Thomas Merton was clear that God cannot be reduced to an ‘object’ that we can possess. God as ‘infinite’ has no limits and so can’t be defined, in the sense that the word define means to place limits. God as the Beyond is beyond all beings. Merton writes:

‘There is ‘no such thing’ as God, because God is neither a “What” nor a “thing”, but a pure “Who”. He is the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness and love. … beyond our natural being we have a higher being “in Christ” which makes us as if we were not and as if He alone were in us.’

So, whilst God cannot be found among the creatures God made, the creatures cannot be separated from their creator. Merton turns to Meister Eckhart where he reflects how God contains a denial of denials. Thus, God is denial: God is “not this” and “not that”; akin to  “neti, neti” in the Upanishads. William Shannon helps us understand:

‘And yet, God is at the same time a denial of denials; that is, God is a denial that God is “not this” and “not that”, namely all creatures that are, find their being and identity in God. To put this seeming paradox in other words: God is transcendent, which means that God is not “this” and not “that”; at the same time God is immanent, which means that God is in all creatures as the source and ground of their being.’

Talking about God we can only use human language to describe our experience, and use these descriptions as symbols or metaphors. Yet the Reality of God outstrips any language we might try to use. I like this description from Merton that our concepts of God are as tiny matches lit to try and look at the sun:

‘As soon as we light these small matches which are our concepts: “intelligence”, “love”, “power”, the tremendous reality of God Who infinitely exceeds all concepts suddenly bears down upon us like a dark storm and blows out all their flames.’

To be with God involves going beyond concepts and images and turning off the lights of reason and imagination and for Merton entering the darkness where it is love that makes contact with God, as God responds to our longings. Merton again: ‘The heart only is capable of knowing God.’ And he quotes a saying of Allah attributed to Muhammad: ‘my earth and heaven cannot contain me. But the heart of my believing servant contains me.’

Through Jesus, God has revealed that God is love – not something God has but rather the divine life – is. And so there is a circulation of Love that constitutes the divine Reality – a circulation that encompasses the entire universe.

Thomas Merton

In Merton’s writings we have many insights into his lifetime of seeking God, and the changes to his perceptions of what that seeking meant. It was his perception of what it means ‘to know God’ that changed and became purified.

In the early years Merton showed a great interest on the role of human reason in coming to know God, and that to accept God’s existence was intellectually acceptable. The word ‘aseitas’ in the book by Etienne Gilson – a book that awakened the seeking of God in Merton, leapt out at him. This is Merton’s definition of what aseitas means:

‘… the power of a being to exist absolutely in virtue of itself, not as caused by itself, but as requiring no cause, no other justification for its existence except that its very nature is to exist. There can be only one such Being: that is God.’

In other words, God exists whether you or I believe in him or not! Taking on this God of reason released Merton from what he had long thought, which is that God is a mere projection of people’s fears and desires and ideals. God was real. Moving to the monastery Merton continued with this scholasticism, and the idea of ‘the reasonableness of Christian faith in God’, but soon there emerges a different emphasis in his journals which is on a more simple, existential approach to the reality of God. As William Shannon writes:

‘… it was not proving the existence of God that mattered so much as experiencing God’s presence … he sought a God to whom his heart could respond…. All his life Merton remained faithful to this intuition. In talking about God we have to rely on experience and we must not be afraid to trust that experience.’

Merton is up for relationship with God who is experienced as present, and who calls for a response. This is the God of revelation who speaks to people perhaps through the Scriptures, meditative reading, and events. Merton’s God, is one involved in a personal relationship, and so this is also the God of the mystic.

William Shannon writes how Merton understood the true God as ‘One who is present’ – through the Scripture and through the Name, but also how Merton was drawn to the theology of the Face. In a letter to Abdul Aziz – a Sufi friend Merton describes his prayer life as:

‘centred on attention to the presence of God … it is not “thinking about” anything but a direct seeking of the Face of the Invisible which cannot be found unless we become lost in Him who is invisible.’

Merton in a journal had written twenty years earlier how his one desire was for solitude and ‘to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of his Face.’

Shannon notes that Merton’s thinking moves consistently towards nondualism and a holistic understanding of reality where God is the centre of that reality: ‘that center Who is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’

This searching for the true God is part of our nature and all of God’s creation – the ‘hidden Ground of Love’ – the One from whom we all come, all are sustained and in whom we all live. And Merton reminds us God cannot be explained: ‘His presence cannot be verified, as we would verify a laboratory experiment.’

Icon of Christ the Holy Wisdom of God

How do we come to realize the true God within us? This is the product of a creative act that comes from within – from the infinite. For Neville Symington this realization of the true God lays:

‘a foundation in the personality of respect for the Self. I have spelt “Self” here with a capital letter because it is the THAT. I am IT … THAThood is my nature, it is my being – the THAT demands respect. The THAT in me is the THAT in you and demands respect.’

Here conscience and symbolism are two aspects of the true God. Conscience is the subjective evidence of the Absolute aspect of our being. The true God invites us to follow our conscience, and this contrasts with the false god where the associated terms are words like “driven”, “obligated” or “compelled”. Conscience is rather a free act and is respecting the Absolute which we all share. In this way following conscience then benefits others – not just ourselves. Similarly, if we say “No” to the promptings of our conscience then we harm ourselves and others.

Symington also links the idea of symbolism to the true God where we can begin to understand how things that are inner – going on inside our psyche/spirit – become played outside of us – in other words projected. There is something interpersonal going on where the outer represents the inner. There can be a creativity and playful spontaneity in our use of symbolism. The false god destroys the inner and symbolism, but the true God is its creator.

Symington offers an interesting dilemma around the difficulty of realizing the idea of absolute Truth

‘A psychotherapist was presenting his work with a patient to a committee that was trying to assess his work. In discussing his work, it was clear that he considered suicide as an evil to be avoided. The chairman of the committee said to him, in a laid-back tone: “But don’t you think this patient was free to commit suicide if he wanted to?”’

Symington reasons that under a false-god morality the only answer would be to say that God forbids suicide as he does murder. For the person who says they don’t believe in God then the only arbiter of truth becomes subjective feelings.

“If I want to kill myself or indeed anyone else then why shouldn’t I?  I can do entirely as I please. I can destroy my own mind if I want to, it is my business.’

Symington sees that this outlook is very pervasive in the contemporary especially Western world and he calls it: ‘The degenerate child of the Judeo-Christian God’. It is based in narcissism, and a relativism, and at times even a collapse of values. It can be seen that conscience here is lacking, and so the person who acts violently towards themselves is lacking respect for the Self, and through their actions causing harm to others. The action is destructive and not creative – for ‘a truly creative thought is closely related to conscience’.

The world tends to split into a very fundamentalist type of solution on the one hand and on the other hand a form of chaos, but from these two opposing views a different type of understanding is possible. This arises from reflective thought, experience and holy wisdom where God is accessed through a creative act, and where how we are in the world is guided by a conscience that tries not to harm.

There is faith in ‘an intentional something that originates from within each living being’.

John Ruysbroeck

The true God is often largely overshadowed by the false god and so requires deep and sustained reflection. Traces of the true God is found in all religions – in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For Neville Symington it is the wise people who wrote the Upanishads in the East who showed:

‘the first and deepest understanding of …the true God. “God” is not a term that is ever used by these seers. They use the following terms: “the THAT”, “the Absolute”, or just “Reality” …. Through contemplative thought these seers came to understand the absolute character of reality. They also understood that reality is contingent.’

So immediately there is a problem how can something be both absolute and subject to chance and so change? The only solution is that our minds are not capable of grasping this conceptually. Instead of struggling with the need to clearly define and say ‘this is it’ and be rid of uncertainty – which makes us anxious – there can be a recognition and an acceptance of our limitations.

‘What we need to acknowledge is that the human mind meets here a limitation rather than trying to deny the Absoluteness or the contingency or changeability of Reality.’

So how is the Absoluteness of the true God grasped? Symington sees it as through rational reflection, through mental discipline and virtue and ultimately that it is a personal act of insight. This therefore seems as if it could also include a personal revelation such as is found in Judeo-Christian-Islamic faith. The breakthrough to the realization of the Absoluteness of God is an inner experience – not one of being called from ‘outside’. Symington writes: ‘it is my own being understood as Absolute’.

This is surely similar to John’s gospel where we are assured that we will know the Spirit of truth ‘because he abides with you, and he will be in you’ [chapter 14: 17] and Christ’s promise that he and the Father will come to make their home with us [v 23]. The leap required, and perhaps this is the difficulty for our Western dualistic thinking, is to both realize the Absoluteness of Being and that we are also part of it.

Thomas Merton describes this as the awakening of the true self when our own subjectivity is united to the subjectivity of God: this is the true God. Merton, like Symington, Christian mystics, and Eastern seers, sees how futile it is to try to grasp God as an object which we can understand and seize.

‘We must transcend ourselves as well as our analogies, and in seeking to know God we must forget the usual subject-object relationship which characterizes our ordinary acts of knowing. Instead we know him in so far as we become aware of ourselves as known through and through by him. We “possess” him in proportion as we realize ourselves to be possessed by him in the in most depths of our being…. the realization that our very being is penetrated with his knowledge and love for us.’

Merton quotes the medieval mystic John of Ruysbroek that in contemplation the unity of God shines a simple light which shows itself to be darkness into which we are enveloped and lost – plunged into nothingness and nakedness but: ‘..overwhelmed by the activity of God’s immense love …becomes one spirit with God.’

Neville Symington

The false god is not arrived at through thought and reflection. Neville Symington (earlier priest, and later psychoanalyst) comments on the way that the false god is often found in a moment of ecstasy:  Allah was revealed to Mohammed in an ecstatic trance, and, he cites how in the Old Testament Moses leads the people out to meet God amongst peals of thunder and lightening flashes, a dense cloud and a trumpet blast. [Exodus 19: 16-19]. Paul’s Damascene conversion and indeed Pentecost fall into this same category where he sees thought as crushed under the force of the experience.

Symington sees this as a false god that has emerged in the narcissistic part of a person where a wound has occurred, and the god arises, having sustained an infinite insult and takes over the personality:

‘…it deceives the believer into trusting his dictates – the presence of this god …is intrinsically antagonistic to thought…. There is no option than to capitulate in total submission… the action and speech of a person dominated by such a system is false …what is said does not represent the thought of the person. It is a pretend person, something standing for a person that could be there but is not. …this is the false god that exists in individuals governed by narcissism; it is also the god that rules all religious observances of a primitive and superstitious kind.’

Symington sees that this false god is not just to do with religion, it can be found in institutions, and certainly in for example the psychoanalytic community. And I would add often in politics where you can see the ‘blind’ following of someone narcissistic who has set themselves up as god [sadly rather too many of them currently]. The follower appears to be thinking, but rather they have embodied the thoughts of a god as a substitute for their own thinking and creativity. They are also then in a submissive identification with the god. Whilst the identification means the person takes on the ideas of the god and embodies them – the actual messages are often distorted.

The false god embodiment crushes the creativity of the follower – but there can be rebellion. I’m thinking here of people ‘brought up’ in strict evangelical circles, where the punishing false god controls all spontaneity: there is intense submission in childhood and then sometimes a rebellion which can take place when the person is trying to break free from the narcissistic bondage. The rage towards the false god is the projected hatred of being submissive. In truth the person hates having been submissive, but the hatred gets pushed out onto the false god or onto the institution that cultivated it.

‘True liberation requires realization that the enslaving principle is the inner submissive act and total liberation requires an understanding that the enslaving principle is one element in the narcissistic structure.’

The false god is self-damaging and destroys the inner life, and so destroys symbolism – it all becomes very ‘concrete’. The false god demands, and persuades, as the false god says: ‘Do it my way.” Naturally, we are all to different degrees narcissistic – it’s a question of acknowledging and recognizing it!

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e. cummings

‘The grace of Easter is a great silence, an immense tranquillity and a clean taste in your soul … The Easter vision  … is a discovery of order above all order – a discovery of God and of all things in HIM.’

Thomas Merton

The prophet Habakkuk  warned against false gods and prophets – who were worthless 

‘What use is an idol once its maker has shaped it – a cast image, a teacher of lies?

For its maker trusts in what has been made,/though the product is only an idol that cannot speak!

Alas for you who say to the wood. “Wake up!” to silent stone, “Rouse yourself!” Can it teach?

See, it is plated with gold and silver, and there is no breath in it at all.

But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him!’

Habakkuk 218-20.

In the Old Testament the prophets frequently chide Israel for going after false gods. Some of these were gods embodied in statues, trees, rivers, rocks, the prophets too were subject to this form of worship from others and presumably also sometimes inwardly. The message of the prophets was one of purification of themselves, and also of Israel of an embodied god – and instead to substitute a pure spiritual reality.

Neville Symington, psychoanalyst who had previously been a priest, writes that God cannot be cleansed from all human characteristics, and so in that sense is ready for embodiment, and inevitably to become part of what Symington calls ‘the narcissistic structure’. One example linked to this is that the false god described is hurt by the slightest criticism or neglect – a god deeply wounded by an insult, or a god offended by Israel’s infidelities, and in the New Testament Jesus, is seen as deeply wounded by every sin that we commit.

This view of God is easy to understand as it’s something we all experience, such as when we are deeply wounded by the smallest slight and hold onto it perhaps even for years. Here’s an example:

‘A man met a friend who said to him: “Good Lord, John, you are looking well today. When I saw you last week, I thought you were a bit off colour …” John was deeply offended that his friend should have said he was off-colour. “Me … off colour” – what an insult. He was so insulted by it that it entirely wiped out the encouraging statement that he was looking well on this particular day.’

Sometimes the wound is tended and nursed as if it were the greatest treasure. Symington comments that although Adam’s sin was quite a long time ago now … ‘but I still hear people beating their breasts about it’. Worth noting is Jesus’ teaching to let go of grudges and try to love those who upset us.

This is an example from the analytic world:

‘Analyst A said to Analyst B: “Oh you were analyzed by Hans Sachs, were you …” and then looking down his nose, said: “You know, I was analyzed by Freud.” Analyst B was still offended thirty years later and took revenge on Analyst A quite regularly year after year.’

 The hurt only makes sense if you put it in the idea of a godlike ego: “Do you not realize that you are insulting a royal personage? Did you not know that you are insulting the Lord Himself?’

Winnicott working with children playing

Both Winnicott and Merton wrote about the true self and the contrast with the false self. There are clear similarities, as both were interested in how we discover our true identity –Merton saw this as sanctity and Winnicott as health. The search was similar but the context different: Merton was writing as a religious based in a monastery, Winnicott as an analyst in the clinic and consulting room.

Merton thought that the essential aspect of the spiritual journey was the search for our true or real self. Eight years into his monastic journey he wrote:

‘For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore, the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.’

For Winnicott, the true self involves a sense of personal aliveness that includes an awareness of being or feeling real and genuine wholeness. This means a lived recognition of being the self that one is, and that this felt presence is one’s true being. ‘Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real.’ Ultimately Winnicott defined this self as ‘always personal, isolated and unaffected by experience.’

For Merton the true self is ultimately ‘my own subjectivity united to the subjectivity of God … When we know God, we know ourselves, when we know ourselves, we know God.’ Merton’s emphasis is that at depth the True Self is united with God.

For Winnicott the false self often served as a self-protective defence, and so helped the true self to stay safe. He explains that initially the mother identifies with the baby, and from this repeated recognition there is security – what he calls ‘the spontaneous gesture’ then emerges which is the true self in action. However, if the mothering person is not good-enough and fails to response to the gesture and instead substituting her own, the baby will instead of responding spontaneously react with compliance – it is this compliance that is the start of the false self existence. In one paper he describes an actress patient whose ‘nothingness at the centre’ is a representation of her true self: empty, hungry and waiting.

For Merton the false self lacks substantiality – it’s not false in the moral sense, but rather lacks any fullness of being – here quite like Winnicott’s lack of being and feeling ‘real’. Merton goes deeper though seeing that the false self is our impermanent self – not enduring. ‘…it is nothing but an evanescent shadow. Its biography and its existence both end together at death.’ The false self has a history but its joys and fears are mostly superficial – at a very limited level of reality. In later writings Merton thought this false self, whilst exterior, also included unconsciousness. He thought one of life’s most pressing tasks was to unmask this false, illusory self and become ‘aware of the presence within us of a disturbing stranger, the self that is both “I” and someone else.’

Both Winnicott and Merton saw that the way to move out of and beyond the false self was through a form of rebirth. For Merton this was through prayer and contemplation. Merton believed this involved:

‘a deepening of the new life, a continuous rebirth, in which the exterior and superficial life of the ego-self is discarded like an old snake skin and the mysterious, invisible self of the Spirit becomes more present and active.’

Through this rebirth we become ourselves: the true self that God willed us to be.

For Winnicott the emergence of the true self from the care-taking false self could happen when the person was able to open to their creativity – Winnicott called it ‘playing’. In the therapeutic setting the true self of the person could ‘be’ and be ‘found’. Loosening the compliance and strictures of the false self the person opens to experiential existence, and to the chance of a new beginning.

Donald Winnicott’s work with children is characterized by an openness and the nonconformity mentioned in an earlier post. This allowed him to be curious and interested in what children experienced and wanted to share with him. Rather than a set way of seeing child development he allowed himself to be surprised.

In one paper he contrasts two brothers. The younger brother he calls Y and describes his typical use of a transitional object. After being breast fed for four months and weaned without difficulty, Y sucked his thumb in the early weeks. After being weaned:

‘.. he adopted the end of the blanket where the stitching finished. He was pleased if a little bit of the wool stuck out at the corner and with this, he would tickle his nose. This very early on became his “Baa” … From the time when he was about a year old, he was able to substitute for the end of the blanket a soft green jersey with a red tie.’

This became an object that soothed the little boy, and helped him fall easily asleep. Sucking the material he lost anxiety.

Y’s older brother X had in contrast, to fight his way to maturity. It was a time when the mother was quite anxious and felt lonely. X was fed for longer and never sucked his thumb or finger so after being weaned with difficulty he had ‘nothing to fall back on’. Instead, it was the actual person of the mother he needed as he had such a strong attachment to her. From one year he adopted a rabbit which he would cuddle and this affection later transferred to real rabbits. Winnicott saw this toy rabbit as a comforter, but not as a transitional object: ‘…it was never, as a true transitional object would have been, more important than the mother, an almost inseparable part of the infant.’

X’s anxieties led to asthma and this was only gradually managed. Winnicott comments that as an adult, it was important to X to find work away from the town where he grew up, but his attachment to his mother ‘is still very powerful’, and it was difficult to form other  relationships. In contrast Y is busy with his own children, who are also keen on thumb-sucking!

For Winnicott, this transitional area of experiencing is central to spirituality and faith. The idea of the representation of God as a transitional object involves creating and finding God, and this continues throughout life, as it involves our connection to our sense of self and of the meaning and purpose of existence and ultimate destiny. Unlike the eventually discarded blanket or teddy, Meissner writes that this,

‘God-representation, whether dormant or active, remains available for continuing psychic integration … the process is an authentic dialogue insofar as the God-representation transcends the subjective realm.’

In the same way religious symbols become vehicles for the expression of meaning and values that transcend their physical characteristics. The meaning and significance of for example the crucifix is achieved only through being received into the transitional realm of experience of each believer, who brings their own creativity attached to their belief and faith into their perception and experience of the cross.

Donald Winnicott, child and adult psychoanalyst didn’t write as a religious person, but many think that his work opened up psychoanalysis to a recognition of a spiritual dimension. Winnicott’s work – greatly influenced by his work as a paediatrician, especially with mothers and babies (he saw over 60,000!), is all about relationships: within our psyche and with one another.

Winnicott grew up in a devout Wesleyan Methodist family, converting to Anglicanism in his 20s – perhaps as a way of distinguishing himself from his father. Hugely influenced by the idea of nonconformism, this trait was repeated in his relationship with all the various factions – including the orthodox in the psychoanalytic world. He saw himself as a believing sceptic, remaining openminded about the existence of a transcendent God.

One of the main ideas that links to faith is Winnicott’s thinking about what he called ‘the transitional object’ and the ‘transitional space’. Initially when we’re babies, we have no idea of anything separate from us, gradually we begin to differentiate what Winnicott calls ‘me’ from what feels like ‘not me’ as we gradually experience ourselves as ‘other’ from the maternal person. Winnicott saw that this hypothetical space affects us physically and psychically in both our inner and outer world. He describes this as ‘the place where we live’ – an ‘intermediate zone … a potential space …’ where play and creativity can take place. William Meissner, Jesuit priest and psychoanalyst, took Winnicott’s concept of the transitional experience when he writes about faith:

‘The believer does not regard their* faith as a matter of wishful hallucination or of purely subjective implications. Rather, their faith speaks to them of the nature of the world in which they live, of the meaning and purpose of their existence there, and in most religious traditions, of the relationship of that world and themselves to a divine being who creates, loves, guides, and judges. At the same time that faith asserts, however, it cannot demonstrate the independent reality of the spiritual world and to which it lays claim. Consequently, the experience of faith is not totally subjective, nor is it totally objective. Rather, it represents a realm in which the subjective and objective interpenetrate … in which both the subjective and objective poles of experience contribute to the substance of belief.’

The experience of God is located, in Winnicott’s terms, ‘outside, inside, at the border’, where the focus of mysticism on the inner world, ‘the centre of the self’, is balanced by the outer world of infinity ‘reaching out’.

Winnicott’s concept of illusion is helpful too. A baby’s experience of an idealized mother created through the baby’s illusion of omnipotence, is gradually replaced through disillusionment by a good-enough mother. This leads to a capacity in the baby to be alone, both in the presence and absence of a mother, and thus able to create and play. The teddy bear, a piece of material, or a hard toy is the classic ‘transitional object’ used by the small child to deal with separation and offer a creative relationship. This renewed capacity to use illusion as a creative aspect of being finds echoes in myth, art, and religion. Winnicott thought that illusions and transitional space link to our later use of religious symbols, rituals, beliefs, and practices.

(* Am changing the quote into inclusive language).