Tag Archives: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Umwelt

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If you sit still for long enough then it will become apparent that there is no such entity as a discrete, permanent self that “has” experiences, thoughts, sensations. Of course there are experiences, but no one “has” them – they are no one’s possession, for there is no one separable from experience to possess them. And yet…

And yet it certainly feels as though I am I, feeling things. I have memories, preferences, longings, losses – so many losses – that don’t belong to anyone else; and they feel like the same kind of thing as these experiences, thoughts and sensations that happen in the present…

What is going on?

In the semiotic theories of Jakob Johann von Uexküll there crops up a wonderful word, Umwelt, the specific way an organism perceives, and interacts with, its environment and its particular circumstances. Not only does the Umwelt of a tick, or a bat (von Uexküll’s own examples) differ from yours or mine, ours differ from each other’s, just as one bat’s Umwelt will perhaps subtly differ from another bat’s.

Now, Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology – the study of subjective, lived experiences – used another, not dissimilar term, Lebenswelt (life-world), to speak of the human Umwelt, just as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins used his own term inscape to describe the unique inwardness – thisness – of a thing, and instress to describe its effect on the one who beholds the thing.

Maybe there is something here. Maybe this sense we have of being a “self” is precisely what each of our individual Umwelten feels like from the inside. Could this be the source of the very illusion of a soul, a granular individuality that goes on in such apparently adamantine uniqueness that it is impossible to conceive of its dissolving, even into the blessed expanse of death? The contemplative endeavour itself then becomes nothing less than the great adventure of seeing beyond the borders of the Lebenswelt, beyond the doors of perception themselves, out in the open ground of isness itself.

Eastering*

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Jesus was not the lone exemplar. Jesus was not the standalone symbol for the pattern of the universe. Resurrection is just the way things work! When we say hallelujah on this Easter morning, we’re also saying hallelujah to our own lives, to where they’re going, to what we believe in, and hope for. 

Reality rolls through cycles of death and resurrection, death and resurrection, death and resurrection. In the raising up of Jesus, we’re assured that this is the pattern for everything—that we, and anybody who is suffering—is also going to be raised up. This is what God does for a suffering reality. What we crucify, what reality crucifies, God transforms. I don’t think it’s naive to say hallelujah. We have every reason, especially now, since biology and science are also saying this seems to be the shape of everything. It just keeps changing form, meaning, focus or direction, but nothing totally goes away. 

Of course, it’s an act of faith on our side. In our experience, our most cherished people, pets, and even places, fade away—but Jesus is the archetype of the shape of the universe. To believe in Jesus is to believe that all of this is going somewhere and that God is going to make it so. All we have to do is stay on the train, stay on the wave, trusting that by our crucifixions, we would be allowed to fail, fumble and die, and be transformed by grace and by God.

Richard Rohr

[Jesus] left us a method for practicing this path ourselves, the method he himself modeled to perfection in the garden of Gethsemane. When surrounded by fear, contradiction, betrayal; when the “fight or flight” alarm bells are going off in your head and everything inside you wants to brace and defend itself, the infallible way to extricate yourself and reclaim your home in that sheltering kingdom is simply to freely release whatever you are holding onto—including, if it comes to this, life itself. The method of full, voluntary self-donation reconnects you instantly to the wellspring; in fact, it is the wellspring. The most daring gamble of Jesus’ trajectory of pure love may just be to show us that self-emptying is not the means to something else; the act is itself the full expression of its meaning and instantly brings into being “a new creation”: the integral wholeness of Love manifested in the particularity of a human heart…

As Paul so profoundly realized, “up” and “down” do not ultimately matter, for in kenosis consciousness reclaims dominion over energy. The pathway to freedom, to the realized unity of our being, lies in and in fact is coextensive with the sacramental act of giving it all away, making “self-giving” the core gesture through which all the meaning, purpose, and nobility of our human life is ultimately conveyed.

Cynthia Bourgeault

The intuition that death is not the end, that the way to light is through the darkness of entire surrender, is fundamental to the contemplative life in all traditions. Easter is only one expression of it, though it is certainly the most powerful expression available to us in the West. Where we so often go wrong is in assuming that “life” somehow implies the survival of something like an ego. Ego is precisely what must be surrendered, in contemplative practice just as, ultimately, in death. Personhood, whether imagined as human or as divine, is not what we think it is. As Buddhism so clearly sees, there is actually no such individual self – it only looks that way; and that illusion ends with surrender, with death. Life cannot fall out of the ground of being; the ground is life; life is being.

I am gradually coming to realise that language and culture are inescapable; I can no more escape my native English, and Englishness, than I can change my own genes. No wonder the language of the Christian contemplative life has so strong a resonance for me; it is simply the way that I perceive things, left to myself. That, after all, is how the Gospels came to be peppered with imagery that looks as though it has been borrowed from its contemporary pagan surroundings almost as much as from its native Jewish culture; that is simply how language turned out for the New Testament writers when they tried to find words for a reality beyond words.

My innate Einzelgänger-ishness remains, of course. But maybe I can embrace, rather than struggle with, my native contemplative heritage. The sense of homecoming I felt at Willen Priory was perhaps not illusory after all, but a real intuition; not a homecoming to a place so much as to a language, to a way of understanding that which is beyond language.

*Eastering, as a verb, seems to have originated with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland‘.