What I would like to do, is to take a quick look at the question of: How do we know? And how does the way we acquire knowledge relate to our spirituality?
We confront reality with two modes of knowing: perceptually and conceptually.
In perceptual mode we become aware of reality directly through our senses and in conceptual mode we relate to reality through thoughts or ideas we have formed in our mind.
Think of learning Pythagoras’ Theorem for right angled triangles: a2 + b2 = c2. It can be explained to you conceptually through the language of the theorem but when that explanation is supplemented by a visual diagram, when your conceptual abilities and perceptual abilities join hands, all of a sudden, the puzzle pieces, in you head, fall into place for you and you say “OK now I see what it is!”. You now have acquired the knowledge of the theorem.
In the everyday world of perception, we have 5 exterior senses, or organs of perception: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Is there a common substrate to our senses? In sight, photons touch our retina. In hearing, sound waves touch our ear drums. In taste, food touches our tongues. In touch, our fingers touch the textures of things. In smell, odours touch our noses. Touch then is the “common sense”.
Do we have any other senses? Christian theology defines faith as the theological virtue that is manifested as that interior sense that compliments our exterior senses. The sensory organ for faith is our soul. Our soul is the retina of our heart. It is our soul that is touched by the Spirit of God and it is how we perceive spiritual things.
We live in a world where we tend to conflate faith with belief and opinion, but belief and opinion are tied to concepts. Now there is a type of faith related to trust but what were talking about here is faith as a virtue, which is perceptual. We need to learn to strike the proper balance between percept and concept, between “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34) and “Study to shew thyself approved unto God” (II Timothy).
Our senses are gifts, including faith; they give us direct perceptions and direct knowledge. They do not involve abstract thinking, on our part.
Look at the language used by people talking about their Alpha “weekend away”. “I was touched by the Holy Spirit!”, “I can’t put my experience into words (concepts) but I have a heightened sense of God’s love for me.” “I know now that I am loved deeply!”. “I see (perceive) my life and my relationships differently now!”
I know a young lady who is an amazing landscape photographer. She is still on the learning curve in terms of the conceptual elements of photography (f-stop, ISO, shutter speed, exposure latitude, etc. etc.) but she has the gift of photographic perception. Using her artistic talent, she can take, what is, in reality, a 3-dimensional landscape and compose it as a 2-dimensional photograph in such a way that her use of light re-presents the missing dimension. Her photographs reach out and touch our aesthetic sensibilities and gives us a direct apprehension of the beauty of the original scenes.
My infant granddaughter, at this point in her life, has only perceptual abilities. Concepts will only arrive for her when she acquires language. If I pick her up, she perceives that I’m not mummy or daddy and she immediately bursts into tears. With her tears she is echoing the sentiments of St. Peter, who, when he first perceived who Jesus was, he cried out, “Depart from me!”.
In Matthew 11:51 Jesus says, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned and revealed them to little children.” Little children have the gift of perception. Think about the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where it was a child that pointed out the obvious. Christ admonishes us that to be fulfilled we need to become like little children. Or, in other words, we need a four-wheel alignment of our spiritual perceptions. We must pray for the gift of faith for as it says in Hebrews 11:6, “But without faith it is impossible to please God”
The “wise and learned” in the passage from Matthew, would be the scholars of the Law who lived in the world of nested concepts or what we would call today “theories”. It is possible to become so hypnotized by our conceptual frameworks that we lose sight of the true reality of things. Think of a stage hypnotist who has someone sucking on lemons, they have turned off that person’s sense of taste!
It is interesting that Jesus’ mission statement, in Luke chapter 4, includes the statement “I have come…to give sight to the blind”. Today we live in a world that has fetishized the concept of the “concept” and in doing so has created a spiritual wasteland. It is the world of Marxist theory, gender theory, critical race theory, etc. etc. These theories have a built-in blindness that sees “faith” only as an irrational superstition or the residue of an un-enlightened consciousness. The followers of these “theories” have a type of “faith” that only exists as a smoking wick that needs fanned back into flame. They need to leave the land of the all-consuming theory and encounter the all-consuming fire of God’s love. I grew up in the Pentecostal Church so, in Pentecostal parlance, “…they need to be touched by Holy Ghost Fire and be healed of their “conceptual” affliction so that they can see and behold the Shekinah Glory!” (they need to be gobsmacked by God!) The Shekinah Glory was the presence of God that hovered over the Ark of the Covenant, in the Jewish tabernacle. Have you ever been in a situation where the tension was so tangible that you could “cut it with a knife? God’s presence was so manifest, in the Shekinah Glory that you could see and taste it. That presence touched all your senses simultaneously!
I take photos at St. Benedict’s that includes the Confirmation, Baptism and First Communion of children. For example, I’ll stand beside the Priest as a child is confirmed, and set the depth of field, focal length and lighting to take an “intimate” feeling photo then snap that photo at the liturgical instant that the Holy Spirit enters that child. I have heard back from parents, who when they have opened the email with their child’s photo have immediately bust into tears. That image, with the look on their child’s face or the look in their eyes, has functioned as a “icon” of the presence of the Holy Spirit.
At the Confirmation ceremony there was both a natural and supernatural dimension present. The photographic image re-presents, the natural dimension of that occasion, under the species of pixel and computer screen but as an icon the supernatural reaches out, through that image, and directly touches the faith sensibilities of the child’s parents. To see the face of God reflected in the face of your child is a heart stopping moment. It is a glimpse of the Shekinah Glory!
Marshal McLuhan has an interesting metaphor as to how the Church has sometimes lost the balance between percept and concept, using the image of a nut and shell. The temptation is to recast our faith into an edifice built of religious or cultural ideas and then place Christ inside that conceptual shell. Think of Peter’s argument with Paul, to the effect that one had to first become culturally Jewish in order to become a Christian. We still culturally encumber Christ. Think of Father Mallon’s point that the normal sequence of the evangelistic process is usually that a new convert must first (culturally) Behave like a Christian (put on the garments of Christian piety), then Believe, like a Christian before he can Belong as a Christian. Whereas the opposite is the optimum. They first come to Belong, then they come to Believe and finally they have the desire to Behave.
In our evangelism, which mainly operates at the perceptual level, (“Taste and see that the Lord is good”) sometimes we have not first “unshelled Jesus”, for our seeker, but tried force them to swallow the shell, and the kernel as one unit. So that what they have initially tasted is not the sweetness of Christ but only the bitter flavour of the outside shell.
Image by Tara Bergen from Pixabay
Authors
Adele's Photography
