Most Christians, in approaching God, visualise an external presence. It is as if God is to be discovered, like Santa Claus, in the heavenly equivalent of the North Pole. Even among many who would be quick to deny that they had any intention of geographically locating God in some supra-cosmic dimension, the tendency to look beyond themselves for this ultimate reality persists. They are betrayed by their meditative rituals, which are less contrived, more spontaneous, and, therefore, more revealing than their theology.

An Inner Presence

I would want to argue that God is to be found, not by us looking outside ourselves, but within. I would further contend that experiencing ourselves involves us experiencing God. The more we come to know ourselves the more we discover of God.

Augustine

The Early Church Father, Augustine of Hippo, bears eloquent testimony to this perspective. In one of his prayers, he confessed that while he had sought God in the external world, with his busy mind ablaze with desire for God, the quest had been in vain. The reason for this, he discovered, was that the God he sought was not without, but within. He had been looking in the wrong place.¹

Medieval Mystics

This tradition was further developed by mystical theologians, who were concerned to link prayer, contemplation and spirituality. Meister Eckhart, one of the most insightful of Medieval mystical theologians, contended that the Ground of God and the Ground of the soul are one and the same and that the knower and the known are one. God is not separate from us in a dualistic sense. To know ourselves is to know God. To know God is to know ourselves.² We will not find God by going out of ourselves, by looking for him in the external world. Nor ought we to seek to serve or glorify an external God, as if such an external God existed. Rather are we to serve and honour the God who is within. We are to live authentically. To know oneself, and to be true to oneself, is to know God.³ He went on to contend that the soul has the capacity for recognizing a oneness with God.⁴

Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard de Chardin, in a haunting, autobiographical fragment from Le Milieu Divin, depicted this two-fold knowing in an analogy of descent. In [6] penetrating his most secret self, and in discovering the ocean of forces to which he was subjected and in which his growth was steeped, he began a descent into the depths of his interiority. Relinquishing the sphere of everyday operations and relationships, where everything appeared clear, he began his descent. But, as he moved beyond conventional certainties, he was aware that he was losing contact with himself. At each stage, a new person was disclosed to him, and, at each stage of the descent, these new people were less and less like the self with which he was familiar. When he finally stopped, because the path ran out, a bottomless abyss fell away before him. It was in contemplating that abyss that he heard the voice of the Gospel comforting him with the world, be not afraid, it is I.⁵

Carl Jung

Carl Jung, a psychiatrist, who, to seek answers to questions his minister father was unable to answer, spent his life rigorously exploring the structure and contents of this unconscious. The record of his self-exploration appeared in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

It is clear from this work, as from other of his writings, that, in pursuing knowledge of himself, Jung encountered an inner divinity. He was not prepared to say that this divinity was the God of Christian theology, arguing that metaphysics was not his area of expertise. From his exploration of himself, and of his patients, he concluded, nevertheless, that, whatever others might postulate of an external deity, the experience of an inner divinity was undeniable.

Karl Rahner

If Jung encountered an inner divinity in the course of an unrelenting exploration of the human unconscious, through dream analysis and a study of mythology, astrology, alchemy and Gnosticism, Karl Rahner, a Catholic existentialist theologian, arrived at the same conclusion through a study of theology and through an intuitive apprehension of human subjectivity.

Rahner argued that all people experience the God, in whom their existence is grounded, at a level of awareness of which they are barely conscious. This knowledge, akin to the caress of a breeze, is unthematic--a powerful, but diffuse impression. He contended that, to flow with the gentle movement of this zephyr, was to participate in one's development.

If one flows with this inner urge towards wholeness, that is, if a person flows with this intuition, rather than resisting it, they appropriate a two-dimensional grace, the grace that encourages this response and that enables it to become a possibility. This constitutive grace, and our dim awareness of its healing energies, Rahner calls the supernatural existential. The challenge with which this grace presents us, to ride its flow, to say yes [7] or no to a nuanced collaboration with what it is seeking to effect, he describes as the fundamental option.

Rahner argues that the foundation of all freedom is the freedom to flow with this grace, which is a freedom to say yes or no to God. This challenge, and the grace that is its source, is latent in every decision we make. This freedom is constitutive because it contributes, through each decision we make, to making us what we are in process of becoming. Rahner argues that this sort of freedom differs from mere psychological freedom, which is concerned with choices between relatively innocuous alternatives. He contends that the exercise of constitutive freedom takes place on two levels, the deeply subjective and the categorical. The categorical sphere is the world of external, everyday decision-making, the world of family, work, economics, politics and history.

Rahner is not arguing that we make different types of decisions in two separate spheres. What he is suggesting, is that the one decision involves both levels of decision-making. His point is that when we make a decision in the realm of the categorical, our action will impact upon the deeply-rooted subjective self. When we discipline our children, react to a colleague, respond to a spouse or participate in a communal expression of opinion, our action will affect, not only those directly concerned, but also our inner being, our maturational dynamic.

Discerning and flowing with the grace that constitutes us, and that moves us in the direction of our healing, and that of others and of the wider society, will contribute to the positive construction of the self. When we deny and resist this inner grace, because of angularities, or because of psychological dysfunctions that are the consequence of the way we have been damaged, we frustrate what God is doing within us to develop a strong centre capable of generous self-giving.

If Rahner is correct, then to know oneself at a deeply subjective level is to know the God whose presence is most powerfully experienced at this level as both otherness and constitutive love. Knowledge of self and knowledge of God constitute a unity.⁶ Knowing God is not like knowing ordinary phenomena. Knowing God is the enabling condition of and the intrinsic element in one's self knowing, such that, without experiencing the God who is at work deep within us, we cannot know ourselves.⁷

Immanent Transcendence

Theology has had a tendency to separate God's transcendence, or separateness or distance from us, from her immanence, or closeness to us, usually in the interests of preserving a sense of the otherness of God. However, it can be cogently argued, as Karl Rahner and Sally McFague have done, that the two characteristics are not polar opposites. Each is incomplete and unable to be accurately delineated apart from the other. [8] They are flip sides of the one experience. God's transcendence is experienced immanently and her immanence transcendentally. This perception is also implicit in Tillich's description of God as the Ground of Being.

The One Experience

Experience of self and experience of God are the one experience. This does not mean that God is no more than the self, or nothing other than the self's reflection on itself. What it means is that God and the self are known in the one knowing. If we truly experience ourselves we will experience God. When we seek and discover God, which comes about through God's self-discovery of herself to us, who we truly are is revealed to us. Translated into simple, more helpful language, this means that the more we are in touch with ourselves, the more we will be in touch with God. The less in touch we are with ourselves, the more likely it will be that what we take for God will be little more than contrived images that are laden with our projections or with those of society.

We cannot know another more than we are capable of knowing ourselves. The limit of our self-knowledge is the measure of our ability to know and relate to others. Though her presence is discerned as an inner grace, God is one of these others to whom we seek to relate. Therefore, there is a sense in which this particular Other cannot be known beyond the limits of our self-knowledge.

It can also be argued that the more of us that is engaged in knowing another, that is, the more we are acquainted with our various selves, and the more these are integrated, the more our knowing of others is enhanced. This further confirms the thesis that the more we know ourselves the more we are capable of knowing God.

Furthermore, the more we know of ourselves, in the sense of discovering the deeper self, or accepting ourselves and the truth of our identity from God, the more we will have consciously experienced her grace. It is in the flow of this grace, not in a disengaged anticipation or consequent reflection, that God is experienced, though the anticipation and the reflection can be part of the flow. As the Johannine Jesus indicated to Nicodemus, it is in the movement of the breeze that the Spirit is experienced. God is to be experienced, therefore, not in the forced imposition of a super-spirituality, but in the flow of her grace, that is, in our flowing with the Tao, the Word, with the energy of that which constitutes us and our world.

A Paradox

Many Christians are suspicious of the suggestion that they should spend time and energy on themselves. They argue that this could reinforce an endemic self-centredness and contend that they are called, not to concern [9] for themselves, but to concern for others. They also protest that some who have concentrated on self culture have ended up drowning in a lake of pure subjectivism.

The reality, however, is that we cannot free ourselves sufficiently to attend to others in a way that avoids self-seeking and that allows us to identify contaminating unconscious motivations, until we have attended to our own deepest spiritual needs.

It is true that some people, in concentrating on themselves, can become so compulsively self-absorbed that they become trapped in their self-absorption. They so anticipate a flow of positive feeling that they become addicted to the process of self-culture, like a jogger addicted to the flow of endorphins.

The self-attention that I am advocating is not a pleasurable, but a painful process, because it will confront you with the fact that there is a dark side to your being. It involves confrontation with the shadow side of your reality, the intuition of which, I suspect, is what causes many to back off from the process and take cover in the cowardly misapplication of the Christian call to self-denial.

There is one critical test that can readily determine whether attentiveness to the self is healthy and fruitful or unhealthy and schizoid. If it manifests in behaviour that reflects an increasing kenotic other-centredness and an affective and hard-nosed loving, then it is the gift of grace.

A Multi-Dimensional Dynamic

I have argued that the more we search out our true selves the more we will know God. This process, however, can be approached from the opposite side. The Desert Fathers of the 4th Century sought God in the vastness of the Egyptian desert and were confronted by themselves, by shadow material emerging from the unconscious, which leered at them from demonic images.

The Hindus, in an intuition that was amazingly perceptive, had one word for both the God who was discerned within and the self that emerged as a consequence of the encounter. That word was Atman.

A Preparation

The discovery of God at the core of our subjectivity prepares us for the discernment of God in the external world of relationships, of community, of culture, of history and in the holographic ecosystem that is redolent with her presence. [10]

An Invitation

The Psalmist, aware of the existential priority of self-discovery, issued the divine invitation, to be still and experience God as God.⁸ We need to still ourselves, to face ourselves and then to encounter the God who is to be discovered in the depths of our subjectivity. [11]

[SFM 6-11]