“I Am the Lord and There is No Other”
O Lover,
In chapters 43-45 of II Isaiah the prophet, engaging exiles in the Babylonian and Persian empires, has You repeatedly proclaiming that there are no gods but You. An example would be 45:18: “I am the LORD and there is no other” (Ego Dominus et non est alius in Jerome’s Vulgate). Such texts, later alluded to in a sermon by the Apostle Peter (Acts 4:12), have generally been understood as making the case for monotheism: You as the Only One in contrast to merely the greatest amidst a plethora of deities. I remain deeply moved by the truth of Your claim which thus serves as bedrock for the critique of all idolatries, whether graven or ideational, cultic or secular, ancient or modern.
However, O Lover, in recent months on at least three fronts—the incarnational theme in the newer testament, the writings of some late medieval and renaissance Christian mystics, and the Advaíta (“neither two nor one”) teaching in Vedantic Hinduism—there has been emerging an additional layer of meaning of the words “there is no other [but You].” That enriching stratum is that, in addition to the above, You are neither an “other” as we humans are apt to classify You nor are we finites, human and otherwise, an “other” to You. In both respects You—Ground, Depth, Abyss—simply obliterate the subject/object structure, the objectification game, within which we seek, however futilely, to classify You.
The core of the case for this “enriching stratum” is the Christic Incarnation. The deployment of the term Immánuel (“God with us”) in Matthew 1:23, its antecedent I Isaiah (7-8), has vast implications regarding Your relationship with all of us in both the Christian scriptures and the subsequent tradition. There via Your messenger You lock the very identity of the Anointed One yet unborn into the appropriated theme of “[You] with us.” Whoever else You are, O Infinite and Unencompassable, You are the “with us” One! And if we finites are no more “other” (or “alien”) to You than You to us, then Karl Barth’s “wholly other” surely requires a major asterisk (*)! Your Self-bonding to all of us Your Love-children, graphically and corporeally “spoken” in Bethlehem, emerges as Your core identity stretching from “before the foundation of the cosmos” (Jn 17:24) into “the eternity of the eternities” (Apoc 1:18). Your Self-ligature to us creatures, O Lover, is Your very core essence: eternal, cosmic, irrevocable, decisive. History itself is too short a time for us finites to grasp fully what all this means.
This enlarged stratum of “no-otherness,” “no-alienness,” is also creatively elaborated upon both implicitly and explicitly among many mystics in the tradition of Jesus. In addition to exploring an indistinctiónis beyond separation, the writings of both 13th C Beguines and 14th C Rhinelanders repeatedly speak of Your relationship with us finites as, in effect, transcending the subject/object structure. These mystics refuse to allow the swallowing of the immanent by the transcendent; in the words of Eckhart, “[Your] Ground and and soul’s Ground is [sic] one Ground.” Stated otherwise, the central paradigm for every present moment is more unítas (wholeness) than anything with “other” in it.
This gravitation toward wholism rather than dualism—this whole inseparable from You and You from us—is varyingly present on the mystical edge of all of the planet’s family of religions, most notably in the Advaíta theme (“neither two nor one”) of Vedantic Hinduism. Indeed, there is a pervasive vector throughout the human family of experiencing being lured by the inclusive gathering up of all “others” rather than the exclusive separating out of the same. I embrace this propensity as ontologically sourced, grounded, and consummated in You, O “all in All” (I Cor 15:28).
But I also acknowledge that for me the journey into eschewing otherness—You, “all in All,” not excepted—is no shortcut to ease or conventional security, especially regarding prayer. Weighty queries persist: Does not being drawn into nonobjective awareness require a re-examination of petition, intercession and confession in much traditional prayer? Does not acknowledgement that ”we do not know how to pray” (Rom 8:26) invite me into the Apostle Paul’s teaching that Your Spirit prays to You via transverbal groans, this on all of our behalf? Why is contemplative or apophatic prayer, sometimes called nonobjective attentiveness or consciousness, such an uneven experience for me, one more of unsated longing than sweet consolation? But then, why would I expect prayer to be a rose garden of self-evidency when You—otherless Saturator of all having being, Mystérium Itself, Enveloping One outside of whom there is no thing—are the Embrace vastly closer to me than I am to myself?
