The Journey to Interiority

     Maurice Zundel, a Swiss priest who died in 1975[i], complained that the great issue of our time had been entirely overlooked by the Church in its attempt to come to terms with the issues of the modern world. He considered it useless to update the Church’s teaching without coming to terms with what God we are talking about.  He was all the more passionate about this because he saw most Christians turning to a “false God” who was “out there” and that was powerful, demanding, and the source of religious laws that imposed themselves on us. He said that, if this were the true God, the criticism of religion and the rejection of a God who lords it over us would be entirely justified.
     Over and over again, he insisted that God is never “up above," wielding power over us.  He used the doctrine of the Trinity to explain how God is a relationship of love pouring itself out. God is not self-sufficient, caught up in a narcisistic self-regard, needing no one and unconcerned with anything except his or herself. For Zundel, this would be a God who is preposterous. Yet, he said, this is the God most people worship. 

     But God is not alone with him or herself  and God is “within” and never “outside.” The Creator is constantly emptying his/her self into the Word in Love and he turns to the Christian view of God as Trinity to explain this.  For Zundel, the only way to approach God is by embracing that outpouring, the “dispossession” that renders God empty, vulnerable, dispossessed.  God gives all in love retaining nothing.  At one point he says that if the world refuses that total gift of love, the only consequence could be that God dies. So then, the only approach to God is modeled on that lived by God, that is to say, in a dispossession of our self-enclosed, self-sufficient self so that, quoting Rimbaud, “Je est autre.” This latter is a phrase almost impossible to translate but that basically carries the idea that the “I” is transformed into the divine, self-emptying, loving of the Other. Zundel believed human beings would be transformed into the divine if they were to follow that dynamic of self-dispossession into divine love. It is in this sense that Zundel then says that God is within and never outside. It is an outstanding interpretation of God, the human, and their interrelationship.
     The only problem with this profoundly insightful approach is that it can easily lead to the kind of spirituality by which an individual detaches from the surrounding world in order to make the journey within, the journey toward the fullness of that self-emptying love that transforms. There is little doubt that this is precisely the journey that marked the life of Jesus as we know it and to which Jesus called his disciples.  It is the journey into the God Jesus revealed to his disciples. However, it is also clear that this journey cannot separate us from the world around us and that the world around us is an intrinsic part of that journey “inward.”
     For this reason it seems important today to add a corrective to the line of thinking proposed by Zundel. This corrective, it seems to me, can be found in the work of Thomas Berry, the Passionist priest and anthropologist, who wrote The Dream of the Earth[ii]. The corrective is that the material universe, and in particular our planet Earth also has an “interiority” of which we human being are an intrinsic, interdependent part. In fact, the entire universe has interiority as a fundamental, constituent element. This has always been recognized by indigenous cultures around the world and, more recently, a growing number of scientists are recognizing this as well.
     The journey to which we are invited by Jesus, and indeed by an deeper understanding of who we are as human beings in the context of our planet, is to recognise that the interiority to which we are called, and which is a transformative self-dispossession that moves into the divine reality of love, is a journey that we undertake in communion with our universe, not at all separate from or in contrast to it. The larger “I” toward which we are invited to move includes the universe. The “divinity” that is the goal is an “I” that is all-embracing.  
     By deepening “interiority” we are acting as agents of and in communion with the journey toward “interiority” of our planet and of our universe itself.  Rather than separating us from our environment and turning us away from it, our journey toward the inwardness of love that empties us of our self-centred, separate self  in order to introduce us into the  transcending communion of divine love as our “I,” the divine identity. This journey is a journey into the deepest “self” of the universe in its interiority and that opens on to the divine Spirit that is present within.
     This is a journey that will be marked, always, with the same characteristics of the Pascal Mystery that marked the life, death and resurrection of Christ. We lose our narrow and closed self in order to welcome a transformed life to which we are moving along with all our fellow creatures and the entire universe. Many have given their lives for that new world that struggles to be born. Those who are marked by this openness of self-dispossession are shining witnesses to new life.

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[i] Maurice Zundel : ses pierres de fondation, Montréal, Éditions Anne Sigier, 2005.

[ii] Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Club, 1988.