Divinity | Contemplative Inquiry

Noticing a single corn stalk under our neighbouring birch trees, I wonder whether the seed simply blew in or was planted by an unknown hand. If the latter, what was their intention? I realise that I will never know.

I do know how much I enjoy its presence in this space at this time. I experience it as a miracle inviting gratitude and it has marked the seasonal moment for me, this first harvest of a now declining year.

With increasing clarity I understand that I do not work well with personified and individualised images of the divine. Something seems subtly off, as if I am failing to sound my own authentic note in the Great Song of the world.

I believe that we are given different gifts in our encounters with the Cosmos, leading to legitimately different understandings. When I lean in to the notion of divine personality – even when using the term ‘Spirit’ in that sense – I am not fully living my own truth. I subtly disempower myself and weaken my connection.

For in my universe, when I rest in my own clarity, there is no separation between nature (including culture) and spirit. In the awkward activity of identification and labelling, I answer to terms like animist, panentheist and nondualist.

These words are approximations, with the power to be distracting and slightly depressing. I can find words that point to my experience well enough. But the explanatory words, the more formal and generalised terms, feel clumsy. There’s a necessary level of unknowing that these isms don’t recognise.

When consciously living in spirit, I am neither alone, as a single human person, nor am I with another being. I am simply in a different dimension of embodied awareness, supported and empowered by the bubbling source from which I spring. For me, Nature is more than the ‘nature’ of dualist spiritualities and of the scientific humanism that grew out of them.

As I harvest the learning, or relearning, of this lesson, I renew my commitment to practice and path, once again revising the beginning and end of the modern Druid’s prayer (1). I move from from ‘Grant, Spirit your protection, and in protection, strength … ‘ to ‘In spirit I find protection, and in protection, strength …’. I end with ‘and in the love of all existences, the love of this radiant Cosmos’ rather than ‘the love of God/Goddess/Spirit and all goodness’. These small changes formalise and anchor my understanding. For me, they are an important affirmation, illuminating my path.

(1) Traditionally, this prayer runs:

Grant O God/Goddess/Spirit, your protection,

And in protection, strength,

And in strength, understanding,

And in understanding, knowledge,

And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice

And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it

And in the love of it, the love of all existences

And in the love of all existences, the love of God/Goddess/Spirit and all goodness”.

NB Providing the options of God/Goddess/Spirit is I think an OBOD (Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids) innovation. The original version, from the late 18th century, simply said ‘God’. Some modern Druids say ‘God and Goddess’.

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November 27, 2024

FAITH

In my Druid circle, I associate the northern quarter with faith. The quality and context of faith are not defined. They could simply mean faith in the practice and path. My contemplative inquiry overall has tended towards a stance of ‘sacred agnosticism’ (1), in which faith is not emphasised. This has served me in many ways. I have avoided mixing up the idea of ‘faith’ with affiliation to authoritarian movements, mandated beliefs, or the surrender of self-responsibility and personal discernment. I have been alert to the metaphysical group think and consensus collusion that can show up in any spiritual movement (other kinds of movement too). I have done my best to gather and evaluate information skilfully, when developing principles about how to live ethically and gracefully in an increasingly scary world.

And yet … this is not the whole story, or I would feel spiritually malnourished. In recent months I have experienced a strong felt sense of the divine. When I describe myself as ‘living presence in a field of living presence in a more than human world’ – an animist identification – the identification now seems more than animist, though the animism is still there. I pray more congruently to the Goddess as Ancient Mother and talk, less anthropomorphically, about the ‘bubbling source from which I spring’. The Divine is beyond name, form or description – and some people prefer a specialist, capitalised use of rather abstract terms like Consciousness, Awareness, Void, Ground of Being. But the ones from my own practice are the ones that work for me. They come from the intuitive heart and the imagination. To me they offer a deeper knowing, though I am personally cautious about the use of the word gnosis. For me, it can reduce the sense of mystery, banishing the creative role of faith itself.

I have become a provisional panentheist, experiencing intimations of a divine which is everywhere and no-where, and from which we are not separate. This partly reprises work I did in the earlier days of my inquiry using the framework of non-duality. Now I find panentheism a better term than non-duality for affirming both the divine and the world. The earth spirituality in the Druid tradition is in no way compromised by a panentheist perspective. If anything it is enhanced.

(1) See https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2024/02/16/sacred-agnos

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September 26, 2024

TWO VIEWS OF THE DIVINE

In 1986, at the age of 50, Satish Kumar (1) went on an extended pilgrimage of British sacred sites. When staying overnight as a guest of the Bishop of Lincoln, he initiated a dialogue on divinity. In this discussion, divinity is described as God, and masculine language is used throughout. (In other contexts Satish Kumar has been happy to use Goddess references and language.) My own practice is largely non-theistic, yet I am Pagan enough to have been jolted by this limitation. Diverse images, stories and beliefs about the divine continue to inform my heart, mind and imagination. The two views articulated here (both eco-friendly in their way) point to very different experiences and understandings of the divine, and of the world: dualist and non-dualist in formal terms.

“‘It is with great pleasure that I welcome you, Satish, to Lincoln and my house, the Bishop said. ‘Going on a pilgrimage is an ancient tradition, but walking for four months around Britain to its sacred places is not so common.’

“‘I am honoured to be your guest,’ I said. ‘I have been inspired and renewed by being within many churches and cathedrals, but increasingly I am finding all places sacred and the presence of the divine everywhere.”

“‘The Bishop heard my comment with thoughtful silence, and then said, ‘For us, God is above and beyond his creation. We aspire to reach God, but God and the world are not the same.’

“‘In the Hindu tradition the world is understood to be the dance of the God Shiva, and the yet the dance and the dancer cannot be separated. The world is not like a painting, a finished object which when complete is seen as separate from the painter. The universe is a living dance and God in in the heart of all beings and things. We do not separate God and the world.’

“The Bishop pondered and in a gentle voice said, ‘I believe that the world is God’s creation and therefore it is sacred. Human beings must act as responsible guardians and caring stewards. We must love the land and look after the earth in its glorious diversity. We have no right to plunder, pollute, exploit, destroy, kill or in anyway disrespect God’s creation. Like in a family, God is the Father and we are his children, and all members of the family should live in harmony with each other. God’s family includes the animals and the natural world. If we are sensitive and caring, we can live with nature rather than against it. The advance of science and technology requires that human beings live with greater sensitivity than ever before, since we are now equipped with extremely powerful and destructive tools. This destructive impulse is not part of God. God is good and good only.’

“‘For me, Divinity is neither good nor bad,’ I said. ‘It is like pure water and pure air. The human soul is also pure. Good and bad is a matter of perception. For example, from nature’s point of view creeping buttercups and nettles are fine wherever they are; they will grow where the soil is ripe for them. From the human perspective, however, a gardener struggles to remove the buttercups and nettles; he regards them as weeds, and complains when they overtake flowers. The rose and the thorn are part of the same plant – we cannot have one without the other. The analytical mind attempts to separate the good and evil, the decorative and ugly, the useful and non-useful, the weed and the flower. I have seen during my journey people pulling out foxgloves in one area and carefully planting them in another. If we are to live in harmony with God’s family, we need to love the wilderness, the weeds and the wet.'”

From: Satish Kumar No Destination: Autobiography of a Pilgrim Cambridge: Green Books, 2014 (extended 4th edition – first edition 1992)

(1) “Satish Kumar (born 9 August 1936)^[1] is an Indian British activist and speaker. He has been a Jain monk, nuclear disarmament advocate and pacifist.^[3]Now living in England, Kumar is founder and Director of Programmes of the Schumacher College international center for ecological studies, and is Editor Emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. His most notable accomplishment is the completion, together with a companion, E. P. Menon, of a peace walk of over 8,000 miles in June 1962 for two and a half years, from New Delhi to Moscow, Paris, London, and Washington, D.C., the capitals of the world’s earliest nuclear-armed countries.^[4][5] He insists that reverence for nature should be at the heart of every political and social debate.” (Wikipedia)

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Contemplative Inquiry

Tag: Divinity

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HARVESTING INSIGHT

November 27, 2024

FAITH

September 26, 2024

TWO VIEWS OF THE DIVINE