Finding God in All Things
This week I’ve been at a Jesuit Retreat House in Colorado. It is my first experience of Spiritual Direction. The retreat involves meeting with a spiritual director for each of the days of the retreat. I’m just getting started, so I chose a two-day retreat.
During my long conversation with my spiritual director, we focused on the team of ‘finding God in all things’ and how I have become more and more concerned not with my intellectual development but with my ‘being in the word’—what kind of energy do I give off in my interactions with others. The focus of the retreat is to better understand this energy—its sources and its effects—and what I am called to do with it in the next chapters of my life.
His assignment for me has been to read Psalm 139 and Matthew 5-7, the Sermon on the Mount. Today’s essay will take the form of sentences on the Sermon.
Excess
As I have been working on my next Time Out of Joint essay, I’ve been concentrating my attention on how one of the capacities of intelligence is the ability to create contingency within necessity. I’ve identified this as the power to turn the hard-coded movements of fate and necessity into an excess of energy that introduces this contingency, but it does not automatically tell us what we should do with it.
In studying commentaries and interpretations of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, I’ve begun to understand how those Exercises deal with the contingency through orientation to God. Jung, in particular, is quite clear on the differences between Eastern and Western practices. In the East, spiritual practices rebound always to the self, the atman, even when pursuing ‘no-self’ as the desired state of being. There is nothing but emptiness (sunyata) and dependent origination (pratityasamutpada) that simply dissolves reality into an endless unraveling of connections. In terms of excess, reality is always somewhat less than it seems, and the goal is to continually tell oneself that suffering is not real.
The West, on the contrary, orients away from the self toward God. It allows the Spiritual Exercises to be summed up as ‘finding God in all things’. For Jung, the self does not find itself in this orientation; it finds God—the best of what makes us human and the source of an ongoing orientation and aspiration to what makes us better. This orientation, crucially, is never done. It is lived daily in the world, and is what I spoke with my director about—‘my mode of being in the world’.
Both the Eastern and Western approaches to spiritual practices are engagements with excess—that which is beyond our immediate perception. As I trace the causality of this excess, I’ve found myself working on this phrase:
Intelligence is the adaptive and expansive capacity to make the future less like fate and more like an open field of possibilities.
As an intervention into fate, intelligence must introduce contingency into the otherwise inexorable flow of necessity. We find it in Seneca’s practices for dealing with anger:
The cause of anger is a belief that one has been wronged, to which one ought not lightly give credence. One shouldn’t immediately assent even to what is clear and obvious, for some things are false that look like the truth. One must always take one’s time: the passage of time makes the truth plain. (On Anger, 2.22.2)
Anger results from an unquestioned instinct about being harmed and needing to seek revenge. It is indistinguishable from the flow of fate and necessity. To intervene in this flow is to learn to recognize its appearance and to slow it down and thus to allow other possibilities to emerge: ‘One must always take one’s time: the passage of time makes the truth plain.’
But what are the other possibilities? At the moment of interruption, we are not necessarily sure. All that has happened is that fate—the automatic execution of a pre-programmed reaction—has been interrupted; contingency has been introduced by the mind acting to slow down its reactions.
Nothing at this point indicates what we are to do with this contingency—an interruption that has no inherent direction within the contingency that the mind has brought about.
Finding God in All Things
Finding God in all things is Ignatius’ answer to this contingency. It is what allows us to re-orient within the contingency. It allows us to take the released energy created by the interruption and turn it into something else. (We are dealing with energy and therefore the laws of thermodynamics. Energy is preserved, but it may be released as ‘free energy’ and therefore available for other actions.) This is the movement from necessity to contingency to possibility.
It is the water in which we swim.
The Sermon
5:1-12: The Beatitudes
The Sermon stars with The Beatitudes: a rhythmic disruption that enters the text after four chapters of asserting that Jesus was, in fact, the long promised Messiah. These aphoristic, rhythmic phrases are designed to provoke a different perspective in the disciples on what will be required of them. While cryptic in their literal meaning, the Beatitudes ends with continuity being reasserted:
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is greater than in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (5:12)
A pattern will be replayed.
5:13-16: Salt and Light
A mission is metaphorically laid out for the disciples, but it will be hard to execute. The mission will not take the form of a new law, but a reorientation toward a metaphor of light shining out onto the world. It is an excess energy that the law as pure code cannot bring about through its literal interpretation. Undoing this literal interpretation and releasing its excess energy—the spirit of the law—will become the substance of the rest of the Sermon.
5:17-20: The Law and the Prophets
The new mission is not reducible to a new law, a new rigid code, a new literal text. Yet it is a fulfillment. The word for ‘fulfillment’ is plērōsai, derived from pléroó, which is defined as ‘To fill, to make full, to complete, to fulfill.’
We are treading in the direction of excess—something beyond the literal interpretation of the law and the scriptures—which Matthew will make explicit in 5:20:
For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds [perisseusē] beyond that [pleion] that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew doubles down on excess with the words perisseusē and pleion, the latter derived from pléroó and therefore echoing 5:17’s ‘fulfillment’ (plērōsai). To fulfill the law, therefore, is to grasp and enact its excess, which as we’ll see in the remainder of the Sermon is the spirit that is its fulfillment.
The fulfillment, in other words, is not about rigid adherence to a code but grasping and channelling the ‘mode of being’ with oneself and others that is contained in its spirit.
This will require a different relationship to words. We’ve already seen that The Beatitudes offer something other than strict laws. They are aphorisms without clear codified meaning. They loosen up the Sermon that is to come by introducing a bit of disorientation—contingency—into the atmosphere. By closing his sentences on the law and the prophets with ‘scribes and Pharisees’, Jesus explicitly invokes the literal interpretation of written laws as the problem he is about to address. The word for scribe is grammateōn, meaning ‘one who writes.’ In this case, a grammateōn writes without innovation, without interpretation. He writes what has been handed down as a pure act of preservation.
This is not what we are about to hear. Righteousness, dikaiosynē, will exceed what is written because it understands the meaning running through what is written. Righteousness, in other words, will become the creation of an excess.
Summary So Far
The Sermon on the Mount is the invocation of an excess—an excess that is the meaning of the law that is missed if we only live by the literal reading of the law. The latter interpretation has, in fact, cut off this excess and contained it within a rigid set of formulas. Going forward, the followers of Jesus (who recognize that he is the actually promised Messiah) will live in the excess because they will release the closed off energy. But in the release, we introduce contingency, disorientation, lack of clear codes. How to put this free energy to good use will be the mission of Christianity from this moment forward. It will not always be good. Christian Nationalism, which is rampant today in the US, falls back to codes and laws and literal interpretations. It is not the best of what we can and should be.
5:21-26: Anger
Now starts the repetition of the phrase ‘You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times…’ This is the fundamental trope that allows the Sermon to establish continuity with the law while releasing its underlying meaning.
The law as handed down is a set of prohibitions—thou shalt not. The only excess that the law creates is a prohibited act—murder, worshipping other gods, coveting your neighbor’s stuff—that must be punished. The excess must be contained, not released. The flow of energy is into conformity.
At 5:23, there is a shift. Jesus offers an example of what it means to inhabit the excess and create the excess. It is the awareness of something before the law that activates the law but is the meaning of the law not captured in the written words.
So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.
What is happening here? The law is still in effect. You should still offer your gift, but the meaning is not in the offer but in the recognition that a reconciliation with another person is called for. This is the fulfillment of the law—the ability to understand that it guides us to be better people without reducing that guidance to the execution of rituals and codes.
Fulfillment is about a mode of being in the world not reducible to duties, oaths, rituals, and codes. It is the ability to live in the excess created by these practices and to realize that this excess has no inherent goodness or badness. It’s what we do with it that matters.
5:25-48
The remaining sentences of chapter 5 focus on creating and dealing with the excess. Turn the other cheek, give your cloak as well as your coat, love your enemies are all releasing energy that would otherwise be channeled into either revenge or doing the minimum good required in a given situation.
6:1-8
Chapter 6 transitions to interiority, which is crucial to understanding how to deal with the excess energy. Matthew’s repeated use of ‘secret’ reorients the excess energy of the law and its fixed rituals into a relationship that the individual has toward God—a God who Himself is released from the closed rituals and literal interpretations of the law.
6:9-15 The Our Father
The prayer that we call The Our Father is introduced at 6:9. The words are familiar, but I find Jesus’ explanation of it enlightening:
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but it you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (6:14-15)
It’s all about our own individual power to forgive. This is what it means to ask God to ‘deliver us from evil’—deliver us from the evil that we, as individuals, are capable of. It is not about delivering us only from the evil that others do, but from the evil we do when we don’t forgive. Forgiveness, therefore, is a power of dealing with the automatic responses of judgment and revenge. Forgiveness is the ability to release this energy from its instinctive automation and to send it in another direction. Which direction? We don’t know, but we are living within the excess.
6:16-34
In the next sections, Jesus continues to shift our attention from external displays of piety and righteousness to our interior disposition to God, ourselves, and others. The sentences on not storing up treasures on Earth is another example of Jesus turning the literal into the metaphorical, and in doing so shifts attention from the external to the internal.
In 6:33, we get the summation of what has been told so far:
But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you.
To strive first for the kingdom is to live in the excess, to adopt a mode of being in the world that creates this excess and knows how to channel it away from evil and toward good. This is the purity of orientation without having a hard-coded law that provides definitive answers. To live in the excess is to be oriented to God who is revealing himself as the spirit behind the law. To access that spirit, we must change ourselves, which is what it means to strive first for the kingdom of God. ‘First’ is the crucial word in this sentence.
7:1-5: Judging Others
Lest we be mistaken about Jesus’s message, he makes it immediately clear that judging others is not what it means to strive first for the kingdom of God. This mode of being in the world is a close system of rewards and punishments for conformity and non-conformity. The force of these sentences is, like those that have come immediately before it, to turn one’s predilection for judgment first on oneself.
This is a zero-sum game. Any excess created is absorbed back into the game of legal rewards and punishments:
For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. (7:2)
7:7-11: Ask, Search, Knock
We have arrived at a crucial moment in understanding the Sermon and its opening us to a mode of being in the world related to the positive release and channeling of energy—the creation of an excess. These sentences are purely about orienting to the future through questions, searching, and knocking without knowing what exactly one is looking for.
Truth is downstream from this search. It is the meaning contained in the New Testament’s recurring use of metanoia, which we’ve mistakenly interpreted as ‘repentance.’ Repentance looks backward and judges the past as out of conformity with a law. It promises to do better, but in that promise it replays the closed system of laws, punishments, and rewards.
Metanoia orients to a search, an ask, a knock that doesn’t exactly and precisely know what is on the other side. As a recapitulation of what has thus far been said in the Sermon, these sentences orient us to the excess as the initiation of a metanoia that searches, that moves forward without the judgmental comfort of a clear law.
This is what it means to strive first for the kingdom of God.
7:12-29
The remaining sentences recapitulate what has come before. 7:12, the Golden Rule, directly echoes the fulfillment of the law and prophets as spoken in 5:17:
In everything do to others as you would have them to do you; for this is the law and the prophets.
7:13-14 offers the metaphor of the narrow gate and road versus the wide ones. This will be a movement and a passage—a search, an ask, a knock—that will be ongoing and never complete.
7:15 to the end offers us the metaphor of roots, branches, and fruit. ‘Thus you will know them by their fruit’, but if we have been attentive to everything that has come before, we cannot see the fruits as the source of their own goodness—just as publicly fasting and praying and alms giving are hollow shows of an empty spirit.
Rather, the fruits are not the goals, they are the result of what is happening in the branches as they draw their energy from the freely given energy of the root.
But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you.