Thursday, December 31, 2020

Ground and Network; Life and Death

Nearly two years ago now, Rhiannon Grant published a post on her blog Brigid, Fox and Buddha considering the question of what, if anything, Liberal Quakers think about life after death. Now, Rhiannon is far better qualified than I to say what they may or may not think, and an interesting discussion ensued in her comments section. But the question, when I revisited her blog, set me thinking.

Merlin Sheldrake, in his fascinating book Entangled Life, discusses the all way life, on this planet at least, is underpinned by fungal networks, mycorrhizal webs connecting tree to tree, plant to animal, bacterium to lichen. He remarks, of his research on fungal networks, facilitated as it is by international academic and commercial scientific networks, "It is a recurring theme: look at the network, and it starts to look back at you." (Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life (p. 240). Random House. Kindle Edition.)

Much of our unthinking outlook on things, even in the twenty-first century, is conditioned by a Cartesian, atomistic outlook inherited from the seventeenth century. This has crept into our religious and spiritual thinking too, so that we tend to understand God as a "thing" over against other things, and we ourselves as separate individual selves who continue, or don't continue, after death. Perhaps this is as wrong a way of looking at life as was the early Darwinian view of evolution as divergence, separation, of organisms (Sheldrake, op cit., pp. 80-82) rather than as interconnection, often cooperative interconnection, within ecosystems.

For a long time now, Paul Tillich's understanding of God as "Ground of Being", beyond being, not to be understood as object vis à vis any subject but preceding the subject-object disjunction (Theology of Culture, p.15) has made perfect sense to me. Tillich somewhere in Systematic Theology refers to God as Ground of Being as "Being-itself" - a concept which has always appeared to me to be pretty much equivalent to Meister Eckhart's Istigkeit, "isness"!

If God is indeed the Ground of Being, that which underlies as well as overarches all things, the ground in which, as Christ, "He is before all things, and in [whom] all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17 NIV) then his relation to "things" in creation, human and other beings included, is, at least metaphorically, much more like the relation of a network to its nodes than anything else I can think of. Our own lives, then, are "hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3.3) - as Paul says, we have already died; how then can we die? (see Colossians 3.1-4!) But is this an atomistic, separate continuation, a life lived "in Heaven" rather than in Dorchester, merely? That neither seems likely nor accords with my own experience at all. Our true life is lived in God, in the Ground of Being, the isness of God. That goes on - death is consumed in life, darkness by light.


4 comments:

Tim Pitt-Payne said...

Thank you for this, Mike. I first came across "Ground of Being" as a way of talking about God in the mid-1980s, through reading John Robinson's "Honest to God". Ever since, this language has spoken to me. Later, David Bentley Hart's "The Experience of God" left me with the sense that this was closer to the classical understanding of God than Robinson may have realised. And I have been greatly helped by some remarks of Simone Weil, in "Gravity and Grace":

"A case of contradictories which are true. God exists: God does not exist. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure my love is not illusory. I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word. But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion."

Yet in the end the purpose of all of these words is to lead us into silence.

Mike Farley said...

Yes, Tim, exactly. That Simone Weil quote is just beautiful, and fits precisely with what I was trying to say. Thank you!

Tim Pitt-Payne said...

Mike, I've written a bit about Simone Weil here, in case it's of interest - https://thismagpiemixture.blogspot.com/2020/07/some-disorganised-thoughts-about-simone.html

Mike Farley said...

That's a dense and unsettling read, Tim, as is Anna Rowlands' linked piece. As, of course, is Weil. I've tried to read her repeatedly over the years, and ended up bogged down each time in "the sense of an overwhelmingly strong personality, fierce and intolerant and sometimes almost intolerable." But you and Rowlands are both right - perhaps now is the time to read her, with that attention she herself demands for the intolerable times in which we are living. And that admission is in itself worth the time spent reading both your articles - the demand to "pay attention to what is" in this time, rather than to our own deep hope "that good and not harm will come to us..." A painful kind of vipassana if ever there was one. But it may be necessary, is necessary: we can't truly find hope except on the bare scarp of truth.