The Polyphony of Consciousness

Religious experience is a normal part of the polyphony of consciousness, even though it is not a natural but a supernatural element.
Mounier said man is naturally artificial. One could echo that by saying man is normally religious. So, little children from any background can be helped to pray. It is also true of course that in a very secular culture the average person may have repressed the religious element in life, a repression they could be brought to talk about, something they ‘register’.
Religious consciousness is an element of conscious experience which along with other experiences forms the substructure of our human being. Substructural elements can give rise to a superstructure where what is experienced is also named and placed in the horizon of what a person knows, in the sense of being able to talk about the matter. So one first experiences and then comes to name the colour blue.
If one can talk about something there can be development in the way of understanding and intentionality. To describe something as substructural is not to disparage it. In the religious experience there is direct access to God who is love, and there is no more important reality for man.
It is through the power of naming things and through discourse, through the word in that sense, that we can consider things, draw on our human traditions, criticise our personal conduct, and declare the truth. ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one God’ is a declaration in language calling everyone to reassess their priorities. It is through such words at the level of superstructure at the level of culture that people learn they should be converted. Something they have been neglecting, something they have forgotten about, something even they have repressed belongs to them in a sense, and is what is most important.
Lonergan uses the word luminous, light bearing, and I think we can take it that he is referring to something within consciousness itself. At a substructural level there are many elements. I am aware that it is a wet day and conscious that my options are thereby limited. I am aware of a pile of papers and conscious that I have things I must deal with. I am aware of divine office to be said and conscious I must fit it in before the end of the day. I am aware that my diary is free and conscious perhaps of a slight disappointment that the wide world does not need me today. I am using ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’ as a sort of duo. My being is being in the world and of that I am aware as a starter. From that my consciousness takes shape. Lonergan has being aware that the window is open and being conscious that I am about to sneeze. Consciousness is the interior state. This is the inner room where I may enter and realise that beyond windows open, beyond piles of paper, beyond the state of the weather, God is present and God is all.
I am playing around with the terms awareness and consciousness, for our being is being in the world of which we are aware and our consciousness has the power to shift us to new realms of conscious awareness. Our conscious awareness is not only of the already out there now but it can become of the already out there now then. Lonergan has made us conscious and aware of the transforming power a question can have upon consciousness and how through memory, through attention to new data, how through the formation of schematic images insights may arise which intimate the possibility of a new grasp on reality. Our movement forward is not merely contemplative.
Contemplation though is truly luminous in that our consciousness becomes aware of reality in the light of understanding. So great an achievement is this that for centuries this was conceived as the goal and so the luminousness sought was the mind in possession of the truth which lay beyond it and in that light, going beyond all creatures, one could and one can find God in the cloud of unknowing. From such awareness came the vast achievement of monastic life, from say 450AD to 1450AD.
Of course to achieve contemplative awareness requires considerable effort, and so the monks built everything around that goal, with personal silence and with readings secular and religious. Almost without realising it, the monks by their evangelisation and agriculture were changing the world.
What makes the modern world modern is the awareness that man has the power to develop things. St Ignatius of Loyola wrote, ‘When you pray, pray as if it all depends on God. When you work, work as if it all depends on you’. What makes the modern world so futile is the introduction of individualism into the scenario, so that unless we are coerced by needed wages or enticed by bonuses we do not know the secret of collaboration with others in obedience and friendship. There has been a crisis in the Congo at the time of writing. I was very proud to be able to take a second collection for the people there using the agency of CAFOD. Such a capacity though belongs to the parish precisely because it is got together.
Luminosity belongs not just to contemplation but to constructive action. Action can be carried out and seen by others. It involves a certain self forgetting and the finding of a new self. The letting go of self forgetting can help one overcome bad habits.
The priest or extraordinary minister who takes the Blessed Sacrament to the sick tries to recollect what he or she is doing. Action though is demanding of our whole attention. So St Ignatius said, ‘when you work, work as if it all depends on you’. We need though to bring love to our work or it will be loveless. Perhaps we can reverse St Augustine’s ‘when you love look to the source of your love and you will find God’, so that we may say ‘bring the love of God into your work so that in all your encounters you show appropriate loving affection’. This perhaps is what Our Lord means when he would have us ‘dressed for action’ or when he says that not only will we be in him, but he will be in us.