t is the intent of these papers to be short, understandable introductions of important topics of Wisdom. Thus their content cannot be considered a balanced or full discussion of the topic, but rather suggestions for thought, reflection and discussion. The first topic "Creation" is more than immense and to attempt much enlightenment in one brief essay is perilous, further, what it means to be a created being must also be considered. The word "Creation" or "The Creation" brings to mind for those of us having our roots in the Christian tradition an immediate association with the story of Genesis and the ideas of Christian theology which we have heard. It is helpful to put all that aside at the outset to avoid confusing ourselves or blocking out clear thinking. The perspective enunciated here is taken from the contemplative tradition and represents a narrow sample, but a representative one from those sources.
good many years ago, a book was published with the perceptive title
"Your God is Too Small".. Almost every idea we have of God is too small for the world in which we actually live. Thus our first consideration is to realize that any description of God worthy of consideration must be large enough to allow the creation of this almost unimaginably vast and complex world from atoms to stars and nebulae. To ask how big is God is about on a par with asking how many angels can dance on the head of pin. Dimensional thinking is simply not applicable to theological language. Yet it is useful to say a few words about our universe, as we currently know it. In age, the universe is believed to be more than twenty billion years and in size to be larger than twenty billion light years. As little grasp as we have of that first figure, the second is even more beyond our experience. A light-year is simply the distance that light travels in one year at its usual rate of about 186,000 miles per second. Think how long it would take one to fly 186,000 miles at 600 miles an hour; that’s a mere 310 hours, 12.9 days to travel the distance that light does in one second. Even at the speed of light, it requires several years to reach the nearest star, or more accurately for the light from that star to reach us. The light from the most distant fringe of the universe presently known has been traveling for billions of years to reach us. The point of all this is that any God concept must be big enough in concept, time and space to encompass that universe. Retreating to a simplistic "creationist" theory is really of no help here either, especially so if thereby one tries to deny, contrary to geological and archaeological evidence, every notion of successive forms in earth’s history. The creationists are right in denying neo-darwinian evolutionary theory, but wrong is denying geological and archaeological facts.
hen comes the matter of complexity. Our earth is a small planet, rather rare in that it is the only one we know of which supports life. But note, I said "the only one known to support life". In our current astronomical knowledge there are believed to be one to four hundred billion stars in a galaxy. Further, there are believed to be some one hundred billion galaxies in the universe. Doubtless some of these trillion stars are similar to our sun in quality and quantity of radiation and many, it seems likely, have planets situated like the earth making life feasible on them. Thus the medieval notion that we, i.e., we humans, are God’s only children in this universe must be carefully circumscribed. We are the only children of God that we know. More accurately, we are the only "thinking" beings with a self-concept that we know. It is, of course accurate and necessary to regard the whole of the realm of nature as God’s children.
ext we come to that troublesome matter called time. Does time flow carrying us all along as in a flowing stream? Is time in any sense reversible as some physicists claim? Certainly psychologically time does not flow at a steady pace. Some moments are dragged out and others speed by. Some days take an eternity to pass, others are gone like a puff of smoke. Can any time be reversed? Perhaps so, the physicists say, but what about morally? Sometimes the past can be undone a bit, but seldom cancelled. It seems that morally speaking we cannot go home again. The problem is that we have changed and thus home has changed.
hat about time for God? How does God experience time or does God experience time? Is all time equally present now for God? And if time be a stream where is God in that stream? Using the text from Rev. 21:16, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end." Paul Tillich wrote a fine essay called "The Eternal Now". In it he points out that our sense of the flow of time really begins when we realize that time, for us, will come to an end; that we have a terminus in this life that is inescapable. Christian thought has always spoken of time as flowing toward an end, a final termination of the world’s process, but it has also spoken about eternity. Tillich wrote, "The mystery of the future is answered in terms of the eternal of which we may speak in terms of images taken from time. But if we forget that the images are images, we fall into absurdities and self-deception. There is no time after time, but there is eternity above time." Tillich points us in an interesting direction with the concept "eternity". How does eternity relate to time? This is the same question with which this paragraph began, how does God experience time. Our answer is that God transcends time.
hat does it mean to say God transcends time? The astro-physicists now theorize that time began with the beginning to the universe. Their statement is like the poetic line of e. e. cummings
"When God decided to invent everything,
He took one breath bigger than a circus tent,
and everything began."
The physicists are saying effectively that once, so to speak, there was no time and then, all of a sudden, everything began. Genesis says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." But, our minds say immediately, what about before that? And just there is the problem, if there is no flow of time, there is no before, no after. Where were we before we were conceived? Where are we after we die? These are equally time-difficult, or time-impossible statements. In asking such questions we incorporate the dimension of time into our thinking and thus make the questions confused and unanswerable. In the Gospel of John, when the eternity of the Christ is mentioned not only does it say that he will return to eternity, but that he came from eternity. Eternity is not at all the direction in which lies the past. Jesus does not say "I was before Abraham" but "before Abraham was, I am" thus pointing to his eternity not to his foreverness or his priorness in time. Now to answer the question with which this paragraph began: God does not experience time as we do, for God is not in time as we are, (except, as we will note more later, God is in us and with us) God rather simply is, God’s isness is, in eternity.
ow we must ask what is meant by eternity. It is certainly not time without end. Nor, as the great English preacher of the nineteenth century remarked of most people’s view of heaven as a life like this one only better oiled, eternity is not simply another life with no bumps, warts, or pimples. Eternity is another dimension altogether. It is necessary to give up any form of applied logic from ordinary human life to try to understand eternity. Ordinary logic, even the most sophisticated logic, is simply transcended here. A parallel is found in the human experience that is characterized as "bliss", "ecstasy" or "nirvana" which, in the face of evil, simply says, but all is well. Like Dame Julian of Norwich’s famous words, "All is well, and all manner of things are well, all is well". When I was in my second parish, a woman, perhaps in her fifties, fell ill with incurable cancer. When I visited her in the hospital, perhaps the day of or after she had been told that she had only a short time to live, she gave me an astonishing story. In the midst of her worry and her pain, she had begun to hear like a repeated record in her mind the words, "fear not, all is well". From that day on she had pain, but maintained a radiant outlook. She was not afraid; she knew that all was well. If we are to grasp at all the meaning of eternity, it will have to be by taking advantage of the insights God gives which transcend logic. Fortunately, the contemplative tradition can be of great help here as can the perennial philosophy. Now a brief consideration of the philosophical matter. In the view of the perennial philosophy, creation occurs not in time, but in eternity. Further, creation is ordered hierarchically. To give a simple illustration, we speak of inert matter, living matter (life), mind, soul and spirit. This is the simple hierarchy of being. Before further consideration of how this hierarchy is represented in the world, it is useful to consider hierarchy in God. If there is hierarchy in the world and it is clear that there is, there must necessarily be hierarchy in God the source of all being. In the contemplative tradition this hierarchy is usually rendered as the Godhead overall, then as the Trinity, as God facing the world, so to speak., yet all God is Spirit. From the physicists we should learn the difficulty of talking about anything supposedly before the beginning, before time was. But, to paraphrase a Biblical quote used earlier, "before Time was, I Am". Thus we must not think of any hierarchy in god as a temporal one; it is rather a qualitative one. From the perennialists view God first (an atemporal, or trans-temporal first) calls into being in Godself the logos.
he logos is the whole realm of possibilities. This realm is helpfully considered as the archetypal realm. There is an ancient axiom that can be helpful here, "as above, so below", meaning that all things of the world are in some respect reflections of heavenly possibilities. Plato spoke of this as the realm of ideas, sometimes also called forms. Each thing in the world is a combination of substance and form. For example, consider a tree. It is a concrete object, but it also has about and in it the idea of treeness and as such represents a universal, an archetype. The logos is the whole realm of the archetypes, the total realm of possibilities, everything that ever could be and every way it could be and every relation possible. The perennialists argue that this must be true in God if God is to be perfect, i.e., complete, whole, full, without lack.. Thus with the logos God "calls into being" the whole realm of possibility. Caution! Do not think there was once a time when the logos was not; remember we are speaking of eternity, not time. In eternity one could say all times are equally present, or that there simply is no time.
ow a word about the relation of eternity (God) to time. Being is the first fruit of the Infinite and the highest level of Maya, the contingent realm. "God as Beyond Being is Reality absolutely unconditional, while Being is Reality insofar as it determines itself in the direction of its manifestation." As metacosmic Reality, beyond all manifestation (i.e. being) Being is sometimes called the uncreated Logos. Being then means the personal God of the various religions who is called Creator, Legislator, Preserver, Judge of the world, to give a few of the world’s religious ideas. The distinction between Beyond-Being and Being is a distinction in fact, in divinis, i.e., within Godself. It must be reiterated that all of Reality is only God—everything that exists is only the metaphysical Infinite, which is Totality. Yet it is correct to speak of metaphysical levels. Reality-God is a single indivisible Essence (Spirit) so the idea of levels must not preclude God being in all and through all. This is implied in an ancient insight, "As above so below", but also every below is in the above. The world may be described as within God and is an expression of god. "Every above is within the below, not just in Heaven but on Earth as well, and it is this which makes possible Revelation, incarnation, intellection, inspiration and a host of other divine disclosures."
he Logos as all possibility may, as I suggested, be compared to, or illustrated by, the concept of archetypes. In order better to understand this matter of the archetype consider a particular and omnipresent archetype, the "Great Mother", or the Divine Feminine if you prefer. As with every archetype, the Great Mother has both what we may term positive and negative aspects. It is incorrect to think of positive and negative as equal to good and bad because they may be either, in moral or in practical terms. To give some indication of the complexity of this archetype’s manifestation in life, consider that Erich Neumann, a great Jungian psychologist, wrote a book specifically about the Great Mother. This book contains well over 300 pages of small print, plus another 200 pages of the pictorial representation of the Great Mother throughout the world. More specifically some of her manifestations are, in relation to the child, to nourish and protect, to keep warm and hold fast. The child comes to be within the mother’s body, nourished by her blood. But also the Great Mother has her dark, or negative side, the witch, Terrible Mother. Insofar as she nourishes her children, it is to feed her own ego. Like the witch of fairy tale, she fattens them in order later to eat them. She is thus the devouring maw of the earth, the continual threat of death and destruction. Our relation to this side of the archetype is one of fear and abject dependence, thus cutting the string of any possible individual development. We should be aware that not only our life mothers, but institutions often act in, or are related to, in this way. Think of how institutions, the Church, the Corporation, the University, the Government can and do devour those who relate to them. Think also of the complicity of those who get devoured. This mention of only the one archetype, but one of major importance is all that space permits, however, a few others without illustration will be mentioned. The Great Father, The Child, the Archetype of Transformation, the Hero, and so on virtually ad infinitum. The archetypal realm, the Logos, is indescribably vast, and each is not only a unit with its own potential, but is dynamic and interrelated to the whole. Jung’s work with the archetypal theory is useful and helpful. However, it is necessary to be cautious here and not confuse Jung’s use of the term/concept archetype with that of the perennial philosophy and contemplative tradition; they have much in common, but are not exactly equivalent. Jung often denies the metaphysical implication of his archetypal theory because he did not want to be cast as either a metaphysicist or a mystic, but in fact he ventured into both realms more than a little. Jung’s concern was most often the function of the archetypes within the psyche; that is not the concern here, at least as yet. In Jung’s vision and research the archetypes of the collective unconscious function more or less autonomously, yet are all interrelated. One can imagine them as being like currents in the vast ocean which vary in intensity and volume and even a bit in location, yet have perennially stable characteristics that identify them from one another. Being infinite, God has no fixed boundaries, thus the relationship between what is God and what is not God is fluid, like the oceanic currents. The most important thing for us to realize about this archetypal realm, the logos, is its omnipresence. Jung often quoted an old saying that "all the gods are within you" to support, or illustrate, his thesis of the archetypal nature of the unconscious. For him the unconscious was a boundless realm; no limits could be set on its extent.
e have noted God as the Godhead or as Beyond Being, but God is also Being Itself. Creation occurs as God emanates the being of the world. The older doctrine of creation ex nihilo was based on the presumption that God must not in any way be sullied by too much contact with the finite, the world. But if we push more deeply into the idea involved, it is clear that God as "beyond-being" overcomes the nothingness of "not-being" in order that there may be the realm of "being". Eternity beyond time brings about being with time. So, simply, it may be said that God overcomes nonbeing in order that there be a world. This overcoming is not a one-time thing. Clearly the notion that God seizes on chaotic matter and imposes an order which is then left to run its course is unacceptable. The insight of the contemplative traditions is that God is continually involved in the creative process. Without God’s creative activity nothingness, not-being would absorb the being of the world instantly. Thus when the Psalmist cries out "Whither would I flee from God?" there is no answer, for there is no place, no state of being without God.
he problem of nothing is a special problem and akin to the problem of evil has no fully satisfactory solution. Yet within perennial philosophy there is a suggestion of great merit. It is simply that "If God is Absolute—All Possibility--, then by definition [the Absolute] must include its own impossibility." It is quite difficult to understand nothingness because we tend usually to turn it into something positive. An analogy that may help is that of coldness. In physical terms we know that there is no such thing as coldness, only less heat, or the radiation of heat leaving something less warm than it was. Coldness is purely a matter of human perception and convenience, a way of speaking. The reality is only less or more heat, or warmth. Even one degree above absolute zero, that theoretical temperature at which molecular action ceases, is heat and not cold. We may also refer to the Hindu notion of Maya, the relative. "In a certain sense, Maya represents the possibility for Being of not being." Just as we call something that is neither real nor unreal an illusion, so Maya is the illusion that God produces in order to seem not to be. God thus veils Godself under the cloak of existence as if He/She were not. "Thus the world is antinomic by definition, which is a way of saying it is not god." In another saying "Reality has entered into nothingness, so that nothingness might become real."
he final discussion in this paper is to focus on the human. Schuon says of the human "God has opened a door in the middle of creation, and this open door of the world towards god is man; this opening is God’s invitation to look towards Him, so tend towards Him, to persevere with regard to Him, and to return to Him." Schuon’s idea is quite reminiscent of a paraphrase of a quote from Ignatius made by C.G. Jung,: "Man’s consciousness was created to the end that it may (1) recognize its descent from a higher unity; (2) pay due and careful regard to this source; (3) execute its commands intelligently and responsibly; and (4) thereby afford the psyche as whole the optimum degree of life and development." John MacQuarrie has argued that the most important fact in the doctrine of creation is that we are to understand ourselves as created beings, not as accidents. This thought makes obvious the terrible error of any idea that the human is a mere product of accidental or fortuitous evolution from matter. There is no sense to the argument that blind chance produced human consciousness, intellect, etc. from inert matter. We are instead intentional products of the Divine. Genesis says it very simply, the human is created "in the image of God" in imago dei. Schuon says humans are theomorphic, i.e., God-shaped, by which he seems to mean again that we are created in the image of God.
his imago dei is indelible, it cannot be lost because it is our essential identity. In the opening paragraph of the Gospel of John we read: "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God, all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of humans." In that last sentence saying that the life of the Logos was the light of humans, it is made clear that none is without this light. The last sentence of that paragraph drives home the point saying "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it." Humans are inescapably drawn toward God as iron filings toward a magnet. Or, as I recall, Augustine put it "There is a God shaped blank in the human heart and we are empty till we are filled with Thee." Yet we are also blessed, some would say cursed, with that curious quality called freedom, or free will. Just how free we are is debatable, but to some degree we seem to have power to choose the course of our lives, the values we support with our actions, the allegiances we make and the loyalties we maintain. We are creatures of trust and loyalty for the most part, although what it is we ultimately trust and to what we give our loyalty is no fixed matter, but rather seems to have something to do with choice.
e generally attribute this freedom to that supposed center of consciousness called the ego. This term was chosen and popularized in the English translation of Sigmund Freud’s work, and in its Latin origin simply means "I", or in the German of Freud das Ich. However, the course of psychology in this 20th century has established the term in our language as meaning the center of the person. C.G. Jung disagreed with this notion because he saw the whole psyche as far more vast than Freud seemed to. Jung considered the psyche virtually illimitable because for him the term unconscious meant not just repressed or forgotten aspects of conscious life, but the whole archetypal realm. The center of the psyche is not ego, but in Jung’s term the Self. This Self is the central archetypal figure and in one comment Jung noted that he could not on any empirical or psychological grounds separate the Self from God. Following our thought above, the Self may be identified with the Logos, the Son of God as the entire archetypal realm which is then incarnate not just in Jesus, but in every human!
atthew Fox has pervasively and persuasively argued that most of Western spirituality has been plagued by an overemphasis on the motif of sin/fall/redemption and has neglected the more important notion of a creation spirituality. The positions presented in this paper are much closer to Fox’s creation-centered spirituality than to any notion of sin/fall/redemption. Fox is heavily indebted to Meister Eckhart and the positions outlined above are certainly compatible with Eckhart’s thought. A more balanced presentation of the perennial thought is that of Huston Smith in his Forgotten Truth. As with God, there are levels, or hierarchy, in the human. These are usually considered to be body, mind, soul and spirit, each more real, fuller of being than the former. Yet we must not forget that all is ultimately Spirit/God. Here we can consider only the level called Soul. We are tempted to consider ourselves like Titans striding on earth because "there is a dimension of our selves that exceeds even the stratosphere, an essence no universe, subtle, or gross can contain." The soul "is the final locus of our individuality . . .it sees through the eyes without being seen, hears with the ears without itself being heard. . .It underlies, in fact, not only the flux of mind but all the changes through which an individual passes."
estlessness is built into the soul as a metaphysical principle and yet its restlessness has direction, intent. Recall the quote from Augustine above. "Ever since man appeared on the planet he seems to have been searching for an object that he could love, serve and adore wholeheartedly; an object which, being of the highest and most permanent beauty and perfection, would never permit his love for it to dwindle, deteriorate, or suffer frustration." The soul is driven, or perhaps better, lured, toward ever increasing being. (Please recall the notion of hierarchy as levels of being from matter up to spirit.) Thus the tropism of the soul is toward being and its increase. This lure is often misunderstood and our loyalty, our love misplaced. Because the soul is finite, it often seeks a finite fulfillment. We do not see that being is what we want. "What the lover senses himself as wanting is his beloved." But why does he want her? Or why does the addict want cocaine? She attracts precisely because she provides the lens, the aperture, through which being can pour in largest portions. Thus "every emptiness we feel is ‘being’ eclipsed, all restlessness a flailing for the being that we need, all joy the evidence of being found." The dynamic of the universe is the love of all things for the infinite, the lure of God. Misplaced though our drives and lusts may be, behind, beneath them all lies the inescapable magnetic lure of the Divine. All loves, drives, lusts, even addictions are ultimately seeking to slake our thirst for God. When our attachments are to less than the Ultimate, they will always pale, and we wonder, as we say, what we saw in her. Thus we are destined to go from one thing to another until, guided by grace, we find that which alone can fulfill without disappointment the emptiness of the heart.
1. Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now, Scribner’s, New York. 1963. P 125.
2. For a clear statement of the perennial philosophy see William Quinn, Jr. The Only Tradition, State Univ. of N. Y. Press. 1997.
3. Frithjof Schuon, Stations of Wisdom" p 13, as quoted in James S. Cutsinger, Advice to the serious Seeker, SUNY Press, NY. 1997 p 37.
4. Cutsinger, op. Cit., p42.
5. Cutsinger, op. Cit. p43.
6 Schuon, as quoted in Cutsinger, op. Cit. p45.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Schuon, as quoted in Cutsinger, op Cit. p 47.
10. Quoted in Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype, Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1973. Frontispiece.
11. All quotes here are from The Gospel According to John, 1:1-5
12. Those interested in this topic should see Jung’s essay "Approaching the Unconscious" in his Man and His Symbols" for an introduction to the topic. A fuller discussion is in his volume The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious" volume 9 part 1 of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Princeton Univ. Press.
13. Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth, Chapter 4, "The Levels of Selfhood", Harper-Collins, San Francisco, 1992. Pp 60-93.
14. Smith, op. Cit. p76.
15. Ibid. p 77.
16. Much more needs to be said here, but space does not permit. You are directed to the chapter in Smith cited above n. 12, for a fuller discussion.
t is the intent of these papers to be short, understandable introductions of important topics of Wisdom. Thus their content cannot be considered a balanced or full discussion of the topic, but rather suggestions for thought, reflection and discussion. The first topic "Creation" is more than immense and to attempt much enlightenment in one brief essay is perilous, further, what it means to be a created being must also be considered. The word "Creation" or "The Creation" brings to mind for those of us having our roots in the Christian tradition an immediate association with the story of Genesis and the ideas of Christian theology which we have heard. It is helpful to put all that aside at the outset to avoid confusing ourselves or blocking out clear thinking. The perspective enunciated here is taken from the contemplative tradition and represents a narrow sample, but a representative one from those sources.
good many years ago, a book was published with the perceptive title
hen comes the matter of complexity. Our earth is a small planet, rather rare in that it is the only one we know of which supports life. But note, I said "the only one known to support life". In our current astronomical knowledge there are believed to be one to four hundred billion stars in a galaxy. Further, there are believed to be some one hundred billion galaxies in the universe. Doubtless some of these trillion stars are similar to our sun in quality and quantity of radiation and many, it seems likely, have planets situated like the earth making life feasible on them. Thus the medieval notion that we, i.e., we humans, are God’s only children in this universe must be carefully circumscribed. We are the only children of God that we know. More accurately, we are the only "thinking" beings with a self-concept that we know. It is, of course accurate and necessary to regard the whole of the realm of nature as God’s children.
ext we come to that troublesome matter called time. Does time flow carrying us all along as in a flowing stream? Is time in any sense reversible as some physicists claim? Certainly psychologically time does not flow at a steady pace. Some moments are dragged out and others speed by. Some days take an eternity to pass, others are gone like a puff of smoke. Can any time be reversed? Perhaps so, the physicists say, but what about morally? Sometimes the past can be undone a bit, but seldom cancelled. It seems that morally speaking we cannot go home again. The problem is that we have changed and thus home has changed.
hat about time for God? How does God experience time or does God experience time? Is all time equally present now for God? And if time be a stream where is God in that stream? Using the text from Rev. 21:16, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end." Paul Tillich wrote a fine essay called "The Eternal Now". In it he points out that our sense of the flow of time really begins when we realize that time, for us, will come to an end; that we have a terminus in this life that is inescapable. Christian thought has always spoken of time as flowing toward an end, a final termination of the world’s process, but it has also spoken about eternity. Tillich wrote, "The mystery of the future is answered in terms of the eternal of which we may speak in terms of images taken from time. But if we forget that the images are images, we fall into absurdities and self-deception. There is no time after time, but there is eternity above time." Tillich points us in an interesting direction with the concept "eternity". How does eternity relate to time? This is the same question with which this paragraph began, how does God experience time. Our answer is that God transcends time.
atthew Fox has pervasively and persuasively argued that most of Western spirituality has been plagued by an overemphasis on the motif of sin/fall/redemption and has neglected the more important notion of a creation spirituality. The positions presented in this paper are much closer to Fox’s creation-centered spirituality than to any notion of sin/fall/redemption. Fox is heavily indebted to Meister Eckhart and the positions outlined above are certainly compatible with Eckhart’s thought. A more balanced presentation of the perennial thought is that of Huston Smith in his Forgotten Truth. As with God, there are levels, or hierarchy, in the human. These are usually considered to be body, mind, soul and spirit, each more real, fuller of being than the former. Yet we must not forget that all is ultimately Spirit/God. Here we can consider only the level called Soul. We are tempted to consider ourselves like Titans striding on earth because "there is a dimension of our selves that exceeds even the stratosphere, an essence no universe, subtle, or gross can contain." The soul "is the final locus of our individuality . . .it sees through the eyes without being seen, hears with the ears without itself being heard. . .It underlies, in fact, not only the flux of mind but all the changes through which an individual passes."
estlessness is built into the soul as a metaphysical principle and yet its restlessness has direction, intent. Recall the quote from Augustine above. "Ever since man appeared on the planet he seems to have been searching for an object that he could love, serve and adore wholeheartedly; an object which, being of the highest and most permanent beauty and perfection, would never permit his love for it to dwindle, deteriorate, or suffer frustration." The soul is driven, or perhaps better, lured, toward ever increasing being. (Please recall the notion of hierarchy as levels of being from matter up to spirit.) Thus the tropism of the soul is toward being and its increase. This lure is often misunderstood and our loyalty, our love misplaced. Because the soul is finite, it often seeks a finite fulfillment. We do not see that being is what we want. "What the lover senses himself as wanting is his beloved." But why does he want her? Or why does the addict want cocaine? She attracts precisely because she provides the lens, the aperture, through which being can pour in largest portions. Thus "every emptiness we feel is ‘being’ eclipsed, all restlessness a flailing for the being that we need, all joy the evidence of being found." The dynamic of the universe is the love of all things for the infinite, the lure of God. Misplaced though our drives and lusts may be, behind, beneath them all lies the inescapable magnetic lure of the Divine. All loves, drives, lusts, even addictions are ultimately seeking to slake our thirst for God. When our attachments are to less than the Ultimate, they will always pale, and we wonder, as we say, what we saw in her. Thus we are destined to go from one thing to another until, guided by grace, we find that which alone can fulfill without disappointment the emptiness of the heart.