We now come to the end of our discussion of the senses. We have considered how each sense offers a unique way of perceiving the world. Sight gives us access to a wide horizon, allowing us to gain a sense of “the big picture.” Sound brings us closer; smell closer still. Through touch, a physical connection is established. Through taste, we completely participate in the reality of another object.

An Open Mind

Throughout this book, we have shown how each sense can be a channel through which we experience God. By doing this, we have assumed that a transcendent, spiritual reality exists and can be perceived in and through our human senses. Obviously, this assumption is open to debate. There is no agreement on whether anything really exists beyond the senses. We can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a transcendent reality through the use of the five senses alone.

Throughout the centuries, the world’s major philosophies and religions have all posited the existence the transcendent – whether personal or impersonal.[1]

Essential to every religious system is the belief that reality is more than what is perceived, that sensory experience communicates only a superficial appearance of what is really real. Behind, underneath, or above what we see and hear is a transcendent yet present reality that is supra sensory, supranatural, spiritual, divine, or all of these.[2]

Christian theism teaches that God – a personal spiritual presence – transcends and embraces all reality. The cliché is true: There is more than meets the eye. Far more exists than we are capable of perceiving.

There are many ways to speak of that which transcends our senses. We may speak of spiritual reality as metaphysical (that which exists beyond physics), supernatural (that which exists beyond nature), or supra-rational (that which is beyond reason). Because spiritual reality is beyond physics and human reason, it cannot be fully proved or denied by either.

Clearly, this way of approaching the world is at odds with materialism (the belief that matter is all there is) and empiricism (the belief that the scientific method is the only reliable means of gaining knowledge).[3] Reducing the world to only that which can be perceived through the five senses (whether aided or unaided by technology) greatly simplifies things, but at what expense? What if our senses, though limited, are intended to lead us beyond our senses?

There is nothing backward, ignorant, narrow, or naïve about this possibility. Secularists often represent themselves as tolerant and open-minded and label religious folk as simple-minded and narrow. But is this really the case?

Often the person with spiritual convictions is seen as close-minded and others are seen as open-minded. What is fascinating to me is that at the center of the Christian faith is the assumption that this life isn't all there is. That there is more to life than the material. That existence is not limited to what we can see, touch, measure, taste, hear, and observe. One of the central assertions of the Christian worldview is that there is “more”. Those who oppose this insist that this is all there is, that only what we can measure and observe and see with our eyes is real. There is nothing else. Which perspective is more “closed-minded”? Which perspective is more “open”?[4]

A secular worldview exhumes reality of all traces of the transcendent. What we see is what we get. This is as good as it gets. The best we can do is enjoy the day, for its significance is exhausted in its use. In contrast, a sacred worldview embraces the ordinary, but recognizes the eternal significance of every moment. It imagines a world open to something greater than we currently experience. It assumes that the limits of human perception do not exhaust the infinite possibilities of our shared reality. It embraces the fact that reality is not what it seems to the senses – it is always more. We do not find out what is real just by seeing, touching, smelling, hearing, or tasting things.

The Problem and Possibility of Transcendence

Theists in general, and more particularly, Christian theists believe that reality is greater than our perception, and this greater reality is evidence of a divine hand at work in our world.[5]

We are naturally limited in our ability to interact with the transcendent. Clearly, the finite cannot comprehend the infinite. But can the finite experience the infinite?

Our difficulty in engaging with the transcendent is illustrated by the following story:

“Where is God, Grandpa? I don’t see him.” Steven giggled.

“Come. I’ll show you where he is.”

Steven, with a grimace of doubt, followed his grandfather. It was noontime and the sun was bright and hot.

“Look up there, keep your eyes on the sun,” the grandfather said. Steven looked up for a while and then turned his face away. “Keep looking straight at the sun,” the grandfather insisted.

Steven covered his face. “My eyes are hurting; I can’t do it.”

“Well, young man, if you cannot see the sun, how do you expect to see the one who created the sun?”[6]

Clearly, our humanity brings inherent limitations to our ability to engage with the transcendent. The Bible recognizes our human limitations. For example, both the prophet Isaiah and the apostle Paul state that “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Somerville writes: “What God has prepared far exceeds anything the senses can feel, the mind conceive, or the heart desire.”[7]

And yet, in spite of our limitations, the Bible never concludes that because we can’t know exhaustively we cannot know truly. On the contrary, we may possess true knowledge of God even though it is never complete. Paul taught that “we know but in part” and “we see through a glass darkly.” But it is this partial vision of Christ that brings about our spiritual transformation (see 2 Corinthians 3:18). This spiritual gaze – though incomplete and imperfect – is enough to transform us.

This is not unlike our encounters with other people. No matter how well we know another person, we never completely plumb the depths of his or her being. The other remains “other” to us – a mystery that defies comprehension. Though we are tempted to do otherwise, it is impossible to reduce someone to an explanation, a label, a personality type – much less view them solely in light of their sex, race, class, or religion. There are depths to others that will forever elude us. Not only is this true of others – it is also true of ourselves. No matter how deeply we think we know ourselves, situations arise that reveal that we remain a stranger even to ourselves. And yet, with all these obstacles, we still possess the capacity to know ourselves.

The good news is that God accommodates Godself to our human limitations. Most people are not interested in a spirituality that cannot encompass their humanness. God is not only considerate of our limitations, God completely assumes our humanity – including its inherent limitations – in Christ. This is a complete act of divine grace. We do not appropriate the transcendent. We could not if we tried. The transcendent appropriates us – making it possibility for us to truly know the divine in and through Jesus and by the Spirit.

Amazingly, we see God in Jesus, hear his message, smell his sacrifice, touch his body, and taste his goodness. The apostolic message was rooted in this sensual encounter with the divine through Jesus.

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. (1 John 1:1-4)

Put simply: God, by definition, transcends our senses, and yet, God can be perceived in and through our senses – though never comprehensively. If God could be completely perceived through the senses alone, there would be no need for faith. It is faith which allows us to transcend our limitations and develop a relationship with God.

This corresponds to human relationships. We never know if others in our life will manipulate, overwhelm, control, or abandon us. No matter how well we know someone, the possibility of others using or abusing us remains. In order to bridge this gap, we must learn to trust others. In light of our lack of complete knowledge of another person, we place faith in them, disclose ourselves to them, and hope for the best.

This is due to the intimate connection between the Creator and creation. As a product of the Creator, creation reflects the touch of the divine artist. Even more, by assuming our humanity in Christ, God sanctifies the human senses as fit vehicles to appropriate transcendent reality. The temple where God dwells is no longer a building, but the human body (see 1 Corinthians 6:19). Every sense is awakened to the pervasive presence of God. Our perception is transformed by faith. We awaken to a deep spiritual reality that has always been with us. We realize that we have been blind, asleep, and ignorant. New life begins.

We glorify God by being “fully alive” – seeking to experience God through all give senses. This new life places on the path to being all that God desires us to be – fully human, fully alive, fully aware. This is a spirituality which wholly encompasses our humanness. We don’t have to abandon or reject our humanity to experience God.

Engaging the Transcendent

“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.  That’s the signpost up ahead – your next stop, the Twilight Zone!”

From 1959 to 1965, these words announced the arrival of a whole new way of life. They called us to recognize a deeper dimension that transcends our human faculties. This deeper dimension did not work according to laws of nature. It had its own set of rules. The experience it provoked was mysterious, unpredictable, sometimes alarming, always unsettling, and at times, very dangerous.  The people who encountered the Twilight Zone did so against their will. They did not pursue an encounter with the transcendent. It was thrust upon them.

In contrast, religious folk seek to purposefully encounter the transcendent. How do we connect with the world beyond sense? Through signs, symbols, and metaphors. In a word, through sacraments – signs of the divine presence that effect what they symbolize. A sacramental mindset is the alternative to a secular mindset that perceives the world as matter and nothing more. A sacramental world – a world ablaze with the divine, a world permeated by the transcendent – contains seeds that open us to its spiritual reality.

Our new technological age provides us with a perfect illustration. We are all familiar with computer interfaces. Many people use Windows Explorer as an interface to the world wide web. We need this tool to access the internet because it is unlike any other reality we encounter. As a virtual reality that exists in cyberspace, the internet exists in a mysterious manner beyond space, time, and matter. It has no real substance. It exists in no literal place. Though most of us do not understand the intricacies of how it works, we are able to access it through the use of icons and hyperlinked text, that is, through an interface. These words and symbols allow us to navigate the virtually infinite world of cyberspace. Apart from these tools, all but the most experienced programmers would be lost.

In the same way, the world is full of signs, symbols, and icons of divine reality. Scripture teaches that all creation is a window of the divine glory – revealing aspects about God’s being, goodness, and wisdom. Furthermore, human beings are described as image-bearers, icons of God. Jesus himself is presented as the icon of the invisible God. No other human being has so fully reflected the presence and power of God. If we want to experience the transcendent, we need to “click on” God’s icon, Jesus Christ. We need to allow this icon to connect us to the “virtual” world of grace and God.

We learn of God’s icon through sacred words – words which serve as sacraments of the divine presence. Though we don’t often think of them in this way, words are really signs – pointers – to the reality they describe. For example, my name is Rich, and yet, I am not Rich. The word Rich does not exhaust who I am. It barely describes me at all. It merely serves as a phonetic pointer to me. It is a sign pointing to a far deeper reality (at least, I hope so). But without the word, it is difficult to distinguish me from my surroundings, much less the remainder of humankind.

In the same way, words can point us to God, and, by doing so, shed light upon the mystery of God. Sacred words manifest the presence of God. For this reason, hearing is extolled as a sense that enlarges our faith: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).

Sacred words do not have to be complex, profound, or difficult in order to manifest the transcendent. Finley provides an example of how the simple phrase, “I love you” communicates far more than appears on the surface:

A wife tells her husband “I love you” not to communicate a previously unknown, logical, verifiable piece of information, but rather to articulate what it is that binds her to her spouse. The repetition of such words is not redundant. Rather, like each new rising of the sun, each new “I love you” offers new, yet-to-be-explored possibilities. Each “I love you” carries within it the promise of renewed and deepened levels of intimacy and union.

The “I love you” finds its power in its ability to express the wife’s communion with her husband...

The purpose of the symbol is not to convey information but to open unknown depths of awareness enabling the disciple to come upon “his own center, his own ontological roots in a mystery of being that transcends his individual ego.” ...

Communion is the awareness of participation in an ontological or religious reality: in the mystery of being, of human love, of redemptive mystery, of contemplative truth.[8]

The same is true of the words of scripture and words inspired by scripture. Henri Nouwen shows how even theological formulations and church doctrines can work in this manner: “The Church is not an institution forcing us to follow its rules. It is a community of people inviting us to still our hunger and thirst at its tables. Doctrines are not alien formulations which we must adhere to but the documentation of the most profound human experiences which, transcending time in place, are handed over from generation to generation as light in our darkness.”[9]

One of the most startling things about God’s accommodation to our senses is how God allows ordinary objects to communicate the transcendent. Jesus regularly used seeds, mothers, fathers, children, families, trees, rocks, clouds, flowers, mountains, fish, coins, water, light (and many other common items) to communicate spiritual truth. The most powerful sign of the transcendent he gave us is a holy meal comprised of the simple elements of bread and wine.

The transcendent is revealed in and through the ordinary. “While the experience of God is always one of transcendence and mystery, it is also true that it always occurs in and through ordinary human experience. God is found at the heart of what is human. It is always an experience of immanence.”[10] Therefore, “grace must be seen as mediated. First it is always mediated because it occurs in and through everyday experience. We experience grace in and through the events of our lives.”[11]

Since grace is revealed through common, ordinary objects and events, it is worth noting that our greatest revelation of the transcendent may not take place in the ecstatic or extreme, but may find us in the most unlikely of places – in the normal routines of our everyday lives. This possibility is at the heart of Christian mysticism. The focus is not on extreme ecstatic encounters, but of knowing God in the ordinary. The brush of a hand, the smile of a friend, the sound of water, the smell of fresh-baked bread, the taste of wine – all these and more stand as witnesses of something deep, yet strangely familiar; an elusive presence that haunts us all our lives, peeking through the ordinary, inviting us to see through creation into the divine.

T. S. Elliot said it best:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Transcending Ourselves

One important positive component of transcending the senses is the way it protects us from egocentricity. By seeking to rise above and beyond our own human limitations, we recognize that our perception is not reality. Reality is greater than we can perceive. Though we are at the center of our own perceptions, we are not at the center of the universe. A reality exists that transcends our own experience.

This keeps us from descending into egocentric narcissism. If our experience is all that exists – or all that really matters to us – then it is lost in its use. “Divorced from transcendent meaning, physical pleasures become compulsory, banal, and exhausted, curiously deprived of the charge of healthy, joyful passion. Thus we develop a culture saturated in the erotic yet bereft of eros, deprived of the classic lover's unswerving ardor and self-sacrificing fidelity.”[12]

In biblical language, our world is reduced to an idol.

A bigger problem [than idols], I think, has resulted from taking the word idol in this context too literally. Thus one who has statues and pictures in his place of worship is called “idolater,” and the one who does not is absolved from such “accusation.” This is a superficial form of thinking. To my mind, idol worship occurs when the deity worshipped is not transcendent and divine at all but ephemeral and banal. Instead of mobilizing one toward a sense of unity with the world, such “worship” remains focused upon narrow personal interests.[13]

The beauty of worship is that it enables us to transcend ourselves: “when we truly admire something, we are taken out of ourselves... in true appreciation there is an experience of genuine self-transcendence. The ego is left behind and we simply behold and appreciate.”[14] Only when we transcend ourselves are we truly ourselves. For, as Merton taught, “True life... is freedom transcending the self and subsisting in ‘the other’ by love... It is a freedom which ‘loses its life in order to find it,’ instead of saving its own life and thereby losing it.”[15]

All creation, all relationships, all reality – everything finds its source and goal in transcendent spiritual reality. That is simply another way to say that everything in creation – including ourselves – finds it source and goal in God. “For from him, and through him, and to him are all things. To God be the glory forever” (Romans 11:36).

Reflections from Spiritual Masters

Over 1500 years ago, the great theologian Augustine, asked an important question. After admitting that “Heaven and earth and all things in them say to me that I should love You” he asked, “What is it, then, that I love when I love You?” His answer is as follows:

Not bodily beauty, and not temporal glory, not the clear shining light, lovely as it is to our eyes, not the sweet melodies of songs, not the soft smell of flowers and perfumes, not limbs for the body's embrace-not these do I love when I love my God.

And yet I do love a kind of light, a kind of voice, a kind of odor, a kind of food, a kind of embrace when I love my God: a light, voice, odor, food, embrace for the man within me, where I am bathed in a light no place can contain, where a voice is heard that no passage of time can ever take away, where a fragrance abounds that no gust of wind can disperse, where there is a food that no eating can lessen-and where there is an embrace that no fulfillment can bring to an end. This is what I love when I love my God.[16]

When awakened to the divine, Augustine perceived God in and through every human sense. It was his senses that awakened him to God, and his love was channeled through his senses, but it did not stop there.

You called and cried aloud
and shattered my deafness.

You were radiant and resplendent,
you put to flight my blindness.

You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath
and now pant after you.

I tasted you,
and I feel but hunger and thirst for you.

You touched me,
and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

Jacopone Da Todi, an Italian Friar of the 13th centurty, has a marvelous poem titled, “How the Soul Through the Senses Finds God in All Creatures.”

O Love, divine Love, why do You lay siege to me?
In a frenzy of love for me, You find no rest.

From five sides You move against me,
Hearing, sight, taste, touch, and scent.
To come out is to be caught; I cannot hide from You.

If I come out through sight I see Love
Painted in every form and color,
Inviting me to come to You, to dwell in You.

If I leave through the door of hearing,
What I hear points only to You, Lord;
I cannot escape Love through this gate.

If I come out through taste, every flavor proclaims:
“Love, divine Love, hungering Love!
You have caught me on Your hook, for you want to reign in me.”

If I leave through the door of scent
I sense You in all creation; You have caught me
And wounded me through that fragrance.

If I come out through the sense of touch
I find Your lineaments in every creature;
To try to flee from You is madness.

Love, I flee from You, afraid to give You my heart:
I see that You make me one with You,
I cease to be me and can no longer find myself.

If I see evil in a man or defect or temptation,
You fuse me with him, and make me suffer;
O Love without limits, who is it You love?

It is You, O Crucified Christ,
Who take possession of me,
Drawing me out of the sea to the shore;

There I suffer to see Your wounded heart.
Why did You endure the pain?
So that I might be healed.

St. Bonaventure (1221-1274) receives the final word as he challenges us to allow all our experiences to culminate in giving glory to God.

Whoever, therefore, is not enlightened
by such splendor of created things is blind;

whoever is not awakened by such outcries is deaf;

whoever does not praise God because of all these effects is dumb;

whoever does not discover the First Principle
from such clear signs is a fool.

Therefore,
     open your eyes,
     alert the ears of your spirit,
     open your lips
     and apply your heart

so that in all creatures you may
     see,
     hear,
     praise,
     love and
     worship,
     glorify and honor your God

lest the whole world rise against you.[17]

© Richard J. Vincent, 2007