1. THE HEIDEGGERIAN PROPOSITIONS FOR CHRISTIAN CONTEMPLATIVE ECOLOGY
Kasie Shahbaz
Christian Contemplative Practice: Capstone
May 22, 2014

2. Heidegger pursues true metaphysics in relation to being, a question “after”
being, instead of “beyond” it. He thinks that philosophy has forgotten being in itself.
According to him, “formulating thinking of metaphysics could never arrive at that
essence of truth,” because it is not a question of the history of pre-Socratic
philosophy, but rather “of paying attention to the arrival of the as yet unspoken of
emergence as what be [ing] has announced itself to be.”1 Heidegger’s nothingness is
the apophaticism of western philosophy. However it, like the contemplative being in
the world, Heidegger’s experience of this nothingness opens up a more authentic
encounter with being itself. Christian identity is endlessly mysterious, its core
somewhat lost in a muddle of Greco-Roman philosophy and arguments on
orthodoxy. However, if the Heideggerian question is of how to encounter
nothingness beyond logical negation of a primarily conceptual experience of being,
then the Christian equivalent ought to be how to embody Christ in the world. If
nothingness and being exist together in a sort of Father and Son relationship, then
the “ecstatic instanding” that Heidegger posits to receive this relationship is the
equivalent to living the Gospel.
In his essay What Is Metaphysics, Heidegger seeks to experience true
emptiness, similarly to Zen objective. He has found a problem with the western
philosophical tradition and its logical and historical cage, which has forgotten about
being itself. To resolve this impossible struggle, Heidegger philosophically paves the
way for experience that does not necessitate the use of reason. Within the
encounter, all logical linkage dissolves, and only nothingness remains. He asks, after
1 Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000, 7.

3. this experience, “How do things stand with no-thing?” 2 And, how do we then, relate
to both? It may be the same question as the Christian mystic seeking to embody
Christ whilst encountering a radical apophaticism.
Heidegger’s thought is infamous for its dense, torturous prose. However, his
thesis is quite simple. All he begs for is an encounter; it is not anything we have not
heard from countless mystics or Zen monks. However, what gives Heidegger a
certain kind of power are both his philosophical context, and his ruthless conviction
to “instand,” meaning to stand within every experience, even of utter nothingness
and dread. Because he is responding to an essentially Platonic tradition, unwittingly
attached to the assumption that the reasoning faculty of the soul is its highest part,
he yolks together western metaphysical thought, and the repudiation of it. By
responding against it within its own tradition, he finally infuses western philosophy
with nothingness, instead of offering it beside the tradition, as to not push
boundaries or ever truly integrate the two. By logically explicating the futility of
logic in the realm of being, he does not just encounter nothingness beside himself,
but asserts the necessity of this encounter with the urgency of thousands of years of
metaphysical thought that has forgotten being itself. In doing so, he powerfully
integrates the human experience. Not historically or in terms of carefully tracing the
evolution of philosophy, but by, as in one fell swoop, showing where thought ends
and being begins. He turns away from philosophy but comes back to heal with it, like
a monk with the world.
2 Heidegger, 35.

4. I am enjoining Heidegger’s thought with what I believe to be a Christian
hermeneutic, because the core of Christianity bolsters this full encounter with
nothingness and being in love. Without love, Heidegger’s model for the good life may
just be painful insanity. However, grounded in incarnation, Heidegger’s mode of
being seems only appropriate. It is the embodiment of faith and trust, giving one’s
self to the Other. The question remains for me: is it more an act of love to let love
inform our experiences of the world, or is it more an act of love to let that
nothingness and dread mold our perceptions? Can we do both at the same time, and
how are these aligned with living the Gospel?
The juxtaposition of Heideggerian thought and passages from the Gospel may
seem simplistic and anachronistic. However, my intention in this treatise is to note a
significant similarity in Christian mystical experience and Heideggerian thought.
Considering the parallels between their progresses of understanding, I intend to
demonstrate how they may support each other, in terms of language and history.
Gifting each other with theological and philosophical underpinnings that serve to
root their profound claims within human experience, they may also find their
glorious realization and purposeful freedom in the “open sphere” of being, or rather,
exposure to a contemplative ecology.
Heidegger begins troubled over western philosophical penetrations into
metaphysics. He writes, “formulating thinking of metaphysics could never arrive at
that essence of truth.” 3 To Heidegger, being itself is hidden, because when it is
revealed, it is revealed in images and thoughts. It is fundamental to the
3 Heidegger, 2.

5. understanding of Heidegger that he seeks a kind of objectivity, that which appears
on its own terms, and therefore the primary emergence of being. Metaphysical
thought “draws away from its own basis because in the realization of emergence,
what is coming to pass in it, namely, hiddenness, always fails to appear…just so as to
be able to appear as be-ing.” 4 Metaphysics continually upholds the appearance of
asking and answering the question about being, but it does not ask the question
“because it only has being in mind while it formulates being as being.” 5 Now, what is
the real question, then, that encounters being without formulating being as being? It
is rather, “How do things stand with no-thing?” 6 Being without nothingness is not
being. Being without nothingness is “being as being,” meaning being as metaphysical
thought has formulated it, which has “without knowing it thereby shown to be the
barrier that denies man the original relationship of being to the essence of man.”
Metaphysical thought, in all its devising, actually acts as a barrier between us and
being. Heidegger laments that this could be the fate of metaphysics, stuck in its
nature. However, he finds a way out of thought, a way out of formulating being as
being. And that is the encounter with nothing.
First of all, Heidegger grounds his argument with exploring the problem with
thinking. Nothingness, being the ground of being in its multiplicity, is the only thing
that can rebirth us. It is so one, so consuming, that it alone may save us from our
formulations of being. Thinking does not operate within the trajectory of
encountering nothing, because, “for thinking, which in essence is always thinking
4 Heidegger, 5.
5 Heidegger, 2.
6 Heidegger, 35.

6. about something, would be working against its own nature in thinking about no-
thing.” 7 Therefore, Heidegger easily omits the ancient Platonic assumption that the
reasoning faculty of the soul is its highest part, or that “logic is the highest authority
on this question.”8 Since reason cannot encounter nothingness, it cannot encounter
being.
Only being in relation to nothingness qualifies as the objective emergence
Heidegger qualifies as being. He seeks the dread in which nothingness reveals itself
on its own terms, instead of as a contrived image of nothingness. In dread’s “very
moving away, it turns to us… There’s nothing to get a hold on. Dread reveals no-
thing.” 9 Dread, in its objectivity, moves all being away.
In the clear night of dread's no-thing, the original openness of be-ing as such
arises for the first time in such a way that it is [a kind of] be-ing and not no-
thing. In adding “and not no-thing" we have not, however, added a
clarification, but rather the predecessive potential of the openness of be-ing
in general. The essence of the originally nihilating no-thing is found in this: it
brings about being there first of all, before any kind of be-ing. Only on the
basis of the original manifestness of no-thing can the existence of human
beings reach and "get into" be-ing. Yet, inasmuch as existence of essence
relates itself to be-ing, which it is not and which it itself is, it comes forth as
7 Heidegger, 11.
8 Heidegger, 28.
9 Heidegger, 42.

7. such existence from that very no-thing which has already been revealed.
Being there means beholdenness to no-thing. 10
In this passage, Heidegger summarizes our relationship to nothingness and being.
Only the experience of dread that we encounter so unwillingly can humble us and
renew us toward being. It is a “clear night” inasmuch as our resistance has
dissolved, and in our suffering, allowed it to consume us. Here, emergence can be
encountered, like being alive for our own last, and immediately thereafter, first
breath. From there on, the open sphere of being, and our place in it is born. Like the
rebirth Jesus preaches of, willingness to be amongst even dread is birth into being
beyond concepts: a dependency on time, a static openness to constant emergence-
being and time.
The “sphere of the open” is the “inwardly begotten emergence of being”
which is “given forth ecstatically.”11 Completely on its own, it opens up to us. We
witness it witnessing itself. Once we have surrendered to nothingness, we no longer
strive to contrive being. Therefore, being itself appears. The open sphere that
emerges in this begetting as it turns out to be “something” is called the “sense of
being.” To Heidegger, “’sense of being’ and ‘truth of being’ speak of the same thing.”
12 The intimations we receive, now with quieter minds, are attuned to being itself.
This is the new realm of being. Embedded deeply in both its nature and ours is “the
essence of making present.”13 Because it is constantly emerging, our way of relating
to it is to make present, “the present and lasting, unthought and hidden…Being as
10 Heidegger, 43.
11 Heidegger, 53.
12 Heidegger, 53.
13 Heidegger, 17.

8. such is born of time. Thus time is referred back to emergence, that is, the truth of
being.” 14This is truly and deeply inhabiting the world. It is mysterious and lifelong,
quiet and loud. And since “no-thing is at one with be-ing as a whole,” experiencing
one is experiencing the other.
After this encounter with nothingness, there are other possibilities of this
revelation, particularly by being attuned to the whole. He offers the example of
profound boredom, which pulls oneself into the whole with “remarkable
indifference.” 15 There is also the joy in the “present existence, not merely the
person, of someone we love.” 16Even our situatedness in certain moods can disclose
being as a whole in its own way. All these revelations are “the fundamental event of
our being there.” Most vital to Heidegger is simply learning how to be there. He is
paving the way for the way to be.
The problem with thinking in Christianity is most made apparent in the
Philokalia. St. Isaiah the Solitary sees the danger of thoughts, and how they may
distort one’s perception of their heart in Christ. His entire treatise is a manual on
how to protect one’s heart from thoughts, which are so easily swayed by demons. To
be still, watchful, and “unbroken by any thought,” is to breathe and invoke
“endlessly and without ceasing, only Jesus Christ who is the Son of God and Himself
God.” 17To protect our true nature is to protect the divinization of our own hearts.
Thoughts, on the other hand, are easily led astray by the devil, and are predatory on
the heart and intellect of humanity. Since the intellect is easily deceived, St. Isaish
14 Heidegger, 17.
15 Heidegger, 44.
16 Heidegger, 44.
17 Palmer, G.E.H. The Philokalia. London: Faber and Faber, 1979, 163.

9. the Solitary advocates constantly interrupting it with the invocation of the name of
Christ, continually resisting their temptation and protecting the heart from
deception. The intellect is halted, in favor of the heart. Logic appears here again,
with no relation to the heart of true being, because it is easily tricked in illusory
appearances. The heart is, our nature is, and Christ is. Yet our thoughts are confused,
tricked, and convinced. As Evagrius the Solitary writes, “We must banish all
thoughts or tricks. ‘Be as ignorant and simple and at the same time a pensive child.’”
18
The duality of human nature, likened to emergent being, versus will, likened
to reason, reared its head in the doctrinal debates of the fourth and fifth centuries.
Christian thinkers argued over the way in which the Son was united to humanity.
One side asserted that human nature and the entire universe were enjoined to and
through the nature of Christ, whereas the other held that human will must purify
human nature in order to receive salvation. If our nature is redeemed, then we may
open up to being itself, instead of trying to use the will to fix our being. It is the
nature that needs and receives saving, “not the human will incapable of Jesus’
devotion.”19 It is the human will, then, that is capable of straying from its
human/Christ nature. Human nature needed redemption by divine nature, not
merely an ethical role-model. Cyril argued for the necessary unification of natures
for redemption, using the Eucharist as the microcosmic exemplar for the macrocosm
of human relationship with the Divine. The Eucharist shows the necessity of the
tangibility, and natural existence, of redemption. When the “mystical gifts are
18 Palmer, 185.
19 Black, Stephen. In class hand-out. Christology in the Fourth-Fifth Centuries.

10. sanctified,” we receive the Eucharist “as truly life-giving and the Word’s own flesh.
For by being nature, when he had become with one with his own flesh, he made it
life-giving.” 20 As Athanasius wrote, “he, being conjoined with all by a like nature,
naturally clothed all with incorruption.” 21 It is a matter of life and death in that, if
salvation is by a conjunction of human will with the will of Christ, we must cultivate
ethical progress in order to have Divine life. Our will, and our reason, are incapable
of ultimate goodness and ultimate being. The nature side became orthodoxy, and in
my opinion, rightly so. This implies that we must be humbled to our nature, and that
we are able to experience Christ within it. It also implies that this nature permeates
the entire universe.
“For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to
save the world through him.” 22 Christ, divinizing the world, gives new meaning to
Heidegger’s “ecstatic instanding.” By beholding ourselves to nothing and being, by
the incarnation, we are now beholding ourselves fully to Christ Himself. Dread takes
on a new meaning. Encompassed by nothingness, we do find the “truth and sense of
being” in the “open sphere of being.” However, beneath that we also are thrust into a
true sense of God’s love, in a renewed openness as well. As Jerome Miller illuminates
in his essay, The Way of Suffering: A Reasoning of the Heart, “it is when one is lying in
that position (in our moments of anguish) that the word “God” ceases to be an
20 Cyril Alex. Ep. 17.3
21 Athan. Inc. 9
22 The Holy Bible: New international version, containing the Old Testament and the
New Testament.. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1978, John 3:17.

11. abstraction... Something that puts us face to face with our own nothingness.” 23 Like
Heidegger, Miller necessitates the experience of nothingness to apprehend Reality.
And, also like Heidegger, he motions that despair and dread are the only things that
can take “us far enough out of our ordinary world to bring us to the brink of that
deeper intimacy.” 24 Despair leads us to look over the edge of our nothingness
without fully encountering it. Yet when one “removes even the final guardrail,”25
they are “in a position to know what it means to be loved into being by God.”26
Instead of looking down at nothingness, it requires looking up from nothingness to
the love of God. This is the nakedness of being. Here Miller asserts that this is the
only true experience of God. Only in extreme suffering does the intimation of God
die, and more truly appear. “What we do not realize is that only the most mortifying
wound can become an endless fountain.”27
My critique of Jerome Miller’s assertion is of the jump from the experience of
nothingness to the knowledge of God’s love. Since, within nothingness, “The idea of
"logic" itself dissolves in the rush of an original question.”28 The knowledge of God’s
love necessitates a logical effort, an attainment of an image that provides purpose
for the nothingness. Since nothingness must appear “on its own terms” according to
both Miller and Heidegger, it must be its own end, at least whilst being experienced.
The Heideggerian understanding infers that it opens us up to the open sphere of
23 Miller, Jerome A.. The way of suffering: a geography of crisis. Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press, 1988, 8.
24 Miller, 9.
25 Miller, 17.
26 Miller, 19.
27 Miller, 22.
28 Heidegger, 43.

12. being, while Miller’s indicates a direct receptiveness to the love of God. However, I
think that Miller is simply replacing old images with a new one, while Heidegger’s
allows for a lifelong openness to being. What the divinization of creation infers is
that being itself is inoculated with the love of Christ, and Christ-nature itself. I think
Miller’s understanding may take us back to images, while Heidegger’s allows for an
infinite space for divinization to occur within us, between us and being, between us
and Christ. The openness of this gets us out of our endless mind loops, and allows
for a vulnerability, a loving, and dedicated beholden-ness to being.
Heidegger ultimately reveals the way to the ground of consciousness, as it is
within being. Within a Christian framework, it is God experiencing God’s self. It is
our ground experiencing Christ within and without. “If existence were not already
beholden to no-thing, then it could not relate itself to be-ing and so not even to itself.
Without the original manifestness of no-thing, no selfhood and no freedom.” The
nothingness, which is the God within us, is the aware-ing self. Being present to life is
the movement of love. As Laird writes in Into the Silent Land, the ground of
ourselves is “depthless depth gazing into depthless depth.” Since we are the
mountain and not the weather, we are able to be courageously throughout all of it.
With the nothingness within us, we are free. And with the love of the whole, it is our
job and essence to be present.
As Heidegger seeks to encounter nothingness, a mystic seeks to encounter
Christ beyond images. Yet there are similar issues. If we attempt to encounter Christ
separate from our own natures, we only think up an image of Him. The only way to
experience Christ, then, is through nothingness, the world, and through our own

13. beings, all of which He fills. This is the epitome of incarnation. Since we are saved
with the world and not from it, we are free to become enjoined with the world, as
Christ enjoined Himself to it.
Heideggerian thought is significant to practicing this, because it provides the
philosophical and emotional language to shape our need for nothingness and being.
Christ’s incarnation is vital to Heideggerian practice because it engenders Godly love
into the nothingness of being and being itself. Both narratives can get stuck inside of
themselves, never manifesting the full potential of their implications for human
existence. The Christian metaphysic and Heideggerian notion of being, given to each
other, empower each other to yolk together nothingness and being, dread and love,
nature and humanity. They drastically allow for an infinite experience of infinity, life
and time experienced by being.
This leads to a fundamentally artistic and ecological life. The sphere of
openness unlocks all of being to be encountered, nurtured, and loved. The problems
with the way western philosophy, which has heavily contextualized Christianity, has
thought up metaphysics in a way unrelated to being itself, the catastrophic results of
which we can see now. The barrier Heidegger wrote of that this formulation upholds
between humanity and its essence is the isolating destructive force that plummets
our world into crisis.
In order for contemplative ecology to have full spiritual richness, Earth must
have intrinsic value. Metaphysical thought has always sought for some higher end
beside this-ness, which acts as a barrier to the essence of being. However,
Heidegger’s plunge into being, and the incarnation restrict the objectification and

14. exploitation of the world. Douglas Christie’s contemplative ecology seeks to
encounter Christ in His full implications for all of being.
Christie encountered Fr. Wadid in an Egyptian monastery, who simply
articulated the center of monastic life, which is “the practice of the Gospel, a lived
response to the Gospel.” Clear enough, but still utterly enigmatic, the “Gospel life”
bewildered Christie for a moment. “What exactly did it mean to live a Gospel life?”29
In the tradition of Antony who heard the Gospel and sold everything to withdraw,
Christie resolved that it must mean to find the “one thing necessary”. This necessary
withdrawal pushes one to “strip away everything, open oneself without condition or
hesitation to the infinite.”30 The question of how again arises, with the objective
clear.
To first find one’s self in the whole is to be oriented toward a contemplative
ecology. Meister Eckhart’s notion of “ground,” which is the ground of humanity as
well as God as well as everything, “stands at the center of everything that exists,”
and “contemplative living is nothing more or less than a simple awakening to its
ground.” Christie is careful to note that humanity has often detached its concerns
from its actual world, which has caused immense suffering to the whole. The
ultimate ground is to be discovered “here in the life and texture of particular places.”
31 In the chronology of Blue Sapphire of the Mind, Christie answers his question
before he asks it, by stating that this simple awareness is the one thing necessary.
29 Christie, 102.
30 Christie, 103.
31 Christie, 17.

15. To actually dwell in the place of God is to know one’s self as they exist within
“an intricate web of encompassing relationships.” 32 Christie, with the support of the
writings of Evagrius, calls for contact with the whole, with vehement and
responsible awareness. Yet, making contact with a whole that is devastatingly
broken can be utterly dispiriting to the contemplative. This condition is named by
Robert Jay Lifton the “loss of symbolic immortality.” 33 The bewildering torment of
humanity’s comprehensive suicide can be traumatic. Home becomes unreachable
and place becomes abstract. Meadows become malls and our minds melt. The
physical, perceptual plane that seemed so static is suddenly unraveling irrevocably
into space, like a trail of beloved, earthly dust lost into an unapproachable, limitless
darkness. It is difficult, to say the very least, to see one’s own soul crumble. One
loses their language, even their ability to communicate. One is lost. And finally, one
has lost hope. However, we must not “prevent ourselves from responding
emotionally to the pain we cause or experience.” 34 The “stark, raw nakedness of the
apocalyptic psyche” is terrifying, but its very defenselessness is powerful to the
contemplative. The dread and nothingness is still the same, but now just made
physical. How one ought to respond to it remains- by having the courage to be.
However, being within this ecological crisis requires more than just witnessing
degradation, but “helping to heal and reconstitute the fragmented self, [and]
reknitting the entire fabric of being.” 35 It requires the contemplative to become
completely porous, so that the boundaries between them, others, the living world,
32 Christie, 34.
33 Christie, 40.
34 Christie, 40.
35 Christie, 41.

16. and God liquefy. In this can they experience the healing of their whole self, because
one part cannot break or heal by itself. The act of continuing awareness offers
palpable hope, and this lifelong commitment can turn into integration, which opens
“up a space in the soul, a space in which the world may live and move in us. And that
we are being called to renew our commitment to this work- for the sake of the
world.” 36 It is an unconditional love, emerging from within, no matter how
devastating the world becomes.
Grieving for the natural world enhances our intimacy with it, and deepens
our love. Dismantling our habit of objectifying the world, it intensifies one’s
awareness of their existence “as woven into an intricate fabric of being.” 37 Instead
of simply trying to replace old ideals with new artificial ones, grief is the way in
which one slowly learns to actually deal with a loss. The careful practice of having
the courage to be is vital to the fate of the world. Denial and repulsion end in the
“compulsion to repeat-“ resulting in an endless cycle of illusion and error.
Dependency on being itself is most intimidating when it necessitates encountering
loss. The painful slipping away of a beloved- forever- is possibly the most painful
thing a human being can experience. However, it ties us back in to the fabric that we
so desperately need for sustenance. The grief opens up raw love, and this raw love
becomes wide and electric.
Grieving, through artistic expression, can quickly and tangibly rest an
individual within their greater whole. W.G. Sebald’s investigation of post World War
II Germany left him empty-handed, having found little to no Germany literary
36 Christie, 69.
37 Christie, 71.

17. records of the late and post war periods. The collective German conscious had no
way to label or communicate their common desolation. Their bewilderment never
became anything more. Awareness and integration here become fundamentally
artistic, in that they necessitate a new way of opening, articulating, and sieving.
Cultivating the ability to feel a new crisis means opening ourselves up to an
inwardly begotten new language. If we never speak that language, we will never
hear the magical compassion that connects us even in deepest shame and
barrenness. We will not come full circle, we will not come home. “It never became an
experience capable of public decipherment,” so it rotted unto death instead of new
life, sequestered within each person’s shame.38 If the contemplative is trying to
situate herself within the whole, her work is to mourn with it, heal with it, and find it
within itself even when it appears broken, constantly regenerating in luminous
interconnectivity.
The renewing power of tears accomplishes the task of including the human
struggle within the ecological whole. “To be intimate with the land like this is to
enclose it in the same moral universe we occupy, to include it in the meaning of
community.” 39 The responsibility is daunting, but the intimacy is irresistible.
Imagine a world where love is so big that home is everywhere.
This leads Christie into the work of place-making; being at home everywhere.
In an age that is increasingly placeless, mobile, and technological, Christie offers the
model of the Christian monks, who maintained awareness of themselves as exiles
while inhabiting particular places. To place-make is to “see more” into a place, until
38 Christie, 81.
39 Christie, 96.

18. it “emerges with blazing clarity.”40 To identify with place is to look upon a place with
care and sensitivity and to become part of its network. This kind of seeing is the way
of seeing into the heart of reality, what the early Christians called theoria. 41 The
monk ideally may see the Divine face within a place, without letting the place fully
own them. Paradoxically, they must belong to it and not. The monk walks the line
between dispossession and integration: letting go of abstractions, and opening up to
being as it is; leaving home, and inhabiting a place. The place of God can only be
found by those who are willing to become strangers. 42 The selfhood and freedom
that emerges from nothingness allows one to behold themselves to being.
Perhaps most relevant to this treatise is Christie’s chapter, Logos: The Song of
the World. This most unsparingly elucidates how we experience Christ. Sharing
Christ-nature with all of being, we listen for “’the birth of the Word in the soul,’ and
outward- toward an encounter with the Word Incarnate in all creation, all matter.”
43 “Inwardly begotten,” as Heidegger spoke of emergent being, is the Word, within
us and everything. The Incarnate Word
has three distinct but related dimensions. It is utterly transcendent, being
identical with the totality of the ideas or powers of God. It is also the
principle or pattern of everything that has been created. And it is the anima
mundi, or world soul, the law and harmony of the universe, the power that
40 Christie, 118.
41 Christie, 118.
42 Christie, 121.
43 Christie, 187.

19. holds it together and permeates it from the center to its most extreme
boundaries.”44
Logos is the mysterious hidden and emergent core of being, the aware-ing self, and
the nothingness that adheres them. Though it is both transcendent and immanent,
its nature remains fully intact whatever its manifestation. Since it is Christ, it infuses
all of life with a self-emptying love, “because Christ is Himself the Word of God, who
in His invisible form pervades us universally in the whole world, and encompasses
its length and breadth and height and depth…the Son of God was also crucified in
these, imprinted in the form of a cross on the universe.” 45 It becomes the lifelong
journey of the contemplative to learn now to hear for the hidden and revealed
Christ, both in silence and in the song of the world. “The wild world has its own
voice, its own language. Learning how to listen is part of our common task”
(Christie, 189). The term “logos” has been used exhaustively over time to
substantiate certain forces, often “exclusive and anthropocentric,”46 however the
ecological association as stated above is the most deeply incarnational. It is that
which is most essential for being, “the one thing necessary” for it, and therefore the
one thing necessary for us to contact. In the Heideggerian framework, the logos is
the essence of being that hides while revealing itself in being, and to see it we must
meet face to face with it in silence, nothingness, and then however it may present
itself, in the whole. However, if the revealed Christ is that essence of being that we
seek, the vulnerability to give one’s self to the Otherness of being is not simply a
44 Christie, 194.
45 Christie, 194.
46 Christie, 187.

20. philosophical pursuit, but an expression of the most loving relationship (in the
Trinity), and the tenderly overwhelming grace and allure of being able to encounter
it, our whole lives long. It is rich and exciting for the individual, but it also has vast
power for healing, as Christ’s love wraps them in the whole. “This basic Christian
idea could be retrieved as a force for healing and reconciliation between the human
community and the natural world.” 47 The Christian contemplative tradition invites
a reconsideration of how the Word speaks “in the deepest reaches of the soul and in
the endless intricacy of the life of the world.” 48 The beautiful thing about logos is
that is possesses the holy ground to support us, love in our souls to enliven us, and
connectivity with the entire universe to magnetize us outward.
Seeing now logos “guiding alike the flight of the sparrow and the life of the
sage,” 49 the term “wildness” now has new significance. The nature of all things,
wildness within us and all around, is sacred, and remains sacred insofar as it is
untouched. “There are no unsacred places. There are only sacred places and
desecrated places.” Wildness, in its own self, is the holy “way of Great Nature.” 50
Wildness is the world. It is not its quarantined parts. Once we see the connection
between our souls and the overwhelming sanctity of the universe the way it is, our
entire disposition rattles and then, like a wave crashing into white noise, settles.
Listen now to the world. It is blue. It is beautiful. It is holy. It is forever wild.
47 Christie, 187.
48 Christie, 187.
49 Christie, 189.
50 Christie, 188.

21. “The world is incomprehensible apart from the Word.” 51 Without its
unconditional power, we would not be able to stand to the destruction we face
today. Were it not for its incarnation, our souls would be completely lost.
Because nothing can take away the logos, nothing can take away the
wildness. The one thing necessary always remains.
And it sings and mourns in our hearts each morning and night like the
forever lingering ghost of a sparrow.
Becoming alive to the Word inside of us may seem impossible. As much as we
objectify Earth, we objectify ourselves. Thinking of ourselves only in terms of our
utility or socially appointed worth becomes habit, and the clear vision of ourselves
is matted over with rusty veins of thought and demons. We are indeed possessed!
Yet the Word makes itself known to us in moments of awe and beauty; the mood of
the sky at dawn and the way it croaks into lilting afternoon sunlight, then revolving
toward star-studded breath. This is indeed grace. But how do we integrate that
necessary thing into our whole lives? The Word is inside of us, but we are full of
loopholes, misperceptions and terrors. It must, then, require a sort of surrender. It is
truly and fully listening to the Word being spoken. “Listening this deeply always
meant entering, again, into wordless silence.” 52 Only silence can hear the thing
appear on its own terms, wild and sacred, “pristine” from thought. We are simply
receiving the gift. “Learning to listen and respond to the Word, opening oneself to
the transformative power, allowing oneself to become incorporated into the life of
the Word, learning to dwell in the silence from which the Word arises and toward
51 Christie, 189.
52 Christie, 198.

22. which it always tends- these are the most fundamental and enduring challenges of
Christian contemplative life.” 53 And they are necessary for the complete, ecstatic
encounter with being as it is, unconditionally beautiful. Entering this new realm,
however, requires no reservations. One must be completely reborn to this “open
sphere” if they are to be actually transformed by it. It necessitates extreme
watchfulness, but more importantly, love. To become wild again, Christ again, one
must essentially throw out all of their beliefs about the world. The objectifying and
fearing habits of mind are loud and strong, and if I spend my whole life trying to
fight them, I will never “learn to listen carefully to the Word that is beckoning to me,
from deep within my own soul and from the heart of the world.” 54 My heart is loud
with Word while my mind attempts to battle it with words. To respond with my
mind to my heart, I must truly take the gift within myself. The “creative yearning”
Heidegger speaks of is the yearning to take this gift. However, there is also fear and
hesitation in taking it completely. Once we receive it, we no longer have the “God” of
our dreams. We have Him only here. We have no concepts to hold onto, no guilt,
fear, or shame. We are no longer in control, no longer separate, no longer victims.
Our guardrail is gone. Love pours in but so does potential for loss and grief. I
become so engulfed in the whole that it drowns me, but I am in love. It is a very
alive death.
Christie beautifully articulates this profoundly necessary arc: “from the initial
stillness in which the revelatory power of the Word is first heard, felt, and
apprehended; to the long, purifying ascesis in which one learns to relinquish all
53 Christie, 198.
54 Christie, 198.

23. attachments that keep one from hearing and living into the Word; to that endless
expanse of emptiness and silence within and beyond the Word into which one
gradually learns to dwell.” 55 The ascesis is long, but not necessarily grueling. It can
be made a beautiful process of letting go, and it is full of grace and mercy. However,
it is extremely necessary, because without letting go, the Word can never truly
enter. Misperception is very dangerous. But not to worry, it is only dangerous
because it is not true.
There are two tensions, however, in this arc that I would like to mention.
First, it is the tension of having vs. being possessed that lies in the final plateau of
Christie’s arc. Fully receiving the Word means being able to integrate it and embody
it. The careful, lifelong act of embodying the Word necessitates opening up to it, as
well as taking it, responding to it, and creating a language for it. My only fear is that
in doing so, we stray from it. However, this is a lifelong, day-by-day process of
watchfulness, trust and growth. The answer here rests in the practice itself.
The second is “the tension between the impulse to honor and value the living
world by virtue of its having been brought into being sustained by the Word, and the
impulse to detach oneself from the world for the sake of the eternal Word that exists
both within and beyond the created world.” 56 My initial question of how to truly live
the Gospel remains. Christie asks if we can attend to both the embodied Word and
its eternal self. What I, with the support of Heideggerian thought, am suggesting, is
that encountering one is necessarily encountering the other. Being and nothingness,
the embodied Word and the eternal Word, must be received as one, because they
55 Christie, 201.
56 Christie, 201.

24. are one. Both detaching from the world and detaching from the selfhood within us
are conceptual prisons. Either one divides. That goes against the contemplative
notion of self-informing, self-sufficient wildness and wholeness. The thought that we
need to do anything besides clothe ourselves in what has been given to us is the
seed of isolation. That, I think, is a misperception that needs to be radically shaken
off. In facing nothingness, we face being. We must encounter this one Logos, in the
way that it moves behind and through us. Forgetting our attachments to conceptual
prisons will help us conquer this “impulse to detach,” and instead continually find
the gift of encounter. If He is all around us, there is no need to hide. And as soon as
we do, the barrier we create cascades into world destroying consequences.
Especially in this time of technological isolation, industrial utility, and ecological
crisis, it is mandatory for the contemplative to receive the whole of being with the
radical willingness that Heidegger necessitates. Christie concludes the chapter with
this very sentiment when he begs, “Can we recover a sense of world so pregnant
with Word, a sense of Word so intimately bound up with the very life of the
world?”57 To do this, we must stand naked in front of being, yes. But we also must
know in our hearts that what we are ultimately receiving is love. And we will know
this by being itself.
Re-imagining paradise informs our experience of the world with a certain
expectancy. However, this expectancy holds the purity and innocence of intuition,
and is not formulating being as something other than itself. Rather, it is that “true
sense of being” that Heidegger articulates, and what Merton names as
57 Christie, 224.

25. “heavenliness.” Merton writes, “Pure- no pathos, no statement, no desire, pure
heavenly sound. Seized by this ‘heavenliness’ as if I were a child- a child’s mind I
have never done anything to deserve…Sense that ‘heavenliness’ is the real nature of
things, not their nature, not en soi, but the fact that they are a gift of love and
freedom.” 58 This heavenly sense is the culmination of everything. Heidegger’s
nothingness is the freedom of the nothingness of self that allows for everything.
Beyond just being purifying for the individual’s mind, this implies that all of being is
not simply an automatic experience, but a gift of “love and freedom.” Because there
is love, there is freedom. Contacting being is not necessary. It is a gift. And as Merton
writes, we have done nothing to deserve it, or to even deserve the sense of it. That is
how we feel and know love in our beings. This is the truest sense of being, in its
freedom and beauty, and in its gift. This is what all that dread and nothingness
allows for. And that is why we must come back to Earth, embracing being, not as a
job, but as a vocation: to listen to and possess the song of the Word in the deepest
chamber of our hearts. The journey does not stop in that enveloping death.
What Heidegger and Miller may omit is that, inasmuch as dread and
nothingness appear in themselves, so too does the fullness of love. It is not a
concept, or a special knowledge. Rather it unconditionally animates and holds both
being and nothing, us included, and we know that in our innocence. When we re-
imagine the world as paradise, this may not be so hard to believe. When we stop
thinking that there is something wrong with it, we may be able to receive the full gift
of the contemplative life. To be reborn into the “open sphere” of being is not to be
58 Christie, 351.

26. confused with being thrust out naked into an endless void. It is how we pave the
way for being to enter ourselves, in its total wildness, excluding nothing. It is the
expectancy and fearlessness of the innocent heart. It is the life of giving one’s heart,
and taking another’s. This static and evolutionary cause is Heidegger’s radical
vulnerability, and Christianity’s eternal love, scattered into everything, beholding us
beloved-ly to the beloved universe. What else could be the one thing necessary?

27. Works Cited
Black, Stephen. “Christology in the Fourth-Fifth Centuries.” In class hand-out.
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Christie, Douglas E.. The blue sapphire of the mind: notes for a contemplative
ecology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000.
Miller, Jerome A.. The way of suffering: a geography of crisis. Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press, 1988.
Newman, John Henry. Select treatises of St. Athanasius in controversy with the Arians.
5th ed. 1st AMS ed. New York: AMS Press, 1978.
Palmer, G.E.H.. The Philokalia. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
Pusey, Philip Edward. The three epistles of S. Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria: with
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The Holy Bible: New international version, containing the Old Testament and the New
Testament.. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1978.