The Five Stages of Finding the King

The Five Stages of Finding the King the most unlikely angles. The spiritual life will begin with a consciousness of a sense that God's ways of moving in this world are subtle. One must accept the necessity that a full realization of this grandeur needs to be deferred. 1) Longing: The King can't even be seen. The first awareness is that the king is be distant. The melekh's greatness can be glimpsed only from afar, or only as in a reflection, a picture, a representation. In the olden days of monarchy, there was assumed to be an overwhelming intensity in being with the melekh. It was said of the Sultan Mahmoud that "those who saw his face would rave and grieve and mourn their lives away." 1 No human shall see me and live The first level of relationship with God speaks of an awareness that God's being can be seen only in reflected majesty. The unveiled splendor of the crown would destroy (in the process of delighting) those to whom it was revealed.2 This "un-seeability" is poignantly captured in the Torah when the people at Mount Sinai cry to Moses, "You speak to us and we will listen. But let God not speak with us any more, for we will die." This is a dilemma. If you have seen it, you become burnt; if you haven't, well, you haven't seen all there is to see.3 2) Hope: The King is vulnerable to love A second stage in coming to claim the king as one's own is the recognition that this vast hidden majesty makes itself vulnerable in love. A tension grows between the passionate yearning that the sovereign incites and the royal glory that makes any approach impossible. The theme of "unrequited love' serves for the Sufis as a dominant source for metaphors of the spiritual life. Their desire for union with God leads them to insert a single flaw in their splendor of the most High. In the stories they tell, the king can hold himself remote from anything but love, the one weakness and vulnerability which is paradoxically the source of the Kings greatest strength. Rakhamana- God is reckless in love The term Rakhamana, God of tender mercy derives from the word for uterus, suggesting God's womb-like love and compassion for the children she has borne. This term for God as mother suggests the softness and vulnerability of God alongside her strength. The image of God as reckless in love as only a mother can be suggests the approachability and vulnerability of God. 4 A Hiding God El Mistater One solution is to hide the Divine countenance behind a mask, or to glimpse God through a filter. In the Psalms, God is referred to as El Mistater- a "hiding God." Moses who, as aTzaddik, shared some of God's intensity, covered his face with a mask: "When Aaron and all the Israelites saw that the skin of Moses' face was shining with a brilliant light, they were afraid to come close to him." This "mask" type of resolution of the tension between the Tzaddik or God and ordinary people makes the vision longed-for semi-accessible. Because it is blinding it is hidden; once hidden it can be present without being overwhelming; and so the holy will be sometimes found in the least expected places. One is forced to a nagging suspicion that more glory lurks beyond the ordinariness of what is seen, which is too often discounted as common and prosaic. The distorted mirror can be reflected from 3) Boldness: Realizing the possibilities of being aggressive in love. A third stage in the spiritual journey to the king is that one need not wait passively for the King/Mother to come to you but that the Lord is curiously susceptible to the most audacious appeals to love. There is invited here a bold, even swaggering manner of laying hold onto God that majesty would seem at first to disallow. Khutzpah klapay shemaya, God longs for aggressive eager lovers and sometimes yield to a lusty enterprising grasp when God would not bend to bloodless unimpassioned fealty. There is a tradition in Judaism of khutzpah klapay shemaya, "boldness with regard to heaven". This is a spirituality which legitimates a daring claim on God- one that can border almost on impertinence. 4) Despair: Abandoning hope at the threshold of the King. The fourth stage of this pilgrimage is the hardest one of all. The hope that has been inspired all along is dashed on the rocks. The paradox suggested is that only through death can one find an entree to the king. One finds that one has lost oneself. This intentional self-betrayal demands the death of all strivings, the giving up of self. It is only as one's feverish self is fullly spent in restless searching that the glory can at last be seen. 5 5) Encounter: Discovering surprise and mystery at union with the King. Having passed from 1) longing for an inaccessible king- whose reflected image can be only partially glimpsed in the surrounding beauty of the world- to 2) a hope for intimate access made open by the weakness of the king for love. This hope in turn has 3) spurred them on to greater boldness, learning that the king yields best to an eager grasping love. As passion has deepened, yearning, anticipating, wishing only for his face, as the soul has honed a sharpened image of the king, at the point of highest tension, then 4) all hopes have been dashed. Entry to the royal court is nothing less than the seeker's own death. To meet the king is to lose themselves. Stripped of all that they are, marked for slaughter, the substance of their being undone, they shrink in shame form the door that hides the majesty they have come so far to see. But then an amazing work of grace unfolds. The door is pulled open to the last chamber of the king. 6 Mystery of finding the lover Having lost themselves they are found again, in perfect undivided unity with the king for whom the seeker had abandoned all. The seeker is the king. We are God in hiding, pretending not to be oneself, made one with those whom God loves. This awesome subtle knowledge is made available only at journey's end. The individual self has been utterly consumed by the passion to see the king and reduced to the ruins in which God's treasure can at last be found.. The seeker is now able to conceive what would have been impossible to imagine at the beginning of the trip. What would have been heresy, overly magnanimous narcissism has become amid the carnage of their broken selves, a humble cry of transformation, of joyous union with that which we most love. 1(From a description of an 11th century sultan whose court's ruins have been discovered in modern Afghanistan.) his face at the burning bush "since he was afraid to look at the Divine." (Exodus 3:6., See also Exodus 24:1011.) God's glory on the mountain top was like "a devouring flame" (Exodus 24:17) Moses is told "No human can see me and live. Ki lo yirayni ha-ad.amva -hai (Exodus:33:20) • When Moses asks to see God's presence, he is hidden in a cleft in the rock and God's "afterglow" (behind? hindside?) passes before Moses. (Exodus:33:22) 2Moses hides 3" All the subjects bewailed their having seen or else not seen their Lord's bewitching guise. Market stalls were left untended, sheep abandoned, the books of scholars cast aside. A solution was sought to find a way was found to reveal while also hide the intense glory of the king. Oblique mirrors were placed so that whenever the king's visage was turned their way, his image shone with mitigated splendor, half-shielded, yet also half-disclosed." 4In Habad literature we find that the month of Elul is a time of God passing "through the fields." Preceding the coronation (the pomp and ceremony of the High holyday services,) the royal person makes him/herself available by walking amongst the populace. (Nowadays we see this metaphor re-enacted in the bus tours of the presidential candidates, the hand-shaking and shoulders rubbing with the common folk.) The haughty distance of the king strangely involves a self-imposed weakness, a disposition to care deeply for that of which he/she has no need. That the king should pass one's way and pause to love is a gift beyond belief. "How much more when a great and mighty king shows great and intense love for a commoner, despised and lowly among people, even one cast away on the refuse heap of humanity, yet the king comes down to this person from the place of glory, together with all the king's retinue, and exalts the person from the dunghill, brings the person into the palace, the innermost chamber such as no servant or lord ever enters and there shares with this lowly person the closest companionship with embraces and kisses and cleaving of spirit to spirit- how much more so will be aroused in the heart of the commoner a true attachment of spirit heart and soul. Even if the person's heart was like a stone, it would melt and become like water and the soul would pour itself with soulful longing for the king. Tanya Chapter 46. The continuation of the chapter suggests that God is always in a relationship with us of "coming down to the dunghill and rescuing us out of love." 5 In Hassidic thought, the experience of union with God always is achieved through Bittul, self-annihilation. Only as Joseph's brothers are shown and read the bill of sale by which they sold their father's son so many years ago, only as they sink in hopeless despair while standing before the one they betrayed- can there come the tears of the Egyptian Lord who embraces them once again as his own flesh and kin. 6"Before the birds' incredulous bewildered sight Shines the unveiled, the inmost Light of Light." From The Conference of the Birds by Farid Ud -Din Attar (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1984), p. 211.