The Problem of the Personal
O You, Finally, Beyond Names,
At about the two-thirds juncture of my life I began addressing You primarily in the second grammatical person as “Lover.” I did this having reached a tipping point regarding the anthropomorphisms of patriarchy, propitiation, and triumphalism, to say nothing of susceptibility to idolatry. It would only be years later that exposure to Christian mystics—e.g., Origen’s commentary and Bernard’s homilies on The Song of Songs, Mechthild of Magdeburg’s The Streaming Light of the Godhead, Juan de la Cruz’s Spiritual Canticle—illuminated the Fourth Gospel in particular as never before and rendered that shift irrevocable. The bold and unprecedented equation of You with Agápe (“Love” [I Jn 4:8,16]) was yet another strand reinforcing this conclusion. Human covenantal love in all of its shimmering dimensions was thus elevated as the least inadequate pointer toward Your identity as Reality Itself.
More recently, however, the plot has been thickening. In numerous interspiritual and so-called “integral”contexts it is held that images of You as relational, personal, and intimate need to be transcended as evolutionarily obsolete. Such terms are there deemed inherently anthropomorphic and dualistic, and therefore need to be supplanted by the “transpersonal.” Such a view has major implications for addressing You in the grammatical second person as well as for both god-talk and spiritual practice. While I am growing in my assent to aspects of the nondualistic challenge, I resist the notion that it and the personal are incompatible in regard to You. This prayer post is the latest window into that ongoing exchange.
But is my cleaving to the nonnegotiability of Your Agápe as the core of Reality Itself actually reductionistic, yet another expression of anthropomorphism? It is a fair ask, one which, however, begs the question for me regarding the distinctive core of my tradition, that of Jesus. The followers of that story hold that that core is incarnational as witnessed to in John’s Gospel, various Pauline passages (e.g., Col 1 & I Cor 13), and much of the subsequent mystical tradition. Why would the personalism of Agápe, equated with You in both Christian text and the ensuing flowering, require being sloughed off, the Incarnated One’s window into the disposition of Your very heart transcended? Is not Your vision, and therefore You Yourself, embodied in a human life, one relational, valuing of intimacy, and capable of sociality?
Furthermore, in the more profound reaches of that tradition’s unfolding of the Trinity the emphasis shifts toward Your interior perichorésis (“interpenetrative dance” or “mutual coinherence”), also profoundly relational, personal, and love-ladened. Thus, to paraphrase Eckhart, the exterior cósmos might be set forth as the ebullítio (“boiling over” or “overspill”) of Your intrinsically relational interior life. Rather than the discard of some now obsolete stage or phase of the journey, the core of Reality Itself in every “here” and “now” is You as Lover. Both mystics and aspirants have always sung love songs to You while drawing upon the full gamut of relational human capacities. In regard to You, the formidable challenge of nondualism notwithstanding, personal, presence, and passion are never passé.
Rather than reflecting an outdated stage of evolutionary spiritual development, the dimension of relationship/personal/intimacy/Agápe constitutes a mode which I glimpse to be timeless, perhaps particularly amid the contemporary corrective of nondualism. Indeed, I am slowly learning to allow Adorámus Te and Hadewijch’s Totality to mingle in both my practice and my daily awareness. Stated panentheistically, Your infinite manifoldness both vastly transcends and overlaps with human personhood. And so, paradox no longer a complete stranger, I continue to intuit, yearn for, and, yes, name You as “Lover.”
