Enjoying God

In numerous posts on this blog, I’ve chronicled my journey into the realm of “experiential Christianity”. The journey has been fueled, in part, by the growing realization that pretty much every character in the Bible hears from God in personal and specific ways.

• “Don’t eat the fruit of that tree.”
• “Build an ark, Noah.”
• “Go to Ur, Abraham.”
• “Sarah, I’m going to bless you with a son.”
• “Go and attack the Philistines, David, and deliver Keilah.”
• “You will not die, Simeon, until you have seen the Christ.”
• “Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
• “Go up and join this chariot, Phillip.”
• “Get up, Peter, and kill and eat.”

While there is much that is different between the Old Testament and the New Testament, there is at least this one common thread: People in both eras hear from God. In the last few years, I’ve been exploring the extent to which this kind of personal interaction with God is continuing today.

This topic might be considered to fall under the broad category of Christian mysticism. While I’ve begun to experience the mystical reality of God speaking to me in the last few years, it is not a topic that I have explored academically or historically. This deficiency is in the process of being corrected. My unofficial spiritual director recommended that I read a book written by David Downing entitled Into the Region of Awe – Mysticism in C. S. Lewis.

Let’s see – are you telling me that there is a book that collects Lewis’ thoughts on the topic of encountering God experientially? Wow! What could be better than getting educated on a subject that fascinates me from the author that I find most captivating?

A quick read of the book has provided many stunning moments of revelation and encouragement and excited recognition. I want to go back and study it more closely. However, in this post, I want to focus on just one aspect of what I’ve read. It ties in with a concept that is integral to the retreat I’ll be teaching soon (as soon as someone takes me up on my offer to teach it).

I’ve thought a lot over the last year about the difference between knowledge gained by reason and knowledge gained by experience. In the retreat, I spend time at the very beginning exploring the importance of both. The book on Lewis and mysticism has given me lots more to think about in this regard.

Downing reports that Lewis defined mysticism as “a direct experience of God, immediate as a taste or a color” and added, “There is no reasoning in it, but many would say it is an experience of the intellect – the reason resting in the enjoyment of its object.”

Whenever you see the words “enjoy” or “enjoyment” in Lewis’ writings, you have to ask if he is using the word in its ordinary sense or in a special sense that had great personal significance for him. The special meaning of “enjoyment” grew out of his reading of a book entitled Space, Time, and Deity by philosopher Samuel Alexander. In that book, Lewis discovered what he described as the author’s “… truthful antithesis between contemplation and enjoyment” and this insight became crucial in his conversion from atheism to theism in 1929 (his later conversion to Christianity came in 1931).

Knowledge, according to Alexander, can be gained through both contemplation and enjoyment. Contemplation is the kind of knowledge you get through reason as you analyze an object or concept. Enjoyment is the knowledge you gain by experiencing an event or phenomenon.

For example, if I ask you to look at a diamond, you are “enjoying” sight to “contemplate” the gem. That is, you are enjoying (using, experiencing, participating in) the phenomenon of sight to contemplate (study, learn about) the diamond. If you later read a book about sight, you are enjoying (experiencing, using) thought to contemplate (analyze) the physical and biochemical mechanics of seeing.

(Note: Enjoyment, in Alexander’s philosophy, has no connection with pleasure. In his scheme, to “enjoy” is to use or experience a faculty or phenomenon. Thus, a person can be said to “enjoy” grief in contemplating the death of a loved one. You enjoy (experience) grief as you contemplate the person whose death has left you desolate. Later on, you might step back and contemplate the phenomenon of grief as you enjoyed (experienced) it and thus gain new contemplative insight into grief as a phenomenon. These crazy philosophers! Why do they take a perfectly good word like “enjoyment” and give it an off-beat meaning that forces you to stop and really think about what they are saying?)

There are several implications that arise from this distinction between contemplation and enjoyment but I want to focus on just two of them: (1) The knowledge we gain through contemplation is different from the knowledge we gain through enjoyment and (2) We have the most complete knowledge about things that we both contemplate and enjoy. To understand this, let’s continue taking sight as an example.

You can explain sight to a blind person and that blind person can contemplate the phenomenon. You might explain that the azure blue sky that you see from the summit of a Colorado 14er is the result of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths of 4500 to 4950 angstroms that impact the eye at a frequency of 606 to 668 terahertz. The blind person can study all the biochemical reactions that occur when a blue photon of light enters the eye and can understand how these reactions cascade through the lens and retina and optic nerve to produce electrical signals in the brain. In all this, the blind person is “enjoying” thought to “contemplate” sight.

Yet even with perfect contemplative knowledge, the blind person never gains the knowledge that is available by “enjoying” sight. He never experiences that indescribable beauty of a deep blue cloudless sky against the granite ridges of mountain ranges as they recede into the distance and his knowledge of sight is forever incomplete, crippled and etiolated.

Every sighted person, of course, has knowledge of sight by the mere enjoyment of it. But most sighted persons have very little contemplative knowledge of sight – they have never taken the time to study it academically. They don’t know about angstroms (an angstrom is one tenth of one billionth of a meter). Biochemical reactions are an enigma to the typical sighted person. An ophthalmologist has the most complete knowledge of sight since he enjoys sight himself and has spent years in contemplation of it.

With this background, let’s go back to Lewis’ definition of mysticism. He defines it as a direct experience with God that is as “… immediate as a taste or a color.” Color is directly experienced and it would be essentially impossible to describe the color “blue” to a blind person. Go to the dictionary and look up any color and you’ll find it defined by telling you to go look at something – a cloudless daytime sky for blue, a ripe banana for yellow, etc. Lacking the direct experience of eyesight, the blind man lacks complete knowledge. He can contemplate, but he cannot enjoy, sight and his lack of direct experience with sight leaves him impoverished.

Likewise, without the mystical encounter with God, we lack complete knowledge. We can contemplate, but we cannot enjoy, God. Without the direct experience of God in our lives, we are impoverished. With both, we are in that state which Lewis describes as “… reason resting in the enjoyment of its object.”

The most profound example I’ve encountered of this interplay between reason and experience in the spiritual realm is in the life of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologica. As its name implies, it was an attempt to give a summary of all theology. The book is vitally important to the Roman Catholic Church and most Protestants, while not agreeing with everything, would find it theologically beneficial. Even secular scholars recognize the Summa as one of the most remarkable intellectual achievements of Western civilization as Aquinas combined insights from classic logic, Greek philosophy and Christian revelation in one work. There was a lot of high level and very sophisticated contemplation going on as Aquinas composed this classic.

Yet Thomas Aquinas never actually finished the book. About two years before his death, he had an extraordinary mystical experience with God one day during Mass and he discontinued work on the Summa. His friends urged him to return to his lifelong project but Thomas told them that what he had seen that day during Mass had made everything he had written seem to be made of straw. After his death, the Summa was completed by his student, Reginald of Piperno, from notes that Aquinas had left behind.

While some interpret this episode as an example of the inherent limits of logic and reason, I see it differently. I can imagine that Aquinas might have returned to the Summa and finished it if he had lived longer. Thomas had spent his life in extreme contemplation and his abandonment of that after a single encounter with God seems like the classic case of over-reaction. He might, with time, have come to a more holistic viewpoint that values both contemplation and enjoyment. At least that is where I have ended up and it is this more inclusive outlook that I want to promote.

There seems to be a divide in the Christian community over the issue of contemplation and enjoyment. On the one hand, we have those who heavily emphasize doctrine and theology. Orthodoxy, for them, requires that one think properly about God. On the other hand, we have the more charismatic faction of the faith which values experience – prophetic utterance, demonic deliverance, healing, tongues and other encounters with the supernatural.

I became a believer in the company of those who valued the former and were suspicious of the latter. As a result, I spent 30 years as a handicapped believer – as handicapped as a blind man who can contemplate sight but never enjoy it.

At the same time, I’m aware that many in the charismatic camp commit the opposite error. They value enjoyment of the supernatural and can tend to denigrate doctrine and theology. If I had become a believer in that environment, I would have been just as likely to have succumbed to their handicap – all experience with no rigorous contemplation of what it all means.

A part of my mission in life is to heal this rift and bring about a healthy integration of both the contemplation and enjoyment of God (which is what the retreat is all about). To spend a whole life in contemplation of God but with no enjoyment (experience) of him is as crazy as spending a lifetime in scuba diving instruction without ever getting into the ocean. What is the value of all that knowledge if it is never used it to explore the Molokini Crater or the Great Barrier Reef for yourself? On the other hand, jumping into the ocean with a scuba tank on your back without ever having any academic instruction on the pressure/volume relationship of gases in your lungs will probably be fatal. Both theory and experience are necessary to make a competent diver and neither alone is sufficient.

And so it is with God. The 30 years I spent focusing on contemplative understanding of Scripture and theology was not wasted. Nothing I’ve learned with my mind is superfluous or unimportant. God values it. My life during that time was, however, incomplete. I was a diver who never dove.

Undoubtedly, my reflections above are embryonic and incomplete. There is a whole debate in Western philosophy between the rationalists and the empiricists. I probably need to go back and read more about that conversation. But at the moment, this is as far as I’ve gotten on my journey and I wanted to put this out for your consideration. As always, your comments are desired and relished.