Highlights

faith was always something that could never be sufficiently, let alone fully, evidenced. It seemed to belong too much to the realm of personal sentiment, opinion and pure conjecture and, in an age when these were increasingly being allowed to trump good, verifiable evidence, well, it seemed best to avoid it.

to be human is to live, move and have our being in a profoundly deep and mysterious, sustaining sea where securely verifiable, final evidence about how the world is and our place in it is not only clearly lacking, but is something which seems to be structurally, and therefore permanently, inaccessible.

this truth requires us to develop something he called our "negative capability" which would help us learn how to become "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."

the ultimate bottom, the very ground of their being -- indeed, all being -- remains something beyond all evidence-seeking-sounding-lines and, therefore, all final, human knowing.

chasing after the unfulfillable illusion that it was possible eventually to find some kind of verifiable, ultimate "bottom" which we could assuredly know, and upon which we could assuredly stand without the need for something as doubtful and ethereal as religious faith.

Konkokyo

reformed, liberal and free Shinto

Imaoka-sesei was very appreciative of the insights of the founder of Konkokyo, Konko Daijin, who, after a series of spiritual experiences, began to have a profound faith in something he called "Tenchi Kane No Kami"

"the spirit and energy that flows through galaxies, planets, air, earth, and life" continually giving "birth to new galaxies, winks out brilliant stars, gracefully opens the dew-moistened petals of a flower in spring, whisks away the last remaining leaf from a bare tree in winter, enables our hearts to beat" and which "sustains and nurtures the cycle of life."

for Konko Daijin and Konkokyo, the whole universe, or the whole of nature, is perceived as being the "body" of Tenchi Kane no Kami in whom we are always-already living, moving and having our being. Now, to my ears this strongly resonates with aspects of Spinoza's idea of "deus sive natura," namely that God-is-Nature, Nature-is-God, the kind of pluralistic pantheism put forward by William James in his "Pluralistic Universe", Jane Bennett's recent ideas about vibrant matter, and Philip Goff's current articulation of panpsychism.

Tenchi Kane no Kami, although always everywhere present, is akin to a fathomless sea, the bottom of which no empirical evidence-seeking sounding-line will ever reach.

A lamp filled with oil cannot be lit without a wick. If a lamp is not lit, the night remains darkness. Without faith, the world becomes darkness." (Gorikai, "The Understanding")

But beginning to use the metaphor of the lamp, our sounding line can suddenly be transformed into a lamp wick, not something to bring back to the surface secure empirical evidence of an ultimate bottom, but, instead, something to bring up to us the creative and energising natural fuel that sustains and nurtures the cycle of life, and which, when ignited in the heart of a faithful person, helps to light up our everyday world in profoundly meaningful, wonderful and creative ways.

Sailing on this sustaining sea of fuel -- and whether I choose to call it by the name of Tenchi Kane No Kami, God-or-Nature or vibrant matter -- I find I really do have faith in its reality.

But with the wick of faith dropped into the bottomless and mysterious ocean of life I find I can quote once again from the "Konkokyo Kyoten" with a clean heart and full belief (pathos), and say that,

"If you would see [Tenchi Kane No] Kami, step out into the garden. The sky above you and the earth beneath you is Kami."

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References

Brown, Andrew James. “From Sounding Line to Lamp Wick — Faith in the Body of the Universe.” Caute, 6 Sept. 2024, https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2024/09/from-sounding-line-to-lamp-wick-faith.html.