Killer Mike is right about a lot of things. He hangs out with Bernie Sanders, he educated a generation of white kids like myself about Reagan, and he has some great all-purpose life advice. But I didn’t expect to find overlap between his rhymes and the mysticism of German Jesuit Karl Rahner.
Killer Mike closes his album R.A.P. Music with the eponymous track. The intro sends shivers down my spine every time – that unique flood of dopamine that your favorite songs trigger. Mike soliloquies over a slinky, sliding synth: “I've never really had a religious experience, in a religious place. Closest I've ever come to seeing or feeling God is listening to rap music. Rap music is my religion. Amen.”
Amen.
Like Mike, I’ve never had spiritual experiences in places of organized worship. Church was something my family did performatively, in front of our relatives in Indiana only. High-school Logan made some half-hearted attempts at frequenting one of Colorado Springs’ many fine megachurches – I was crushing hard on a church girl. I never felt close to God there. I was mostly crawling in my skin as people around me talked in tongues. I went to a church retreat where the councilor fucked up my name, resulting in a weekend of being ‘Landon’. I never did get any pussy.
Then I went to a Catholic school for my higher education. The church was at the center of the campus, though rarely at the center of my experiences there. But I studied philosophy, and when you’re at a Jesuit school thinking about Truth and Nature and Beauty and Justice and other Capital Letter, Big-Thinky concepts, you’re going to naturally get some theology and spirituality. Hence why I have Karl Rahner in my spiritual lexicon.
Rahner speaks from the mystical tradition. Key to this are the immediacy of God and the direct experience with God. God is Absolute Mystery: incomprehensible, vast, present in moments high and low. God is everywhere, and we can come to experience God directly. Rahner doesn’t mean a vision of Jesus descending from the clouds or a burning bush. No messages delivered by flaming Alan Rickman here. Rather, we have a transcendental, mystical experience through which we lose ourselves in the encounter with something greater. There is a certain je ne sais quoi to all of this. You almost sense Karl throw up his hands at the challenge of it:
I’m just saying that I experienced God, the nameless and unsearchable one, the silent yet near, in the Trinity that is His turning to me. I have also experienced God – and indeed principally – beyond all pictorial imagining. God, who, when He comes to us out of His own self in grace, just cannot be mistaken for anything else…I really encountered God, the true and living one, the one who merits the name that destroys all names… Even then, I could already distinguish between God’s self and the words, the images, the particular limited experiences that somehow point to God…Godself. Godself I experienced – not human words about God. God, and the sovereign freedom that is proper to God, the freedom that can only be experienced as coming from God, not from the intersection of earthly realities and calculations… That’s what it was, I say. (Karl Rahner, Spiritual Writings, “Encounter with God”, page 37-38).
In some Eastern traditions, you practice meditation in order to experience the non-duality of and interconnectedness of all things. The artificial line between self and world dissolves. You can glimpse enlightenment this way, but damned if it isn’t hard to talk about it. If you’re describing a spiritual experience and it is simple to convey to others without sounding insane, it is probably not the profound truth of the universe. Truth cannot be explained, only experienced.
This is the kind of religion I can get behind.
It’s also the kind of God Killer Mike’s talking about – the god of Rap Music.
I don’t know why it took me so long to make the connection. I’ve been lucky enough to see Killer Mike live a few times, and it’s always a spiritual experience. I mean, tell me this man isn’t preaching some kind of gospel:
That picture was taken at a small club in San Francisco, at an event where I lost myself completely. I melted into the music and coalesced with the crowd. Some of you out there probably know what that’s like. Live music can be a wonderful route to that kind of peak, mystical experience, and it has been since our ancestors danced around fires to tribal drums[1].
And so I find myself re-reading my Rahner lately and thinking about the times I’ve felt those spiritual moments of transcendence – where the veil dissolves. I’d like to conjecture and theorize a bit here if you’d care to join me.
I experience the mystical most clearly at times where I am either losing myself or finding myself; at times where I am either utterly unselfconscious or where I am acutely self-aware.
Let’s start with the one that’s easier to grok: losing yourself.
At some point in our past, we developed a sense of self vs not-self, and we’ve been acutely aware of ourselves ever since. Self-awareness is that painful, uniquely human experience. I’ve always found Ernest Becker the most perfect distillation of the untenable human predicament. We experience our interiority as selves, souls, luminous spiritual substance. Yet we know that we’re all made of the same ever-changing, decaying matter. We are, as Becker poetically puts it: “Gods with assholes.”
Being conscious of self kind of sucks, and consequently I try to do as little of it as possible. I bet I am not alone in this; who doesn’t love the sweet release of self-obliteration? There are many paths to this summit. Here is an inexhaustive list from my own experience:
- Doing drugs and dancing at concerts.
- The flow state of rolling on the Brazilian jiu-jitsu mats.
- The quiet contemplation in study and the experience of learning.
- Sexual congress and ecstasy.
- Meaningful, productive work or art; when the essay that comes through me and from me equally.
- The grandeur and splendor of the natural world; the feeling of standing at the foot of the mountains or gazing over the eternal ocean.
In all these things, you can lose yourself. Is it so crazy to believe you might also encounter some aspect of the Infinite there as well? I bet some of you out there know what this is like, to some degree or another. This is a mystical experience, for those who have eyes to see.
Let’s ascend in difficulty. Any old donkey can tear down a barn, but it takes a special donkey to build one. Just so, finding yourself is a great deal more difficult than losing yourself. Consequently, I have fewer illustrations of this. But there are times you can find yourself in where you feel like everything in your life culminated in a certain, crystalline moment.
Recently, I married. After our ceremony, we were announced for the dinner. My bride and I descended an elegant staircase, and with each step, more and more of our loved ones came into view – smiling, cheering, clapping. And I had never felt more at peace. I have heard of men getting cold feet or nervous jitters before their nuptials, I even expected to experience that myself. But what I felt was something quiet – so still, so soft, yet so sure. I felt in my bones that I was where I was meant to be, who I was meant to be. I was meant to marry this woman, and I knew it. The Jesuits call this consolation – a powerful, soulful feeling of moving forward in alignment with God’s plans for you. It’s a truly euphoric experience.
Other times, you find yourself by bumping up against something: the limitations of yourself or your world. Often, this is painful. We are all thrown into a world beyond our own creation or choice. Shit happens, and suffering can be clarifying on the journey discovering oneself and one’s place in the universe.
Recently, I tore my ACL. I had entered a grappling tournament and was fiercely preparing for battle. That’s how I found myself at a judo class at 7AM on a Friday morning. My partner and I tussled, tried to trip each other in a flurry of randori. Somehow, my leg got blocked at the knee, and I was toppled over the weighted limb. I flew ass over teakettle. There was a room-shaking *pop*, an electric jolt of pain. Time stopped and every head turned to look, all their worst fears confirmed by the grim spectacle of me grabbing my leg and grimacing.
I find myself now defined by new limitations. My horizons have narrowed, in ways that are immediate and obvious (no more judo for me). I pulled out of the tournament. There is a long and painful road to recovery that leads through surgery and crutches. This will consume months of my life. It will also have long-term effects on my life that I cannot yet begin to predict. I’ll make new risk calculations before athletic endeavors I would have thrown myself into without previous pause.
Put bluntly, this sucks. I feel as a cat declawed. I am an embodied person, and I take joy in the expression of my body. I will have to come to new understandings of myself as I navigate this injury. In struggling and suffering, I will come into knowledge of myself and my limitations through a direct engagement with a reality that bumps back.
Suffering as a key path to spiritual wisdom is a common tenet of religions, comparatively speaking. We venerate Jesus on the Cross for a reason. The Buddha teaches that life is a cycle of suffering. Hindus have an ascetic tradition of deprivation. There is great knowledge of self and world contained in pain and suffering. In this too, there is God.
If there is a God, It must be everywhere. Nothing short of pantheism has ever jived with me. Spinoza’s God is the only one that has ever made sense to me. I’ve simply never found evidence or experience of any other kind. Rahner describes a common spiritual pitfall:
When people notice that their souls are blocked up, they either begin to defend themselves with the desperation of a person drowning… Or else they really despair… icily they curse, they hate themselves and the world, and they say that there is no God. They say there is no God because they are confusing the true God with what they took to be their God. And as regards what they are actually referring to, they are quite right. The God they were referring to really does not exist: the God of earthly security, the God of salvation from life’s disappointments, the God of life insurance, the God who takes care so that children never cry and that justice marches in upon the world, the God who transforms earth’s laments, the God who doesn’t let human love end up in disappointment[2]. (Rahner, Spiritual Writings, “Opening the Heart”, page 72)
In these low moments, such a God of relief is seldom found; direct prayers are rarely answered. But instead, in life’s nadirs you can find a certain stillness, and in that stillness, a clarity of vision and purpose. Think of those who hit rock bottom and then turn around their lives. Many of them do so by finding religion, by finding a new spiritual relationship and understanding of their place in the world.
For look, if you stand firm, if you don’t run away from despair, if in your despair at the idols of your life up till now, idols of body or mind, beautiful and honorable idols (for yes, they are beautiful and honorable), idols that you called God – if in this despair you don’t despair of the true God, if you can stand firm in this way (this is already a miracle of grace, but it’s there for you) then you will suddenly become aware that you’re not in fact buried alive at all, that your prison is shutting you off only from what is null and finite, that its deathly emptiness is only a disguise for an intimacy of God’s, that God’s silence, the eerie stillness, is filled by the Word without words, by Him who is above all names, by Him who is all in all. And his silence is telling that you He is here. (Rahner, Spritual Writings, “Opening the Heart”, page 73)[3]
Like most mystical experiences, it’s hard to describe to the uninitiated. But as I sit here with my busted knee, with former parts of my identity and experiences stripped bare; as I sit there wondering who the new Logan is and how he will understand and express his role in this world, I do feel a small, still voice. There’s divinity in this suffering.
So, there are two examples of recent spiritual experiences where I felt myself found in direct contact with reality and with God.
To repeat my thesis for those who may have forgotten (I forgive you, it was a while ago): I experience the mystical most clearly at times where I am either losing myself or finding myself; at times where I am either utterly unselfconscious or where I am acutely self-aware.
But this is not an exhaustive thesis – remember, if I am anything, it is a pantheist. The veil is easiest to pierce at these times, but those with the practiced mystical muscle can find God even in the quotidian, the dreary, the drudgeries of life. In his essay “God of My Daily Drudge”, Rahner writes:
When I think of the hour that I spend at your altar or saying your Church’s office, then I realize that it’s not worldly business that make my days a drudge, but me – I can change even these sacred actions into hours of drudgery. It’s me who makes my days drudgery, not the other way around. And thus I realize that if there can ever be a way from me to you, then it leads through my daily drudge. (Rahner, Spiritual Writings, “God of My Daily Drudge”, page 46)
See how much lifting the mystical attitude does here. Rahner notes that even religious work, approached carelessly, can be a hollow slog. Contrast that with Thich Nhat Hanh – another spiritual thinker and leader Santa Clara exposed me to. In Everyday Peace Cards, his collection of daily meditations, Hanh offers a “Driving Lesson”:
Even when you are driving your car, you can practice. Take advantage of that moment to cultivate mindfulness. In fact, you can practice quite well while you are driving a car. Breathe in and breathe out, and remain aware of everything that goes on inside you when, for example, you come to a red light. You look at the red light and you smile. The red light is not your enemy. It is a friend who is helping you come to yourself. (Hanh, Everyday Peace Cards, “Driving Lesson”)
The promise of mysticism is the direct accessibility of the divine, and the ability to find the divine in all aspects of reality. You can practice spirituality everywhere: driving your car; injuring yourself worse than ever before;, in the flow state experiences where the self dissolves; in the lyrics of your favorite hip-hop artist.
[1] Powerful psychedelics optional, but always recommended.
[2] I might add,” The God Who Gets High School Logan Laid”, who most certainly did not exist.
[3] As a brief aside, how beautiful is Karl Rahner’s language about God? It so beautifully captures the infinite mystery and awe of the divine.