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“Where is the dwelling of God?” This was the question with which the Rabbi of Kotzk surprised a number of learned men who happened to be visiting him. They laughed at him “What a thing to ask! Is not the whole world full of his glory?” Then he answered his own question: “God dwells wherever man lets him in.”
from The Hasidic Tales of Martin Buber
And again a topic „follows me”. When I started to ponder on it, we had our holidays in Slovakia, Hungary and the Polish Spisz still ahead of us.
Holidays are for us almost always a time of “increased liturgical acivity”. We visit churches and monasteries, watch internet services broadcasts together and together pray the Daily Office. Yet this time there was something special – at least for me. We were to visit Telgárt , a village in Slovakia where in 1981 I spend a few weeks as a 10 year old. It was there that I for the first time took part in the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrystostom in the Byzantine Catholic church in the village. I experienced something there, which I can describe only very imperfectly, even tough it is clearly imprinted in my memory. It was a moment when time had stopped its utilitarian flow, a moment I was absorbed by a different dimension of reality, which suddenly opened before me through the icons (and especially the icon of the Theotokos ) and through the liturgical action: the chanting (and above all the continuously repeated mantric “Gospody pomyluj” – Lord have mercy), the hieratic gestures, the smell of incense… For many years I had not known what to do about that memory. I didn’t talk about it with anyone. My intellectual and spiritual formation didn’t provide a suitable language to tell anything about it, or perhaps I just needed to grow up to this. Fortunately it has not isolated me completely from the liturgical experiences – also those connected to the Eastern tradition. That I wasn’t the only one who have ever had an experience like this in his life I learned from the writings of P.J.G.A. Hendrix, a professor from Leiden (the Netherlands) who liked to be called “Pjotr”. In the thirties Hendrix visited first the Holy Mount Athos and then Moscow – not the red capital of the Soviet empire immersed in the abyss of Stalin’s terror, but another Moscow. A Moscow that one had to look for, and finding it was nonetheless a pure sola gratia . And it still seems to be, even though so much has changed: the Holy Moscow – the spiritual centre of “Mother Russia”. He visited it in order to – when the city has been celebrating the 1 st of May in an almost orgiastic way – celebrate Pascha in one of the few still functioning churches… And there, just there, balancing on a high wall in front of an overcrowded church in the suburbs of Moscow, he experienced a resurrection. The resurrection announced and celebrated in the ancient Eleusinian mysteries , the resurrection the Celtic druids waited for, the resurrection of Christ.
We have stayed in Telgárt twice: on our way to Hungary and on our way back. Both times we stayed for the Sunday Liturgy. No, of course, neither the first nor the second time did “anything special” happen. Rubbish! Of course, the Divine Liturgy has happened, and I had a chance to take part in it again. “An ordinary Sunday” (even some liturgical calendars use this – actually almost blasphemous! – term, Sunday in ordinary time) – the “LITTLE PASCHA”… More weeks and more Liturgies pass. The time between the Liturgies is sanctified by the – more or less faithfully and more or less regularly – said daily prayers, usually with the help of the Church on the Web or the Prayerpage of Rev. David Guthrie. And there is something more – a feeling always accompanying me that I want to (must?) write something about the liturgy…
The first question I would like to pose is: what is this all about? Is the liturgy for me a way to escape the gray everyday life, or a way to make it more colourful? I remember as we were laboriously translating the article of Richard Toews, Politics and the Cross (
part I
and
part II
), an extremely long and extremely difficult to comprehend one.
People like Toews himself and the “cloud of witnesses” he called effectively make it impossible for my escapist tendencies to develop in the liturgical space. So what is the liturgy for me?
I’m asking about the liturgy, but this question is really about religion and religiosity in general. I would like to approach it using some texts of Rabbi Dr. Lawrence Kushner . My “love affair” with Rabbi Kushner has been going on for 20 years, that is from the moment I bought the Polish translation of his “Honey from the Rock” in the Jewish History Institute in Warsaw at Tlomackie street. The Jewish mysticism, kabbalah, has then not yet become one of the things the celebrities get enthusiastic about. As the Polish idiom says, only a few knew “what to eat it with”(had any idea what it is about), and Kushner was able to prove that even a hamburger will do and it still won’t be a fast food. On the contrary: one has to relish the “honey from the rock” – slowly, in appropriate amounts, even if his easy to read style tempts us to go immediatly from one story to the next, without taking a brake to “digest”. I regularly come back to the “Honey”, and I have discovered other books by Lawrence Kushner in the meantime, so I can say today that he belong to the group of theologians – actually not a very big one – who have shaped my own views in the greatest extent. So who should I ask for an advice in this issue, if not him…
‘MAKE ME A SANCTUARY that I may dwell among them’ (Exodus 25:8). That pretty much sums up the religious enterprise: You have to do something, so that God, who is not there, can be. The tabernacle is a metaphor for the religion we ‘construct’, an exercise we perform to alter our consciousness.
Or, to put it another way: If God’s everywhere, then why can’t we find God anywhere? If God made the world and, as Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl teaches, the presence of the Creator is within each created thing, then why can’t we find it? We have this nagging suspicion that God is ubiquitous, we just can’t seem to find God.
According to Shneur Zalman of Laydi (d. 1813), its not that there is a world and God is everywhere within it. It’s that there is God and the world is everywhere within God. There is nothing, absoluthely nothing, that is not already God. It’s all God. You, me, the trees, the murders, the children, the sewers, the blossoms of springtime, the toxic waste dumps, the tabernacle – it’s all God. At the end of Job, God says, in effect, I’m the whole kazoo. Not just the sunshine and the bluebirds, but even in the lions tearing gazelles, vultures eating carrion. Everything. Everywhere. God. God. God.
I feel that I have to interrupt “my” rabbi here. How come: “it’s all God”? Truly “all”? Including all these most horrible, most perverse things we do to one another? Should we simply accept them? So what was this whole talking about worship as a subversive act for?
In another text, published in a book with a significant title, “God Was in This Place and I, I Did Not Know” Kushner elaborates on this topic a little bit more. Here follows its fragment:
And if God is everywhere, God is also in the perverse things we plan and even carry out. To be sure, God is less evident and less accessible than in acts of kindness, for example, but in them nevertheless. In the words of Rabbi Tsaddok Hakohen, a student of the school of Mordecai Yosef of Ishbitz, ‘God is present even in our sins’. And rejecting our sins only postpones the ultimate task of healing and self-unification. Accepting ourselves is another way of finding God.
Perhaps its all about that and it is also what our “subversive act” consists in? Perhaps its about a protest against any attempt to tear anything from God (or rather OUT OF GOD!) and give it to the one more cruel, enslaving idol? Anyway, a thesis Gnostic in its essence is apparent here (but it’s such a type of gnosis with which I have no problem at all!) that everything in religion is about consciousness, our consciousness. Or, using the words of Jerzy Nowosielski: Our consciousness is that mediator that carries the fallen reality, the empirical, rotten, reality – to the redeemed reality. In other words, to a state when “God will be all in all”. The Chilean communist poet, Pablo Neruda, expressed this in a poem, which we very often sing at the Liturgies in the Kritische Gemeent IJmond (and it is one of my favourite songs):
And day will come,
When the light and water,
the earth and man
will be freed by us.
And a day will come.
And then will be:
Everything.
Everything for everyone.
Not a word about God, yet for me it is an expression of what Jerzy Nowosielski said:
– But we wan’t to redeem ourselves, sir.
– Alone?
– We want to redeem ourselves and the world.
– But will that help the world, if we are redeemed?
– It will, it will… We may consider ourselves rational beings, in a sense delegated to redeem the world. In the moment the world disappears as the empirical reality, our redeemed consciousness will carry some elements of this world to the new earth and the new heaven.
– Our consciousness will create a new world?
– Our consciousness is that mediator that carries the fallen reality, the empirical, rotten, reality – to the redeemed reality.
– Is that not so that it’s God who will create the new earth and the new heaven? (Isaiah 65,17; 66,22)
– God has his cooperators and it’s us.Source
But let’s go back to the first text of Rabbi Kushner:
And how do you get that awareness? It has something to do with how you
behave as a human being. Being a decent human being increases the chances that you’ll find it, that it’ll dawn on you, just as being a louse gradually seals off from it. It’s not that you’re religious to be good; it’s that you’re good to be religious!
But suppose you want this awareness more of the time: that it’s all God, that the presence of the Creator is everywhere. Suppose you say, I want to be aware of the presence of the Creator more than just sporadically. What do I do? That’s where religion comes in. That’s where constructing the tabernacle takes over. Religion, you might say, is the collected advice of those who have come before us on how to attain it. Sure, it doesn’t always work. Sure it can easily be perverted. But the ‘hit rate’ is way ahead of what ever is in second place. So God says (Exodus 25:8): ‘You build me this sacred place, just as I’ve told you, so that I can dwell among you.’ Whenever you perform a religious deed with devotion and reverence, then you get it. Every time. It’s all God.
Source: Eyes Remade for Wonder
A Lawrence Kushner Reader
Jewish Lights Publishing , Woodstock, Vermont 1998
And this is what Liturgy is all about, because
There is the Music of Heaven in all things and we have forgotten how to hear it until we sing
(Hildegard of Bingen)
Master of the Universe!
I will sing a song to You (familiar)Where shall I seek You, Master of the Universe?
And where shall I not seek You, Master of the Universe?
Where can I find You, Master of the Universe?
And where can I not find You, Master of the Universe?You, above; You, below;
East, You; West, You;
South, You; North, You.So good You are, forfend not You!
You. . .You!
