1. The Experience of God Must Not Be Restricted to the Few or to the Old.
1. The experience of God must not be restricted to the few or to the old.1
Why does this observation from Aquinas excite me so much 800 years after they were spoken?
First, because all spirituality leads with our experience of God. In this book we are studying spirituality first. This is what distinguishes spirituality from religion—spirituality is our experience of the divine. Religion, on the other hand, is defined primarily today as a sociological category, a matter of buildings and numbers and money and hierarchy and institutional one-upmanship.
A number of years ago I was interviewed on Dutch television by an intelligent young man, and as soon as the show was over and the lights dimmed, he leaned over and said to me with a sense of urgency: “I have an important question for you that I have been wanting to ask for years.”
“What is that?” I replied.
“Do you Americans still believe that people can experience God?”
He was correct. That is an important question. And the answer is Yes. At least some Americans are curious about and eager to experience the divine. We call that experience spirituality.
Notice how utterly nonelitist Aquinas is in his invitation—not the few and not the old hold a monopoly on experience of God. It is meant to be a democratic opportunity—one available to all. Because it is not exclusively for the old—the young are invited too, indeed they may be invited to lead. That seems to be happening today with leaders like Greta Thunberg addressing the climate emergency and high school students from Parkland, Florida, taking on the NRA.
I could say that my life’s work as a spiritual theologian the past fifty-five years has been to uncover how we everyday folks experience the divine in our daily lives. One such way is through creation itself, as the poet Bill Everson attests: “Most people experience God in nature or experience God not at all.” We are all called to be mystics (lovers) and prophets (people who stand up for justice) on a daily basis. What changes do we need to make, what transformations do we need to undergo, to taste the divine within and around us and how everyday can this be?
I am talking about democratizing mysticism and its counterpart, prophecy, and removing them from an elitist mindset that wants to restrict them to a few specialists (professional pray-ers, monks, or the equivalent). I believe we are all born mystics—that is, we all have minds and hearts that want to learn new things, get excited about life, taste awe and wonder, and build one’s values around such profound experiences. Clearly, Aquinas was in this camp also—and centuries before “democracy” was a rallying cry. By insisting that many and not just a few are invited into experiencing the divine, he deconstructs the hierarchical thinking typical of both religion and society. He reinforces the beauty of all people, the intelligence of all people, the humanity of all people. We are all born for wonder and awe and stretching our souls.
He refuses to say that only the old know the divine. We all do. Children do. Teenagers and young adults do also. Challenging adultism in all its manifestations, Aquinas offers this interesting observation:
Youth is the cause of hope on these three counts, namely, because the object of hope is future, is difficult, and is possible. For the young live in the future and not in the past; they are not lost in memories but full of confidence. Second, their warmth of nature, high spirits, and expansive heart embolden them to reach out to difficult projects; therefore they are mettlesome and of good hope. Third, they have not been thwarted in their plans, and their lack of experience encourages them to think that where there’s a will there’s a way. The last two factors, namely, good spirits and a certain recklessness, are also at work in people who are drunk.” (349)
He also praises beauty found in the young. “For delight is the perfection of happiness, as beauty is that of youth” (505).
Yes, there is a certain optimism in being young, and one profits from it by being around those who are. By comparing the young to people who are drunk or high, Aquinas highlights the importance of optimism, hope and exuberance at living.
He encourages all to get a life—an inner life—and start paying attention to our experiences of beauty and truth, of oneness and oneing, in short to value our mystical experiences and make them the basis of our consciences, our choices, our values, our work, and our goals. In many ways he is setting the stage for his younger Dominican brother, Meister Eckhart, who said that the person who is awake may experience “breakthrough”—that is, our experience of God—“not … once a year or once a month or once a day but many times every day.”5
Aquinas also echoes the wisdom scriptures such as the psalms that say: “Taste and see that God is good” (34:8). Tasting is something we all do—it is not done vicariously, nor is it done for us by some nobodaddy in the sky or some ordained prelate or pope. No one does it for us. We are responsible for learning life and drinking deeply from it. We can all taste the divine and thereby undergo the goodness of the divine. And of ourselves.
We taste the divine when we taste the wonder, the marvel, the surprise, the beauty, and the goodness of creation itself. And Aquinas develops this sense of the ecstatic on many occasions. He says, for example, that goodness and beauty go together, that they are distinguished only by the fact that beauty appeals more to the intellect than to the appetite.
He says that ecstasy is a sign of love and that we are all subject to it. He says that ecstasy and grace are not religious or profane, Christian or non-Christian, but that ecstasy is ecstasy and grace is grace.
He teaches that beauty is a way, a door, to the divine whether beauty be found in nature’s sunsets or trees or animals or sky; or whether it be found in the human works of poetry and music and truth-seeking and truth-telling and work for justice and compassion.
Aquinas dismisses entirely the idea of a punitive father God or a God who only judges us (or teaches us to be overly judgmental). Rather, for him Divinity is a compassionate God, a God of love and a God of joy, who urges us to love and to develop virtues of compassion, justice, and love based on self-love. He encourages healthy self-love and wholesome pride when he insists: “Self-love is the form and root of all friendship. To know and appreciate your own worth is no sin” (99).
He teaches us to trust nature, to feel and love creation, to realize how thoroughly we are part of it and how much it has to teach us and how it awakens us and leads us to experiencing God. To trust nature we must trust ourselves, our own nature, and our own uniqueness—not to flinch at differences but to rejoice at diversity—at our being different and our being personally responsible for decisions we make while honoring differences in others.
In opting for an ethic of virtue over an ethic of obedience to rules, he forcibly resists the childish mentality of catechisms that set us up with binary questions and answers about morality that pave the way for burdensome guilt and shame. He also stands up to fascist mentalities that rely on the powerful or the few to tell others what is good and bad and who consider obedience a greater virtue than creativity or compassion or developing a conscience.
Aquinas tells us that when a truly important ethical question arises, one will not find the answer in a book, but rather should seek counsel from a mature, ethical person—and then make your own determination about right and wrong. He therefore urges the development of conscience.
In declaring that “the experience of God should not be restricted to the few or to the old,” Aquinas celebrates the existence, the wisdom, and the potential maturity of every human being. None are excluded from this school of wisdom, this pilgrimage of growth, this growing of a soul that life invites us to undergo.
I have intentionally offered this first saying as our kickoff point, because this book is primarily about our experience of the divine—and my goal is for younger readers to awaken to that experience. After all, this is what spirituality is about, and it is important to begin with the many blessings—indeed the original blessings—that have called us into existence. Another term for that original blessing is the cosmos. It birthed us after all. We did not birth it.
We are all in it, and it is in all of us. It is not only good but very good. The universe is the starting point of our existence, of the air we breathe and the water we drink and the food we eat and those of the songs we sing and dance to and the joys of our lives. We are in it and it is in us. It is the kingdom of God.
“They shall be drunk
with the beauty of thy house,”
that is,
the universe.