Image via WikipediaWHO CAN READ GOD DIRECTLY?
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Emerson states on p.4 of “The American Scholar”: “Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When we can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.”
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As if resounding Emerson,
Whitman wrote about the poet as the true son of God in Section 6 of “Passage to India”:
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“Finally shall come the Poet, worthy that name;
The true Son of God shall come, singing his songs.
Then, not your deeds only, O voyagers, O scientists and inventors, shall be justified,
All these hearts, as of fretted children, shall be sooth’d,
All affection shall be fully responded to-the secret shall be told;
All these separations and gaps shall be taken up, and hook’d and link’d together;
The whole Earth-this cold, impassive, voiceless Earth, shall be completely justified;
Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish’d and compacted by the Son of God, the poet,
(He shall indeed pass the straits and conquer the mountains, He shall double the Cape of Good Hope to some purpose;)
Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more,
The true Son of God shall absolutely fuse them.”
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What the poet is saying here is that, as His messenger, he can read God directly, that is, he can read and write the Word of God. But if the poet, the true son of God, who can read Him directly, as Emerson puts it, does not transcribe his readings for others to read, what is the use of a poet? Emerson is right in saying that when one can read God directly one does not need to read the transcriptions of someone else’s readings, because when one is doing so, one does not need to pay attention to any thing else, in the sense that the reading is already everything.
But the question is: what about those who cannot read God directly?
Are they not worthy of at least knowing that there are those who can?
Should they not know what the ones who can have seen?
Although Emerson does not point to this, we should not forget that he is pointing to a task that is seldom done so well as it should, that is, the task of taking notes of one’s readings of God. And this task of transcribing one’s reading of God must be made available for the majority of those who can not read God directly, if we have understood Emerson’s point correctly. From my point of view, reading God directly means seeing and understanding the nature of things, the essence of things, grasping the meaning beyond the form, looking at what the physical eyes can not see, so that we may know what the soul is telling us,
our soul and the soul of the others.
One thing we need to know is that souls speak through hearts, not minds. We need the rational mind to understand that we must listen to the heart, and only hearts can communicate with other hearts. As what lives in the hearts is Love, and Love is what we are made of, spiritually, we may say that our connection to God, how we can see Him, is through our hearts, our souls, which lead us to our spirits, God’s Creation.
Reading God directly means then understanding that we are more than a physical body,
that we have souls born of spirits, who were created by God.
The task of the poet is to give precise renderings of his readings, being faithful
to what he/she read. This is the measure of a great poet, faithfulness
to his vision of the essence of things, as Whitman said, seeing with eyes that ate not
the physical eyes.
