” that is to say one in which a belief in God was not questioned, to a “reflective” one has resulted in a society in which there is a “presumption of unbelief” (Ibid., pp. 13-14).  As far as I can tell from Taylor’s argument so far, this to him is a negative development because it renders the attainment of fullness infinitely more difficult, especially in the case of believers because their once solid foundation for their belief has been destroyed and as such it makes it all the more harder to have a concrete sense of their belief.

But back to my original line of inquiry.  He opens his discussion on the attainment of fullness with an excerpt from Bede Griffith’s autobiography.  Though somewhat lengthy, I believe including it in full will be fruitful for my purposes.

One day during my last term at school I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full of chorus of song, which can only be heard at that time of the year at dawn or at sunset.  I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears.  It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all year round and I had never noticed it.  As I walked I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and again I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before.  If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing I could not have been more surprised.  I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields.  A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest.  Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth.  I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me.  I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God. (Ibid., p. 5)

I read this on a plane on my way to Chicago and found myself stuck on the page, reading and re-reading it, unable to move on.  How can one not want to have such an experience, unsettling though it may have been?  How can one not want to find a crack in the line between the “visible and invisible” (to quote the Credo that I recite every Sunday)?  These are “moments when the deep divisions, distractions, worries, sadnesses that seem to drag us down are somehow dissolved, or brought into alignment, so that we feel united, moving forward, suddenly capable and full of energy” (Ibid., p. 6).  Moments like these can help us to orient ourselves towards this goal of fullness.  However, Taylor continues:

[T]his sense of orientation also has its negative slope; where we experience above all a distance, an absence, an exile, a seemingly irremediable incapacity ever to reach this place; an absence of power; a confusion, or worse, the condition often described in the tradition as melancholy, ennui (the “spleen” of Baudelaire).  What is terrible in this latter condition is that we lose a sense of where the place of fullness is, even of what fullness could consist in; we feel we’ve forgotten what it would look like, or cannot believe in it any more.  But the misery of absence, of loss, is still there, indeed, it is in some ways even more acute. (Ibid. p. 6)

Once I was able to tear myself away from the previous passage, I found myself fixated on this one.  I know this is often said in jest, but it’s like he’s in my head.  He has described the emptiness I feel better than I ever could hope to.  This emptiness creates “a sense of damnation, of deserved and decided exclusion forever from fullness” (Ibid.).  Perhaps this is why I feel a profound sadness every time I go to Mass.  And perhaps it is why I go as much as I do and then have periods when I don’t want to go at all.  When I do go I pray that for once I will find that sense of peace that should come along with it, but most of the time I don’t even know that I believe in who I am praying to.  I suspect this is something like what Taylor meant when he wrote that this age of secularity has created a stumbling block for believers to, well, believe.  But perhaps that is nothing more than an excuse, blaming others for my lack of faith.

I think I should close with the prayer that often crosses my mind in my struggle to properly dispose myself for Mass: “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.” (Mk 9:24)

~ by jhoffacker on July 28, 2009.