1 year with the Logos: An Anniversary Dialogue

I’m staring down the barrel at the one-year anniversary of starting this little blog.  The “insight” that started the whole party, that the Christian concept of Logos was equivalent to Mu in Buddhism, was first articulated in June 2017’s “Kairos, Koans and Conversion 1.”  For the most part, I’ve talked about the Logos like it’s a force, a cosmos governing rule.  I’ve referred to the Logos like it’s a law governing our purgatorial predicament—and, surely, it is.  But when the post “Why I’m a Pluralist and other Travelogues” quoted my hindu friend’s exclamation of “Om Nama Shivaya” I began to see that Logos might be more than some sort of deterministic existential force.

The Logos also seemed to expose a big, traditional lie, a dirty secret of the Christian revelation.  (I’m fairly certain I first talked about this in “Why I’m a Pluralist.”)  We were made in God’s image, but we are bound to decay.  And Christianity lays heavy on the fact that this is our fault, a consequence of sin, but here's the kicker: our finitude is also a function of being a creature as opposed to the creator.  Neither finitude, nor powerlessness nor the need to learn is so terrible that it qualifies as a consequence of sin. If that’s the case, “becoming like God” has to be more than being infinite, all knowing, or all powerful, and it makes sense that it would communicate the divine purpose behind Christ’s path of self-emptying.

Thus far, what I’ve said about the Logos is dreadfully, blessedly incomplete. A fuller truth would look like this: The Logos is God’s voice.  As such, for one thing, it isn’t the Godhead itself.  But it is more than just a law of nature.  What I’m getting at is, (drumroll please): The Logos is God’s intelligence, blabbed everywhere by a universe that just. won’t. shut. up.  Sunsets stun us, and stones shout their way through our silences.  God’s Word isa law of nature, but also God playing a childish game of hide and seek—that is, he hides till he’s tired, then he calls out from his concealment, begging us to find him already because there’s cookies and milk in the kitchen and he’s hungry, for Christsakes.

In short, I need to talk more about the Logos as an intelligent force.

The Logos speaks both destructively and constructively.  As loud as my head is, I’ll always emphasize that silence is God’s first language, that listening is more important than speaking. The imageless prayer of Christian apophasis, then, correctly suggests rejecting perceptions in order to gain access to the God concealed beyond them.  It is important to mention, though, that the Logos also speaks constructively.  The Catechism (par. 46) says “Listening to the voice of creation,” along with the voice of conscience, reveals God.  That means there’s got to be something to which we’re listening.  But the listening isn’t aural, it’s a matter of attention.  God’s constructive speech is illogical for just this reason: it is the metaphorical speech of the prophets, the font of every poet’s similes.  It is the “Aha!” at the core of every realization precisely because it’s our attention that God is trying to grab, and our full presence he’s trying to cause.

God speaks through both the Logical and articulate with the illogical groans of silence. Both God’s Logical voice, and his illogical voice, are present in the Genesis myth, but to see it plainly we have to decouple some of our ancient associations.         

Neither childbirth nor work are a punishment.  They appear to be so because of our sin.   This is a corrective that the church has long since issued to the popular mind.  Another such ecclesial corrective is this: the body is a teacher of virtue, not a punishment for sin.  Sadly, the overemphasis on rationality has disembodied the Western mind, and left the west with no means by which to say how the body is God’s way of guiding us.  This is where inter-religious dialogue becomes not just pivotal but mandatory: The Yogas of Hinduism are the guardians of disciplines by which the body, as such, teaches us to connect to God.   

The Church ongoingly updates its paradigm because sin does, in fact mar our ability to perceive these messages. But our associations with various symbols in the Genesis myth are marred by sin as well.  For instance, Satan, the tempting voice, is not the serpent.  Temptation comes, forever, from our own hearts, just as the choice to disobey God comes from our own wills.  Later use of the Serpent as healer, when Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, points to a positive significance of the serpent, at man’s origins as in his liberation.

God and the serpent needn’t be opposed.  Christianity unites earth and sky by the cross, men and angels on Jacob’s ladder.  Non-dual and unexamined perception of reality remains the highest form of prayer and that gives the senses a bad rap—as if they’re forever something that keeps us distant from what we’re perceiving, forever something soaked in our selfish misinterpretation.  But as we’ll see later, there is a way to remove “self” from our senses as well.

In Cosmic Serpent, Jeremy Narby's study of Amazonian “Vegetalismo” religions, the author notes that the serpent is an ancient and Universal symbol for God.   When an old Shaman said the mother of the plant wisdom was a snake, Narby was puzzled.  In examinations of the artwork of those who have made long study of the Shamanism, Narby observes structures shaped like chromosomes.  Snakes are ubiquitous in such art.  His great revelation is that DNA has a serpentine shape. Narby concludes that disciples of the great Shamans are allowed access to “internal senses” by which they become aware of the cellular structures from the inside out.          

This shows the limits of both Western science and empiricism—"if testing won’t allow distance, its bad,” they say, following it with “Things that aren’t visible to the naked eye don’t exist.”  The West’s rational worldview is also quick to condemn mystery.

Like it or not, when the church clashed with the rational assumptions of the scientific revolution, science won.  Faith, which was once an immersive plunging into mystery, became reduced to the acceptance of pious intellectual formulations.  

This gives immersive, omnipresent realities like God a bad rap from the start.  As distant observers—among whom Narby counts all modern anthropologists like himself—we see what we want to see.  Mystics and Shamans know that the stuff of faith, however, doesn’t permit such distance.  As experiencers we are given what we need by a reality higher than ourselves.  This is, if you want, a good criteria by which to judge a spiritual experience: does it move us from observing to experiencing?  Inevitably, such a move will distance us from Ego.

However—lets be specific—the Shaman’s claim is that DNA communicated to plants, and plants communicated with us.  The prospect that the created order might be intelligently communicating God’s voice, albeit in a language of symbol and metaphor, is intriguing.  As a person who spent many years interpreting “what I think the spirit is saying to me,"  the theory puts real flesh on the Catechism’s contention that the “message of creation” is the source of revelation to which we must listen.  The prospect that the body might have a set of "internal senses” (by which those without microscopes might have a plain view of their own biological structures)—this would explain the altered states of consciousness experienced by so many saints throughout history.  And the prospect that the use of such senses might be more assuredly free from egotism--as it is in ecstatic divine visions and as it can be in the course of the purgative Shamanic dieta’s proscribed curriculum of learning from various plants.

However we learn the things of the spirit, mystics and shamans are united in saying that it’s not the communications of the Logos that represent the height of the spiritual life.  God’s Word isn’t God, after all.  Catholics have an account of the bits of egotism we part with as we progress through vocal prayer, meditation and contemplation.  Shamans have an account of the healing that ensues as a practitioner "works with the plant medicine."  The mechanism by which that work gets done say the Shamans, is a gift of the universe.  Catholics might differ in the particulars, but progressive divination, they say, is a work of grace.  Beyond cooperation with the divine, our work isn't terrifically important.  

What is important, say Shamans and Priests alike, is our calm, intentional integration of the Logos into the rest of life.  Part with ego, they say, and the logos (or the universe) facilitates the rest.  This is no small obstacle, though.  Brujeria, a witchcraft-like, prideful use of these “internal senses” is as likely a pitfall for those skilled in plant medicine as spiritual materialism is a risk of Christian Mysticism.  Ego’s both the original demon and the original drug, in comparison to which all other poltergeists and pills are but imitators.  If there are altered states of consciousness, if God teaches something of particular import, Christianity and Shamanism are united in saying they can certainly part us with our ego, but that they are temporary at best, and not spiritual credentials that make us better or different than others.

My life has been a sequence of “one day at a times,” lived in the hope that the right mix of willingness and honesty will keep me free from excessive egotism and dependence.  This is true whether the substance is brain chemicals mislabeled as grace, man-made substances, or relationships.  That pitfall should not obscure the fact that I’m drawn to hear, that my happiness is bound up in that hearing.  If, in the end, the Logos is not just a principle, but the mechanism by which God literally speaks to us, the highpoint is not the talking, but the safe, silent vulnerability following the exchange.  I have come to believe that a power greater than myself is whispering-- in poems and prophesies and plainspeak-- and no rest, outside of my listening, will content me.