The Contemplative Consummation of Atheism

being an introduction to the October Material Mysticism at Comment

This post has a great title, but it is borrowed. It’s part of a chapter title from Boston College theology professor Brian Robinette’s luminous book, The Difference Nothing Makes (which is now in paperback and therefore much more affordable). Robinette’s Merton-infused book explores “the liberating but also painful and sometimes ambiguous process of being purged of distortive conceptions of God.”

This purgative process involves a kind of death, a relinquishing of false securities and projective fantasies that set themselves up as ultimate, but which turn out to be suffocating self-enclosures…. (176)

Turning toward modern atheism, Robinette then claims there to be a

potential filiation between [this] contemplative dispossession and the existential homelessness felt by many in our contemporary age—the sense of being in a spiritual desert, of being rudderless, hollow, or perhaps ontologically forlorn, abandoned to a time when God seems absent or barely noticeable (177).

This book is no revisionist abandonment of theological essentials, which is in part why I commend it. On the contrary it begins with a thorough evisceration of such juvenile maneuvering, moving us toward genuinely Christian mysticism instead.

The contemplative disposition is not a defensive reaction to this void but, paradoxically, an abiding with it and in it, of patiently allowing it to be. Contemplation does not fight the inchoate sense of “nothingness” that lurks within human consciousness, or simply declare it tragic, absurd, but entrusts itself to it with poverty of spirit. In this way [and here comes Merton] “the option of absolute despair is turned into perfect hope…. From the darkness comes light. From death, life. From the abyss there comes, unaccountably, the mysterious gift of the Spirit sent by God to make all things new, to transform the created and redeemed world, and to re-establish all things in Christ” (179-80).

I cite Robinette here for self-serving reasons. Namely, to set up my likewise Merton-infused claim to have enshrined (I hope) similar insights in narrative and material form. The narrative aspect I refer to is my own bouts with the so-called void, and the material dimension is the way all of this came to a head for me amidst the ruins of Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest. Which is to say, if Robinette takes us to a metaphorical desert, I take us to a literal one.

I hope you enjoy Salvation By Dread Alone, the October edition of Material Mysticism.

Thank you as ever for reading. And remember, you can subscribe for future installments (one email per month, no spam) here.