Transtheism.

Harvey Gillman – edited version 15/09/26

transtheism edited talk – Word version

Good evening, friends. Am I heard? Good. First of all, I said good evening, but I realised that not everybody is in an evening time. So whatever time you’re in, I hope it’s a good one. And I also hope that you will understand me. That sounds a strange thing to say, but I remember giving a lecture once at Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, and somebody said at the end of it, I’m sure it was very interesting, but I didn’t understand his accent at all.  I am a linguist, so I aware of the accents. We all have our own ways of speaking and using words.

What I would like to offer this evening is a series of reflections. I’ve not prepared a lecture.  I have been contemplating, thinking deeply, worrying even about what on earth I would have to say to this prestigious group of people. When Al asked me to offer a tease, and I guess he meant a bait, I wrote the following, and I’d like to read it as an introduction to where I am in my life.

“I came to Friends almost 50 years ago to embrace the sacred through silence, community, and a way of life. Though a man of many words, alas, I would say too many words, I find words very limited. I’m not a theist. I’m not a non-theist. I’m not an atheist! I dare to talk of transtheism, but this is only a temporary oasis on the way to somewhere else.”

In the silence just now, the phrase, ‘on way to somewhere else’ came into my mind as an addition. I hope I am still on a journey discovering new things.

I am calling it a series of reflections because I do not have a prepared text. I was fascinated to read an article on Transtheism on your website, mentioning Jung and Paul Tillich, as the originators of the phrase transtheism. I had not known that. The word transtheism had jumped out at me from a page of a Quaker writer some time ago. I loved the word so much that I thought, I’m going to play with it and see where it takes me. Words for me are a very serious game.

When I read what Paul Tillich had said about it, I realised that not only had I chosen the word, but the word had actually chosen me. I agreed with so much I read in that article. Trans in Latin is going beyond, going through, across. Having spent all my life fascinated by theology and rejecting it like mad at the same time – I’m a man of paradox – it dawned on me that I had to get beyond all the arguments and all the intellectual discussion about what God is, might be, was et cetera, et cetera.

Many years ago, I was giving a talk at Yearly Meeting and I noticed that when one woman was sitting in the audience and crying. She got up and said very loud, that we should not mention the word God any more. I thought that’s typical of a liberal authoritarianism, which I often find amongst Quakers. We are told what words are acceptable. You may believe what you like, you can do what you like, etc, as long as you don’t offend other people’s sensibilities. But the problem is, anyone who uses words is going to offend somebody else’s sensibility in one way or another. Words are the fruit of the tree of our lives. Sometimes we are using the words of our lives in an entirely different way from the way other people use them. It’s like when people used to ask me, “Do you believe in God?” I find that such a dreadful question. I always want to say, “Well, what do you mean by that question? Or how would you understand what I think that question means? And even, why do you ask me that? What do you want me to do with that question? Would you understand my response?”

When I first did an inquirers’ gathering many years ago – I was outreach secretary for British Quakers for 18 years – someone asked me whether he had to believe in God to be a Quaker? And I said, with the assumption that person did not believe in God, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in”. I hoped that open the door to a conversation, rather than closing it.

With the woman at Yearly Meeting, I wanted to ask: “What is it in your life that the word God has done to you? Why these tears?” Answer the person rather than the overt question.

I have to say, Friends, that I have the immense advantage over many Friends of not being born into a Christian family. I have not spent the whole of my life rebelling against Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity.  What I got from my nominally Orthodox Jewish family, and especially from the Orthodox Hebrew school that I attended and where I toyed with the idea of becoming a rabbi, was a sense of the sacred, an intimate sense of power and energy. This eventually led me paradoxically, to a sense of the sacred which broke down the doors and the walls which separated me and my development from other human beings, leading me out of the Manchester ghetto to embrace the world, on a sort of life pilgrimage. The old narrow images of the divine had to go. Indeed, after joining Friends years later, I wrote an article called The Necessity of Atheism for God’s Sake.

Part of my wandering round from one oasis to another is the fact that I have met so many teachers who have offered me lessons. Some of these teachers contradicted each other but I think I have been able to take on board these contradictions. One of my latest teachers is a niece of mine who has spent many teaching years in Africa. She said to me once, Harvey, I thought you’re supposed to be erudite and clever, why don’t you know about these great African poets and philosophers? (One’s ignorance is always enormous.) She had come across a Nigerian writer, Obedingo Akomolafe and told me to read him. I went online, and I found three sentences which I want now to offer you as part of a reflection.

First of all, the world exceeds language.

Secondly, there is nothing more hope-inducing than indeterminacy.

And the third is that the world is open and emergent and poetic and promiscuous.

And I thought, how extraordinary. Wow. In a way, that would be Akomolafe’s variation on the Quaker idea of continuous revelation. We never quite know what we will discover. And when we get an inkling of something, some of us aim to put it into words. And yet I know whatever I say or write is inadequate, and when I have given a talk, I often wake up about 3 o’clock in the morning thinking, what on earth did I say today? Why did I say it? Did it make sense? Does anyone understand what I’ve said at all? And have I understood the people who ask me questions?

In a way, that’s why I’m offering you these reflections. I’m hoping I’m taking you into an open, emergent, poetic, and dare I say for a Quaker, promiscuous world.

When I was growing up, when I was increasingly uncomfortable with the ghetto of the prejudices that I was taught as a child, and rebelling very strongly against my rabbi telling me that I must not read non-kosher books, I loved exploring books I wasn’t supposed to read. The non-kosher books that made the greatest impact on me were by James Baldwin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Krishnamurti.

I love the writings of James Baldwin. His Giovanni’s Room was the great revelation to me as a growing gay man who was trying to make sense of a world. I was also told by one of my rabbis who had a psychology degree that there was no such thing as a Jewish gay. Gay people can’t be Jewish and Jews can’t be gay. This was a Jewish variation of the evangelical Christian idea that you can’t be a Christian and be gay. Life teaches you much that teachers cannot.

And Dostoyevsky blew my mind! I read his Brothers Karamazov, and I remember an English teacher of mine saying, Harvey, you don’t need to read anything else in your life if you’ve read the Brothers Karamazov. The story of the Grand Inquisitor and his conversation with Jesus on the cross made a great impact.  He tells Jesus, “Stay on the cross, we need you on the cross. For heaven’s sake, don’t come around human beings and spoil their lives.” For the inquisitor, ecclesiastical authority was a preservation of the status quo. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, Jesus, don’t start spoiling anything. And then Jesus became my Jewish brother, my teacher, my rabbi. Jesus as Messiah, why not? Messiah means anointed. Every human being on this planet is anointed for a task, a loving task. So if Jesus is Messiah, I can accept that, but then so am I. So are you. If Jesus is the Son of God, even if we don’t know what God is, then so are we all. Daughters and sons of God.

And Krishnamurti was my third teacher. He was so incredibly subversive, I thrilled at his demolition of set forms of ideas, established hierarchies and orthodoxies.

I started going to Quakers when I was about 18, because I used to study in the centre of Manchester, and the Central Library was opposite the Quaker Meeting House. I loved the Quaker posters, especially non peace and justice. I remember going into the meeting house one evening. I had to sneak in, by the way, because a Jewish boy was not supposed to be seen to be going to a Christian place of worship. That’s how it would have been seen. There I met my first Friend – one of the many, many, many eccentric Quaker women who have delighted my life – and she said, “I’m a Quaker, you know, my dear, but I don’t know about God. I took her words humorously as if she were saying, “I am a Quaker, but I’m not sure if God is”. And I just thought that she didn’t need to know. She didn’t need to delimit the divine.

When I went to university however, I rejected all of religion. Why? Because of ethical principles – I thought, what an appalling, incompetent destroyer of the best human values, this punitive God was.  When I still look around the world, especially now, at the disasters in Nepal and in China, and the dreadful goings-on in Israel, Gaza, and the horrendous wars in Russia and Ukraine, with Israeli government proclaiming Judaism, and the Russian government proclaiming Christianity, etc, etc, I still wonder I think, for heaven’s sake, what is religion really all about?

And yet, I still have that passion for the sacred.  It won’t let me go. So I can’t call myself a non-theist. I can’t call myself a theist because I don’t have that ‘l’ sense of a personal being with whom I am in relationship, but I don’t have the sense either that I cannot be in relationship with something which transcends myself and which transcends other people.

So how do I find the language? How do I find a language of sacredness in a time of appalling catastrophe and natural disasters. Where does one find hope? All I can say is that I hold on to the sense that at a profound level there is something sacred. I just cannot give that up. The sacred is that which inspires awe, a sense of the value and specialness of everything, a sense of the interdependence and profundity of all life. A sense of transcendence.

During Covid I had a book of poetry published. I said recently to some Friends, I can’t think in prose very clearly any more. The most profound language that I experience is the language of poetry.  I hear that there is a branch of theology which is, I think, is now called something like poetic theology where you play extremely seriously and creatively with metaphor as a way of discovering the reality in which you live.  (I was told later this is called theopoetics). This does not always go down well with Friends who are heirs to a Puritan mistrust of metaphor. Martin Buber once said that there are people who reject the word God – it’s patriarchal, what has been done in the name of this God is horrendous. And then he says something which, to me, sounds very Jewish, very human in fact. Precisely because the word God has been contaminated, we have to redeem it. And that’s incredibly difficult when there are a million different definitions of God, and people are slaughtering in the idea of God. How rationally can one use the word God in that way? My response is that I really do not know, but I feel there is some truth in that intuition. Somehow we have to risk language.

I think also of Ettie Hillesum, one of the great mystics of the 20th century. She was a young Dutch-Jewish woman who died in a concentration camp. She wrote that if the temples are being destroyed, God is to be found under the rubble and we need to redeem God. This may not be a line of thinking that finds a welcome among non-theists – perhaps it does? – but I find is particularly cogent. I am happy however not to use the word God. I might use Spirit, or just the words Presence or the divine. They all have their limitations.

In my introduction I used the phrase that I embrace silence. I am an embodied human being, which is why I use metaphor, which is why I cannot just live in my head. I embrace the silence because I find as I walk into the waters of silence, I am so totally refreshed. I have a sense of the wow-ness of things. This afternoon, I went for a walk by the river. There’s a river about five or six minutes across the road from where I am now.  I love sitting down on the bank of the river. I used to walk for a long way, but since I’m beginning to suffer with walking problems, I just go very close to the river and I sit there, watch it rippling, and listen to the wind and the birds in the distance.

And I know that in parts of the world the rivers rippling become the waters of floods, and I know that animals are being killed, and I know that the wind can be hurricanes and can destroy. But at the same time, I have this sense of the wowness of things! The wowness of human beings! Of the natural world. Can I say I’m in the presence of God? I’m in the presence of the Spirit? I can just say, wow. I can just want to embrace the world around me. Enter the almost silence and feel the oneness of all things. Perhaps the word adoration comes close to thios feeling.

I also experience this in many places of worship. For example, in the past I spent much time in monasteries. I once tried to escape from Quakers by going to a monastery, and all the guests were Quakers. I found that quite fascinating. Other Quakers were escaping from Quakers into a monastery. There was something about the chanting and the music, even the words of some prayers, which I don’t take literally. I see them sometimes as an aspiration of the spirit. Aspiration means breathing towards. The human spirit is breathing towards something sacred.

I would like to end with my non-creed. (Did you know that the word creed may be related in Latin to the words ‘cor do’-I give my heart. So the question may not be what do you believe in , but what do you give your heart to?). It’s a poem called Questions, and it’s inspired by Kahlil Gibran.

I wrote it years ago and forms the introduction to my anthology, Epiphanies.

They asked him: ‘What do you believe?’

He replied: ‘We are alive together on this fragile earth. What we do has meaning and consequences. We can fail and fall, we can love and nurture.’

They asked him: ‘What is the light you talk about?

He replied: ‘It shines sometimes. It casts a shadow. It reveals. It warms. It burns. It may be found in the heart of each, but is owned by none.’

They asked him: ‘What is your faith?

He replied: ‘The light will shine even when our eyes are closed through sleep or blinded by fear.’

They asked him: ‘What is your prayer?’

He replied: ‘To keep my arms open, and my heart, and my eyes, that my lips may sometimes move.’

They asked him; ‘What would you die for?’

He replied: ‘My question is rather, for what, for whom, do I live this day? This hour.’

They asked him: ‘What is your God?’

He replied: the creative silence that welcomes beyond the edge of words. The light that burns in the darkness. The wind that is my breath, our breath, blowing where it wills. God is not the name of God, and the wind has no name, and blows through the doors and windows of many temples.

They asked him: “What is your authority?’

He replied: ‘The restless communion of the winding path, visited sometimes by grace.’

They asked him: ‘What happens when we’re dead?’

He replied: ‘Death has taught me a concern for life, for open doors and arching bridges, for the challenge of this moment, for the challenge of this transient life, moments of unknowing, glimmers of more, a discovery.’

They asked him: ‘What have you learned in your 70 years? ‘

He replied: ‘We are not just names. Our past, our spoken and written words. We are all anointed. Our country, our deepest faith, has no flag, no borders. We may be each other’s purgatory or hell or even paradise.’

They asked him: ‘What is your hope?’

He replied:’ That we may continue to cherish our questions. Cherish each other. That we be not afraid to be silent with each other. That in spite of the pain we and the day inflict upon each other, we can still believe, have faith, pray, and even dare to love. My hope is that we go on hoping tough our hearts and our history and the shadows of the moon may teach us to give up hope. That despair may not be the last word.

Harvey Gillman – edited version 15/09/26