Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part XIV

Part XIV in a series.

Imagine a close encounter with someone really quite special. Not an avatar, for heaven’s sake, whose existence is entirely unreal even as you repeatedly curate one another amid the sad solipsisms of cyberspace. But an actual human being, a someone with whom real presence is possible. An embodied person, no less, to whom you find yourself drawn so captivatingly close that nothing can get in the way to impede the perfect unity of the experience.   

“I to my beloved, my beloved unto me.” It doesn’t get much better than that, does it? “In the experience of a great love,” says Romano Guardini, “everything that happens becomes an event related to that love.” An ideal intimacy, in other words, for which nothing in this world can match the joy and the harmony it brings. And not because the two of you are identifiably the same, which would be sodomitic and boring, leaving only those fraudulent masturbatory pleasures that do not finally satisfy. But because neither of you is looking to replicate the other, reducing real unity to a claustrophobic uniformity. That is what makes a relationship possible, the promise of a connection leading to real communion between two endlessly different human beings. 

Self-love has nothing to commend, therefore, save only the delusional dream that in cleaving to another one is actually making love to oneself, a species of self-worship bound for the nearest lunatic asylum. And so everything depends on the extent of one’s awareness of the other as other. “The nature of any union is such,” Thomas Howard reminds us in Chance or the Dance,

that it follows only upon the junction of separate things. You can’t have a union of one thing. That is solitude. A union requires at least two elements…. In chemistry you bring two things together in the compound that you want—say, water; in music you bring two notes together and get harmony; in human affairs you bring people together and form a community that makes possible a certain esprit and solidarity not possible in one man alone. 

A love that is not essentially other-directed can never be authentic and will thus devolve into something wholly grotesque. Only love of the other as other can succeed in igniting the flame of eros, of keeping the fire of love from growing heartless and cold. A husband and wife, for example, whose very differences work to anneal the two in the reciprocal exchanges of life-giving love. Or a parent and child, the obvious differences between whom actually allow for the flourishing of each. Or, again, those connections formed among friends, the happy outcome of which will depend on preserving and respecting the uniqueness and unrepeatability of the other.

And then, of course, there is that level which is the loftiest of all: namely, the love of God for the world He made—indeed, for every blooming creature on whom He has freely chosen to bestow the gift of being in that world. And of what does that consist but a share in God’s own being, in that pure act of existence—of is-ing. “The most marvelous of all the things a being can do,” says Etienne Gilson, “is: to be.” And to think that owing to that fact, we, too, have been permitted to be, takes one’s breath away.

Hans Urs von Balthasar reminds us, in a stunning sermon on the divine Trinity,

God is not a sealed fortress to be attacked and seized by our engines of war (ascetic practices, meditative techniques, and the like) but a house full of open doors, through which we are invited to walk. In the Castle of the Three-in-One, the plan has always been that we, those who are entirely “other,” shall participate in the superabundant communion of life. What we regard as the ultimate meaning of human life, be it giving, creating, finding or being given, being created and being found; all this is fulfilled in the original prototype: in the life of the eternal “With.”

Because we are beings who have quite literally been lifted out of nothingness, whom God will not let go of, will not suffer to fall back into nothingness, we may be confident that He holds us more dearly than any other created thing. That is because, once again, in a relationship created and sustained by love, and not by convenience or use, the other is to be loved and cherished and respected precisely in his or her otherness. God’s attentiveness to us, therefore, which He constantly lavishes upon us, is never exploitative or instrumental but aimed always at promoting the highest and best good of His beloved creatures.

This was, by the way, the great and stupendous discovery made by the Lady Julian of Norwich back in the 14th century, documented in a series of shattering revelations vouchsafed to her by Jesus Christ Himself—shewings, she called them—that took possession of her life, her very soul.  She was an English mystic, who lived the life of a recluse, or a solitary, in order to pursue the life of holiness in a wholly undistracted way. And she wrote it all down, faithfully transcribing all that Christ had spoken to her; in fact, she was the woman to do so in her own language, much as Dante would do in writing The Divine Comedy in his native Italian.

In the first of what will be 16 separate shewings, she is shown a bleeding crucifix, evincing God’s readiness to wed His own perfect divinity to a humanity as poor and suspect as our own.  Why would God, she asks, “who is so reverent and so dreadful,” wish to do that? To countenance so profound an intimacy “with a sinful creature living in this wretched flesh?”

It is, quite simply, because He who is God is also Love, and nothing is impossible with God. “For the great endless love that God hath for all mankind,” she tells us, “He maketh no departing in love between the blessed soul of Christ and the least soul that shall be saved.” Why should He not then be, as she will later put it, “the ground of our beseeching?”

Here is the great theme of her Revelations of Divine Love, borne out so beautifully in the story of the hazelnut, which she recounts later on in Christ’s first shewing. It is a wonderful moment, emblematic of everything we believe about God and the faith we have in Him, in which we see her holding this tiny little thing, about which she marvels and exclaims. Turning to Jesus, she asks, “What can this be?” He at once tells her: “It is all that is made.”

The symbolism of the thing is not lost on her because she soon realizes that it is emblematic of all created existence. All of which moves her to marvel yet again, asking how so tiny a thing could keep from falling into nothingness. That, after all, is the tendency of every living thing, to move unresistingly in the direction of the looming abyss that awaits all that is finite and mortal. 

So, what answer does Jesus give her? He tells her that the entire universe of things is held in being, kept from that final fall into nothingness, simply because God loves everything He made. Indeed, things are precisely because He loves them; they receive their being only in virtue of this love. And thus, in her conversation with Christ, the Lady Julian comes to see in that ever so tiny hazelnut the sudden crystallization of three truths on which everything depends.

One, that God made the hazelnut, it being quite unthinkable that the hazelnut should have to account for its own existence. Two, that God loves the hazelnut. Why would He fashion something He could not love? Accordingly, there must be something good, lovely even, in all that God has made. And, finally, that God looks after that hazelnut from moment to moment lest it should, in a final fall, lapse into nothingness.

Which, of course, moves the Blessed Julian to burst forth with stupefied amazement: “What is He indeed that is Maker and Lover and Keeper!” And that there are no words in Heaven or on earth equal in adequacy to describe, much less comprehend, who or what God is. “For until I am one with Him I can never have true rest, nor peace. I can never know it,” she concludes, “until I am held so close to Him there is nothing in between.”