The Journey As Eternal Progress By Laurence Freeman

In the first part of the Letter of St. James, he says, ‘Count yourselves as fortunate when difficult times and challenges come to you because they are going to deepen your faith and shape your character and they are going to bring you growth and grace.’ (Jam 1:2-3) How can we understand that in a more spiritual way?

Transcript

The journey as eternal progress.

In the first part of the letter of St.

James,

He says,

Count yourselves as fortunate when difficult times and challenges come to you because they are going to deepen your faith and shape your character and they're going to bring you growth and grace.

How can we understand that in a more spiritual way?

St.

Gregory of Nyssa was one of the great figures of the Christian mystical tradition.

He was the first Christian teacher to articulate that God is infinite,

Not as an abstract idea only,

But because this explains how we make our journey,

How we seek,

Know,

And eventually are deified,

Divinized,

How we eventually become one with God.

So understanding the infinity of God is helpful to us because it's going to allow us to make the journey and all the stages and all the diversity of the journey in a deeper and fuller way.

His other key insight,

Which somebody said changed the history of human thought,

Is the nature of the journey as eternal progress.

He develops this insight throughout his work,

But in particular in one of his books called The Life of Moses,

In which he uses the figure of Moses in Exodus as a symbol and as an example of the human and the divine relationship.

In The Life of Moses,

His question is,

How could Moses sit and talk with God face-to-face,

As the Scripture says,

And then soon after be plunged into despair when he discovered that the people were rebelling and the people were going back to their old gods and idolatry and so on?

And yet,

How could he experience these different stages of his own life of the journey to God?

And his answer is,

It was because he was able to realize how transcendent God is,

How out-of-reach God is.

This is the really essential point here.

It's by discovering the transcendence of God,

God who is within us,

But who is also transcendent beyond anything we can think,

Imagine,

Or control,

It's by realizing the transcendence of God that we are able to let go of our preconceptions and of our egotistical desire for God.

Gregory then says that Moses learns from God that there is a place with God,

And in that place there is a rock and a hole of the rock.

This is in Exodus,

Chapter 33.

Moses is having trouble with the people as usual.

He's having this conversation with God about how he's going to cope,

And all the prophets are very human people who often think,

I just can't take this.

I don't want this job.

This is too dangerous or it's too much.

The Lord said to Moses,

I will do the very thing that you have asked,

For you have found favor in my sight,

And I know you by name.

This to know someone by name is a way of saying,

I know you through and through.

I knew you when you were in your mother's womb.

I know you better than you know yourself.

And Moses says,

Show me your glory,

I pray.

Okay,

I know that you know me,

But I don't know you fully,

So show me your glory.

The glory means fullness,

So tell me everything about yourself.

God said,

I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you the name,

The Lord.

So in other words,

All right,

I will show you everything.

I will show you my name.

I will give you that most intimate and my true nature,

And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious,

And will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.

But he said,

You cannot see my face,

For no one shall see me and live.

So what does that mean?

It means,

I think you could say,

This is the transcendence of God.

You can't ever know me,

Maybe you can know me fully,

But not finally.

You can't have every single piece of information and knowledge about me,

Because no one can see me and live.

So no one can see me,

And their personal identity cannot survive that.

The ego is going to be exploded by that knowledge.

And the Lord continued,

See,

There is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock.

And while my glory passes by,

I will put you in a cleft of the rock,

In a hole in the rock.

So a cave,

And a cave is a universal symbol of the deepest encounter with God and one's own self.

So while my glory passes,

I will put you in this cave,

And I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by.

So this is a kind of a paradox here.

He's going to reveal himself,

But at the same time,

He's going to cover him in order to protect him from an overload of God.

And then I will take away my hand,

And you shall see my back,

But my face shall not be seen.

Gregory of Nyssa uses this as a starting point for his discourse on journey to God.

And Moses has to stay there in that cave.

You need to stay there.

You need to be able and allow it to become rooted in part of your life.

Obviously,

Gregory doesn't take this story literally.

It's an allegory.

He reads it in the mystical sense.

He describes,

Then,

How the ascent of the soul to God,

So our journey,

The ascent of our soul to God,

Is the counterpart of the force of gravity in the material world.

So in the material world,

Everything falls to the ground.

But in the spiritual world,

Everything moves upwards.

And the soul keeps rising,

He says,

Higher and higher,

Reaching out and upwards by the force of desire,

By which he means the force of love.

The soul keeps rising ever higher and higher,

Reaching out and upwards by the force of love.

This is the reference to the letter to the Philippians,

In which Saint Paul has this famous passage.

It's a passage,

Then,

That Gregory of Nyssa comes back to over and over again.

In Philippians 3,

Verse 12,

He's talking about his own journey,

Actually.

He says,

Whatever I have lost since I have been on this journey,

After my conversion,

Whatever I have lost is because of Christ,

But I regard it as a gain.

I regard it as something positive.

I regard everything as loss,

In fact.

In comparison with the surpassing value,

The transcendent value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord,

I've suffered all the loss of all these things,

But they're rubbish compared with finding Christ.

And then there's these few verses.

He says,

Not that I have already obtained this,

I have not already reached the goal,

But I press on to make it my own,

Because Christ Jesus has made me his own.

Beloved,

I do not consider that I have made it my own,

But this one thing I do,

Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,

I press on toward the goal for the price of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

So the concept here is the Greek word epictasis,

Which means a continual progression,

A continual going forward.

What St.

Gregory of Nyssa,

Discovering as he reflects upon this in the light of his own experience of prayer,

That there is a continual progress.

This is an unceasing evolution in eternal happiness.

In this idea of eternal progress,

Many writers have said that Gregory of Nyssa,

Writing in the fifth century,

Made an original contribution to the history of thinking,

And it has an implication for us.

If this is our sense of the human journey and of our journey to God,

And if this is our image of God,

Or this is how we can begin to think about God,

It has a big implication for the way we live,

In fact,

For our idea of community,

Of church,

And human progress in general,

That there is eternal progress.

And the good side of it is that there is no limit to our progress towards God.

We are never satisfied.

So gradual enlightenment could be understood not as being slow,

But as being infinite.

Our experience of the journey may be gradual today,

But sudden tomorrow,

Or gradual this morning and sudden this afternoon.

So gradual and sudden really refer to different ways of perception,

Different ways in which we are interacting with the evolution,

With the journey itself.

Reviews

Thank you. I enjoyed your thoughts. Celebrating St James today and his steadfast faith. May our own be deepened by his example.