Cosmess: Our Immanent & Transcendent Realities

Cosmess 

Our Immanent & Transcendent Realities

We understand the word ‘cosmos’ as alluding to the Greek ‘kosmos’ (κόσμος) meaning ‘order’, ‘arrangement’, or ‘harmony’. For the ancient Greeks, however, while the term referred to the order and harmony of the universe as a whole, they also used it in contrast to the words ‘chaos’ and ‘disorder’ on the opposite extreme of the spectrum. Unlike the term ‘disordered mess’, which would be, though redundant, easily understood and justified, therefore, how novel and thought-provoking would it be to coin the word “cosmess” (cosmos + mess, meaning ‘ordered mess’) as a more apt and pertinent way to refer to the intrinsic human nature and its consequences in the world today? Let me make an attempt here, therefore, to shed some light on the word, especially through the lens of Ignatian spirituality. In so doing, I make a distinction between two types of understanding of the term – ‘immanent cosmess’ and ‘transcendent cosmess’.   

To begin with, in Ignatian spirituality, one of the best ways available to differentiate between the terms ‘ordered’ and ‘disordered’ is to look at how Saint Ignatius of Loyola understands them in his Spiritual Exercises. He uses the word ‘disordered’ when speaking of “disordered attachments”, referring to the state in which we human beings become overly attached to things or relationships in such a way that keep us from growing in our relationship with God. Also known as “inordinate attachments”, such disordered dispositions can take many forms, such as an excessive desire for material possessions, a preoccupation with work or achievements, an unhealthy inclination toward a particular person or relationship, or an addiction to a substance or behavior or ideology, etc. 

Accordingly, when these attachments overwhelm human beings, when we become immune to our disordered mess within, and when we behave as if our conscience is dead (often for the sake of our vested interests), it is when we begin to justify the external manifestations of our disordered mess within as normal and ordinary. Either by way of our active indulgence in these disordered attachments or being passively but excessively exposed to them, either by being unaware of these inordinate fetters or willfully ignoring to accept them, we human beings tend to perceive and justify our own cosmess as ‘that is how things are usually done in the world’. This, according to me, is the ‘immanent cosmess’ or the existing, human-made, ordered mess we experience within and in the world outside. 

In the context of Africa, the immanent cosmess is quite felt today as long as 3.8 million people do not have enough to eat in Angola; 50 percent of people live on $ 1.90 dollars a day in Zambia; 4.4 million people are in acute food insecurity in Niger; and Chad has the second highest maternity mortality rate in the world, to mention a few. Skewed distribution of wealth and resources in the world and across Africa has given way to this ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the well-offs and the malnourished, the privileged and the marginalized, the healthy and the sick, the learned and the uneducated, the equals and the differents, etc. The immanent cosmess is far from being absent today as long as there escalates systematic violence against the ‘black’ across the world. It is far from being absent in Sub-Saharan Africa today as long as there exist unjust structures – be it one person against another person, or one tribe against another, or one religion against another, or one nation against another as we increasingly witness in the case of lopsided geo-political, socio-economic, religious, and cultural ties established within and across the world — as a way of establishing one’s superiority and control over the ‘other’. The immanent cosmess is ineradicable in Africa today as long as there exists the wanton destruction of nature which increases water scarcity, desertification, loss of biodiversity, and depleting crop yields and, as a result, which, as Pope Francis puts it in his encyclical Laudato Sí, groans today like a woman in labor pains. It is because, immunized by our immanent cosmess, either personally or collectively, we have become oblivious to the truth that John Ferguson speaks about in his Songs for the Seventies (Stainer & Bell, 1975): “As long as people hunger, as long as people thirst, and ignorance and illness and warfare do their worst; as long as there’s injustice in any of God’s lands, I am my ‘Brother’s keeper’, I dare not wash my hands.” 

Therefore, in the ‘Contemplation on the Incarnation’, one of the key meditations in the Spiritual Exercises (## 101-109), Saint Ignatius invites us to imagine how the three Divine Persons, upon looking down upon the earth with love and compassion and seeing the chaos and brokenness (the immanent cosmess) in the world, consider what they wish to do about it. Put differently, one could say that God’s economy of salvation or His saving plan was to enlighten the human mind and heart to differentiate between the immanent cosmess that they believed in and lived in and its authentic form, which I call the ‘transcendent cosmess’, that they should take heed to and live by. 

Accordingly, through the ‘Contemplation on the Incarnation’ Saint Ignatius invites us to reflect upon not only God’s becoming one among us to transform our human-made immanent cosmess. In so doing, he also invites us to contemplate the authentic form of our ordered mess in our relationship with God, put into effect in the person of Jesus Christ. I esteem, therefore, that in his Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius makes Jesus Christ the epitome of our transcendent cosmess as Scripture attests: 

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God…” (John 1:1)

“…Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Phil. 2:5-8) 

After the example of Christ, therefore, we are called to the realization of our transcendent cosmess within us and our corresponding actions in the world. As Saint Ignatius encourages it in his ‘Contemplation to Attain God’s Love’ (Spiritual Exercises ## 230-237), realizing this authentic form of cosmess in us is nothing but coming to a felt understanding that it is God who took the first lead, not only to love us and to choose us to be His own but, despite our fall, who also made (and continues to make) Himself vulnerable to restore order in our relationship with him. Put differently, in the unfathomable economy of God’s salvation, we human beings are called to realize not only God’s continuing labor in and amidst us. Through that realization, we are also called to pay heed to our transcendent cosmess or the authentic form of ordered mess as ‘pardoned and loved sinners’ or ‘sinners called to be saints’ or ‘wounded healers’. It is in so doing that we are called to a sincere contemplation of not only the ways in which our immanent cosmes and its consequent actions contribute to the chaos and brokenness in the world but also of the ways in which we can work (both individually and collectively) to bring about healing, wholeness, and transformation in the world as the agents of transcendent cosmess. 

To conclude, therefore, it is sufficient to say that the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola provides us, human beings, with an efficient toolbox useful for realizing our transcendent cosmess. Accordingly, the Exercises help us toward developing the awareness of our higher form of ordered mess or healthy ‘ordered attachments’ that support our growth in the effort of living our lives more fully in God’s love. This is to say that Saint Ignatius invites us not only to be detached from our disordered and immanent messes that, caused by our inordinate attachments, hinder our true relationship with God, with one another, with our own selves, and with the creation. But he also invites us to be attached to all that is good and helpful toward becoming ever more united with the ultimate good, God himself. In so doing, the Spiritual Exercises identifies prayer, self-examination, Ignatian indifference, two standards, discernment (each of which deserves a separate elaboration), and spiritual practices such as fasting, acts of charity, and service to others as the means toward realizing and emancipating our disordered and immanent messes and instilling in their place the transforming potentials of transcendent cosmess instead. 

(Image courtesy - M Ordered Mess)