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This writing is paradoxically rational. That is, like much contemplative writing, the rational is employed to show the inadequacies of the rational and push toward an implosion of linear logic. This does not entail un-reason, only a higher reason, which linear reason is essential to as preparation.
The person who does not have a reasonable faith is not prepared for what I am to write. Transcendence, see, is inclusion at a more embracing Embrace. Therefore, linear reason is transformed into Wisdom by Wisdom; so, the forming of Wisdom arises from discursive reason. The exhaustion of linear reason opens into lateral, all-encompassing intuition, or Wisdom.
I am writing, herein, what contemplatives have said for thousands of years. Agreement as contemplatives in these matters, and other ones, points to a common quest, though we might differ on varied matters related to our historical faiths. Our common quest arises from a common Ground. A divergent quest, though quests are differentiated, cannot arise from the same Source. So, here we go…
Pure Faith, like Pure Love, has no object. I speak of Pure to distinguish from cultural caricatures, including religious and “spiritual” caricatures.
Pure Faith is a more mature form of trust, which often has its beginnings in a manipulative form of faith. This less mature faith sees Mystery out there “from” me or “inside” me as an “object” for “me.” This “God” is “our God,” and “we” are “God’s people,” meaning “God’s only people.” This is called tribal consciousness. We are the “believers,” while they are the “nonbelievers,” “pagans,” “doomed,” “damned,” … Jesus, in my estimation, met head-on this tribal consciousness, seeking to implode the boundaries of “insider” and “outsider.” The “Body of Christ” is, when understood contemplatively, a reference to a cosmic Reality, as Christ is understood to be the cosmic Christ, the unifier of difference back into a single Whole, through Love (i.e., the Holy Spirit). Indeed, this Whole is the Home of difference, for difference arises as an expression of the Whole.
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Even “contemplatives” can get caught in a more sophisticated version of object faith in the “Other” or “otherness,” when the person seeks God “inside myself,” or “in my heart,” but separate from and other than the Essence of each and every manifestation.
Likewise, the less mature faith tends to validate the “believer” by mental assertion of the “right” beliefs and moral precepts. And, here, the liberal can be as strong and certain of opinion as the opposite, the fundamentalist, and as closed to difference and a change of mind or heart. Such faith always leads to self-righteousness and no where more than, I surmise, among we who speak most of faith. Indeed, I surmise that the most faithful might have the least to say of faith. Possibly, the most faithful ones are simply faithful, with little need to toot the horn, so to speak. They have a quiet witness that helps keep our world together, possibly more so than those who are trying to save it by preaching, politics, agendas, reform or rebellion.
Where there is any sense of spiritual superiority, as though one or a group has found the right gnosis (knowledge, insight), the key to the Mystery of mysteries, in exclusion of all other persons, be certain this self-referencing faith has reared its head. However, the way is the same, really, between the self-referencing “gnostic” who thinks all fundamentalism is a bunch of old-fashioned stupidity and the fundamentalist who bombs abortion clinics or says that everyone not in his religion is doomed and going to hell. Both have faith in their faith, a notional faith. And, the faith of the atheist, ironically a faith that says there is no God, is a pitiful, though subtle, display of “gnositic” faith.
So, any notional faith is not Pure Faith, for Pure Faith has no notional system, even if a notional system somewhat reflects it. Put simply, Pure Faith has no system, period, while we humans systematize and delineate faith.
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