finding holiness in excess
seek God through living life, not living death
Many of the faithful seem to assume that spiritual experience and depth come from deprivation. You remove things from your life during Shabbat, Yom Kippur, Pesach, or if you’re Christian, Lent, and so on. It’s like apophaticism made flesh, apophaticism being the idea that you can only describe God through negation. God is not wise, because God is not wise in a way we could understand, that sort of thing. You grow better at understanding God through stripping away what God is not. Similarly, we sometimes get the impression that through stripping more and more things away from our lives, we grow closer to God. But I say: God is found in excess.
I think this way because I believe our goal is to make the spiritual matter. Or, to put it more clearly: I believe our goal should be to take what’s said to be spiritual and enact it in this world. To borrow the phrasing of Ada Rapoport-Albert in an explanatory footnote on the 19th-century essay “Something for the Female Sex,” one of my main feminist influences, we ought to pursue “the concrete substantiation of the spirit, including the full physical materialization of the divine…” This is what is meant by: “You shall be holy, for I, the Eternal your God, am holy” (Lev. 19:2). The divine is heavenly, so we should live heaven-wise. The divine is joyous, so we should seek joy. The goal isn’t somehow to enrich life by rejecting the material, which is counterintuitive for good reason, but to make life fuller and holier through making the material count. We don’t make our lives count by seeking to reject our vitality, we make them count by living them — and by shunning the influence of death. Speaking practically, not morally (as in I’m not morally dissing the dying): Nearer to death is not nearer to God, only nearer to the ruler of this unredeemed world that is death.
Contemporary scholars of “heretical” mysticism, such as Jay Michaelson, broach the idea that religiously antinomian practice — that is, engaging in practices that go against religious law — can result in mystical experiences. Such acts shake the soul out of a dogmatic slumber, so to speak. We read in the Words of the Lord that the goal of antinomianism is “to perform such a deed that that one cannot go back to their first place anymore” (§397). Take “first place” as meaning “starting point.” Once you’ve been spiritually out of line, you feel different. You crossed a line that you can’t uncross. You’ve left square one. Once you’ve left that square, the journey can begin. Perhaps you need to be a little spiritually daring.
How you choose to live your life for holiness rather than seek to live death is up to you, hypothetical reader. There are instances in which restraint is necessary, of course. It would be bad to do everything that comes to mind as fun. There is a huge gap, however, between reasonable, virtuous restraint and intentionally shunning life. The universe is not as paradoxical as it can seem. Life is life, pleasure is pleasure, satiety is satiety. Death is death and nothing else is found down the “highway to death” (Prov. 7:27). We should always run to the side of life.
Shabbat shalom.
See below for some housekeeping.
Firstly, I now have a subscriber chat!
Secondly: Any day now I’ll have a super special chat and more over at… another app! More on this shortly; it’ll be getting a full reveal post. (Yes, I will be creating labelled and unobtrusive “sponsored content,” as the kids and I think the law call it.) The new app is something I’m genuinely excited for and I’ll look forward to seeing y’all there once that’s set up. I’ll have special linkies and everything, so stick around. But really, stick around, I’m not leaving this blog or Substack. In fact I now have more incentive to be here.
Thirdly, we’re launching a weekly newsletter over at Wailing & Gnashing. I’ve noticed that some Karnivores haven’t subscribed to the vodcast I host with the wonderful Forest Gren, but now that’s also where I’ll be posting the media recommendations/logs I used to post in Notes, albeit more regularly, alongside Forest’s lists, as well as roundups of what the two of us have written lately. It can be difficult to keep track, after all — even for me.
That’s all for now.