Richard Lloyd Jones: Welcome to Episode 5 of our Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. In our last episode, we looked at some of the sciences responsible for modern science's turn to materialism, something that sought to make God irrelevant in the creation of life. English biologist Richard Dawkins perhaps best epitomizes that point of view, opining in The God Delusion that God is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction, and then swinging from the heels with a brutal list of negative adjectives describing God.
That, to my mind, simply substantiates the discoveries of the early explorers of the psyche, who showed that sickness lies in projecting our evil qualities outward onto others. That dismissive view of God is more than obvious in countless modern art, too, that looks at the mess in the world created by man as proof that God doesn't exist. Well, I'm struck hard by that modern conceit because, well, I'm a product of it.
Moving to Brazil, twenty years ago, with my wife at the time, Madeleine, began a process of change inside me, a gradual opening to a theological reality that had simply not been part of my life. The spirituality I'd delved into in the New Age movement notwithstanding, that had been insufficient to feed this quest for truth I hungered for. It was the certainty of the existence of God that marks Brazil that began to turn the tide in me. From disdain for God, picked up through modern science and art, to a budding belief in something concrete, a real God, in place of that vague and simplistic notion of cosmic energy coming from New Age spirituality.
Madeleine, unfortunately, was not able to follow me on this journey, returning to
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Canada and taking her own life a short time later.
Richard: I guess unable to
Cláudia: take that step to developing a personal connection with her own deeper spirituality and all that that entailed. And it was when I began to study Nereptokypti's concept of inversion, which we talked about in our second episode, that I began to think, well, wait
Richard: a minute.
If we're inverted, we must be inverted from something. What would that be? That's what we'll begin to explore in our podcast episode today with Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco. Who is this God we're talking about anyway?
Cláudia: Can I tell something about your life, your privacy? And I remember one day we traveled on a weekend to a church, to a place, to a city,
Richard: and there was a church.
When I first came to Brazil.
Cláudia: Yeah, and we visited this church, but you were outside. You didn't want to come in.
Richard: I was never very comfortable with the whole aspect of organized religion.
Cláudia: But this has a meaning, because organized religions identify God with pathology, with suffering. We project onto God.
Richard: Yeah. I'm only now, because of Keppe's science, coming to understand what a spiritual life means.
I never came to this through religion. That never would have happened for me if it had come through religion. It's come through science. So I received a letter, I don't know, maybe a couple of years ago, Cláudia, when we were doing another program about this. And somebody said, but why do you have to use the name Jesus in a religious way? Why can't we talk about energy?
Why can't we talk about the universe, universal energy, this great love that exists in the universe? Why do you have to separate people by talking about Jesus? What are you talking about, and why are you talking in this way about this?
Cláudia: We can name maybe three most important monotheistic religions linked to an idea of one spiritual God. And God is a being.
God is not a quantic soup, as sometimes I say, of energy, beauty, truth, and goodness. It's not something vague. No, God is a being, and God is tangible. Sometimes he manifests himself even physically, as he did with Jesus, as he does sometimes manifesting himself through nature. And God, being a being, and being a perfect being, and an infinite being, he is intelligence, infinite intelligence.
He has feelings, infinite love. He's joyful. He is happy. He has will.
Richard: Probably has a sense of humor.
Cláudia: For sure he has a sense of humor. For sure he has.
Richard: He's very creative.
Cláudia: Extremely creative because he created everything that could be created perfectly, perfectly. Even though we destroyed a lot, a lot still remains perfect in his creation. And so this being made us as his children similar to him.
So if we want sometimes to understand God, we have to understand ourselves. And to understand ourselves, we must understand God. So it's a two-way thing, you understand? So sometimes people say, okay, so one thing is the love, spiritual love. You love God spiritually. And another thing is to love our fellow man. But this is another love. This is a human love. As if we could have many loves.
And I understand that the degree of love we can have depends mostly in our inner contact with ourselves and with this inner essence and also has a connection and a relation to the being we love. So the resonance, the vibration you have with a person that is more spiritual will be much bigger, much more satisfactory. A resonance than a physical understanding, a sexual one, but a spiritual and psychological artistic resonance between souls.
This has inspired so many artists and so many religious people and theologians and many others, men and women, that had this inner intimate connection with God. So they were able to have this ecstasy, this enormous feeling of pleasure.
Richard: And St. Thomas Aquinas spoke about ecstasy, even in a physical sense, because we are bodies and soul. We're not divided. There was a medieval saint, I believe, Spanish, who wrote a poem called The Dark Night of the Soul about his exploration of his love for God.
It's very powerful. Lorena McKenna, a Canadian singer, wrote a song based on the poem. And it's the expression of a saint of his love for this being called God. It's very
Cláudia: powerful. You know something, Richard, we starve from, like we starve from God. We need his love so much, so much. We're starving. We are like orphans, starving. Lost in the desert. Lost in the desert, needing and always having this saudade.
Saudade, you don't have this word in English. It's a
Richard: pity because in Portuguese you can say, we miss, we miss. It's a deep sense of longing.
Cláudia: Yeah, deep, deep, deep longing for this perfection, for this total happiness. Yearning. And total happiness, total fulfillment and happiness, but beyond any possible imagination, is in God. So why not to start now, this way back to Him?
Why not? We are here, He's here. He's not there, far away, He's here. So why not to start realizing who is with us? And when you start giving one step, two steps in his direction, and then the thing starts getting better and better. Every time, each day in, the vibration starts to increase and to increase. And beyond aesthetics, beyond music, beyond beauty of the arts, is even more it's got there waiting for us.
Kierkegaard spoke about this, that spirituality was a degree even higher than arts and ethics, because spirituality was beyond. It includes all the wonders of the universe, material, aesthetical, cultural, all.
Richard: The senses, everything.
Cláudia: Senses, human relations, and everything, and goes beyond, because it encompasses even all the infinite universe, material universe, and the transcendental universe, which is plenty of beings that are, well, we can't now at the moment imagine this.
But if like Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine or some people that dedicated themselves to go further, why to stop? They were not modest in the sense they wanted more. They wanted more. They wanted more. So they gave their lives in terms of finding. And Jesus said this. He said, the lucky are those who see and to perceive what is the kingdom of my Father.
It's like the most incredible precious stone. And spirituality, Richard, is the best. And
Richard: we are here not speaking about institutional religion. We are speaking about spirituality, which is part of our essence, and it's in ourselves, inside of us, all human beings, all races, all creeds, everybody. We have the same essence, which is mostly spiritual, and we are not taking advantage. This reminder that God was eagerly and passionately sought stands out to me in what Cláudia Pacheco was talking about there.
Some of our greatest souls in history desired to know God in a personal way, to live like God wanted them to. Poets and philosophers and musicians wrote about lost paradises and journeys through the levels of heaven and hell and seeking God above the canopy of stars and how our hearts can only be restless when outside the divine. And what to do with those extraordinary works now?
Just stick Milton and Alighieri and Augustine into moldy classics courses? Taught by anachronistic, tweedy professors in mostly empty university classrooms? Throw them on the garbage heap of history, irrelevant as typewriters? I think not. This wisdom should not just be echoes of a quaint, ignored past, but understood fervently, stamped into our cultural heritage as surely and importantly as the celebration of the birth of a child.
Norberto Keppe expresses this spirit well in his great book, Glorification. Quote, our highest thoughts, the most beautiful and grandiose things we can imagine, are practically nothing in the face of all that is truly magnificent, beautiful, and radiant. There's no doubt that we are a part of a marvelous reality. All we have to do is look around ourselves or at ourselves, breathe in the aromas, taste the foods, feel the water and the sun on our skin.
All we have to do is not deny what is before us. End of quote. Yeah, because what is before us speaks loudly as evidence of God. Seems to me we'd be wise to listen again to those historic echoes. Truth is, though, we've fallen from that knowledge, unable to embrace it anymore, brought low by our arrogant modernity, perhaps. John Newton knew about that.
And that fall from grace is what we'll look at in our next episode.
