“I’m going to have to generalise freely now from my own
experience, because I’m dealing strictly with internal events, and I don’t have
direct access to anyone else’s interior. I haven’t been anyone else; only
myself. But I’d guess that for most of us who do end up believing, the moment
when we asked and nothing happened changes in retrospect. It becomes,
afterwards, part of the history of how help did after all arrive, though not in
the way we expected it to. We look back on it and we find it altered. Its
significance is different now. Literally its significance: its sign-age, the
way that it points.
It isn’t the story that has been rewritten, with a piece of
imaginary cause and effect projected back into it from some happier future
point, with unreliable memory erasing the disappointments of the past by
inserting a phantom helper’s phantom action. That’s not the feeling. It remains
perfectly clear that at the moment of asking nothing happened, nothing altered
in the world, nothing started up. But we begin to recognise that the moment
signifies anyway, because it was then, when we asked and because we asked, that
we started, falteringly, tentatively, to be able to notice something was already
happening…
…Now I register something that precedes all this manifold
immensity that is not me and yet is real; something makes itself felt from
beyond or behind or beneath it all. What can ‘beyond or ‘behind’ or ‘beneath’
mean, when all possible directions or dimensions are included in the sum of
what is so? I don’t know. I’ve only got metaphors to work with, and this is
where metaphor, which compares one existing thing to another thing, is being
asked to reach beyond its competence. Beyond, again: but I’m not talking about
movement through or out of any of the shapes of existing things. I’m talking
about a movement through or out of shape altogether, yet not into vacuum, not
into emptiness. Into fullness rather. Into an adjacent fullness, no further
away than the thickness of everything, which now feels as if, in this direction
that can’t be stated, it is no thickness at all…
…I feel what I feel when there’s someone beside me. I am
being looked at. I am being known; known in some wholly accurate and complete
way that is only possible when the point of view is not another local self in
the world that glows in the whole medium in which I live and move. I am being
seen from inside, but without any of my own illusions. I am being seen from
behind, beneath, beyond. I am being read by what I am made of…
…On one level I can feel that this is absolutely safe. A
parent’s safe hold is nothing compared to this. I’m being carried on the
universe’s shoulder. But on another level, it’s terrifying. Being screened off
by my separateness is all I know in my dealings with somebodies who look at me.
This is utterly exposed. And while it may be safe, it is not kind in one of the
primary ways in which human beings set about being kind to each other…
…I have been shown the authentic bad news about myself, in a
perspective which is so different from the tight focus of my desperation that
it is good news in itself; I have been shown that though I may see myself in
grim optics of sorrow and self-dislike, I am being seen all the while, if I can
bring myself to believe it, with a generosity wider than oceans. I’ve been
gently and implacably reminded of how little I know a whole truth about myself.
I have been made unfamiliar to myself, and therefore hopeful; I’ve had the grip
of desperation loosened…
…These are explanations of how my feelings might have
arisen, physically, but they don’t explain my feelings away. They don’t prove
that my feelings were not really my feelings. They certainly don’t prove that
there was nobody there for me to be feeling them about. If God does exist, then
from my point of view it’s hard to see how a physical creature like myself
could ever register His presence except through some series or other of
physically-determined bodily states.”
-
Francis Spufford – Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make
surprising emotional sense, p62 - 67 - well worth reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment