“When Gods Die”
[Jack Welch, OCarm, When Gods Die: An Introduction to John of the Cross. Paulist Press, 1990.]
O Lover,
Part of my encounter in the mid-1990s with the spirituality of Juan de la Cruz was a course I took from Fr. Welch in Washington D.C. One of his books bore the enigmatic title of When Gods Die which opened up for me the hazards of creating deities in our own image. Juan (via Welch) showed me how deconstructive spirituality needs to be so as to open ourselves to Your ineffability, O Lover. That issue has remained central throughout my subsequent life, a feature which I do not expect to change in my time remaining.
So how would I describe my self-constructed deities; my false gods; the ”graven” images crafted, managed, and thus compromised by my own faculties? One example might be the notion that You are a being among others, albeit the highest, the entity/object atop the medieval chain of being or within the subject/object structure, rather than the ineffable Grunt (“Ground”) or Depth of Being Itself. Another designer deity might be ligatured within the dogmatic/creedal confines of the philosophical system of one or another historical period, perhaps efficacious for a time but neither immutable nor absolute. Another might be predominantly characterized by judgment, punishment, propitiation, and/or contractual manipulation. Yet another false deity might be a melding of our own religious exclusivity with hateful supremacist ideologies or behaviors. All such human creations, some briefly useable, posture so as to pass for You, O Lover, even while invariably compromising of the Kin-dom of the Christ via whom I have been extended glimpses of You.
Experiencing the death of our created, and thus false, gods is not for sissies, those opting for safety in shallower shoals. Sooner or later it requires stepping away from heretofore securities into dimensions of Your unknown Depth where conventional verities evaporate. The abandonment of false gods requires spiritual courage, the entrusting into Your embrace of all that we are and hope to be. For me the watershed existential question is this: is Core Reality some idea my created and egoic self has crafted and then manipulated across the years, or is it You Yourself ever-engaging me in all of Your ineffability and Mystery?
So what continues to inhibit within me the necessary divestiture from what is finally idolatry? The security of certitude, so alluring a siren, must be jettisoned in favor of allowing the journey to become one of response to the invitation into You, O Lover. Only You are, finally, enough. All else, however useful for a season, is a shortcut when absolutized, and is found wanting. This requires spiritual courage, the courage to allow ourselves to become increasingly centered in You whom we cannot sense, think, image or imagine; in the words of the Apostle Paul, it is to “journey by trust rather than by sight” (II Cor 5:7).
I confess, O Lover, that allowing false gods to die is intensely painful for me. They, invariably kataphátic constructs, have been part of the very furniture of my entire life. In different ways I have had enormous investiture in them. Indeed, to abandon them sometimes threatens the abandonment of my very existence. Ah, but there is the hitch, for crafting you in my own image and fabricating my (created and thus false) self in my own image are all mixed together. No wonder it has sometimes seemed uncertain whether I would survive the death of this or that god! The death of the graven gods is inseparable from the death of the created, the egoic, the false self. Thus much is at stake here.
A powerful and promising image of You, O Lover, is presented in the poem/commentary by Juan de la Cruz entitled “The Living Flame of Love” (c.1590). Here Juan depicts the other side of Your relentlessly unconditional Fire of Love transcending all dualisms (a la advaíta) as the purifying and transformational purging of the self-delusional, the egoic, the grandiose, the fabricated. Juan’s central image of the log being not only immolated but transfigured into You who are the Fire of Love is but one of the texts pointing to no less than Deificátion, Theósis. Indeed, fire and ashes, Phoenix-like, are an essential part of the road to You who are neither projection nor pseudo-facsimile. And in my inimitably vacillating way, it is for You Yourself that this aspiring apophátic heart pines.
