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ecclesial exercise: what were the minimal number of four magical cards need we
turn over with preconditions or results on the upsides and downsides if what was
showing was: (1) Beatifically good; (2) Cursed with extraordinarily bad luck; (3) Not
dependent upon personal virtue; (4) Inordinately fortunate in all of life’s trials. The
pay-as-you-go God people would need to pick up (1) and find fortunate life and (2)
to find the fate of the non-believer to establish that God was coldheartedly true and
fair with the results of flipping (3) and (4) being none contributory. The grace-to-all-
sinners God people need to turn over card (3) to find good life and (4) to find
sometime sinners nonetheless fortunate to confirm their belief in the unconditionally
of the loving generosity of God and making finding out about the underside of cards
(1) and (2) unnecessary. This liturgical discussion and gamble with God’s cards,
perhaps a caricature of the Talmudic, rational discussions with the rabbi, felt
irrelevant to my spiritual needs.
Missing was mysticism’s promise of the disappearance of | into a union with
the divine, the Heart Sutra’s eternal emptiness of form and the eternal form of
emptiness that gifts with spiritual perspective and not-necessarily-logical intuition
about unseen Absolute Reality. Forced either-or, binary, card-turning cognition in
the search for God’s logic is unrewarding. As the Dalai Lama, in his Heart of
Wisdom Teaching, says, “...all phenomena are emptiness, without defining
characteristics, they are not born, they do not cease..." In trying to penetrate the
mystery and promise of this emptiness, it was difficult to surrender my internal
parody of what sounded like that day’s Southern California New Age stuff about
global nonaggression, sexual politics, Beadles music, distressed jeans and pot. In
the synagogue of my neighborhood, experience with a deeply felt, never-you-mind-
about-anything God of detachment with love, was not on the menus of Friday night
or Saturday morning services. All | could feel was a faithless and nonnegotiable
fear.
In the work of many mysticism-positive scholars, a classic being Evelyn
Underhill’s Mysticism, 1961, it has been speculated that this ineffable state as a
union with a powerful unknown, transcending description in language, becomes
more socially prominent during times of cultural efflorescence. She pointed to the
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