Orthodoxy and Javanese mysticism

I found this testimony among the biographies and testimonies of contemporary Orthodox priests in the Church of Indonesia. I am just beginning to read about these servants of God who, like the holy apostles of the ancient Church, are bringing Christ to their people, and finding Him already there, 'asleep' in the night of their traditional culture. You can find out more by going to the Orthodox Indonesia webpage, particularly here, where the biographies and testimonies can be found.

The coming of Fr Daniel after almost ten years away from Indonesia was a joy to all of us. Fr Daniel stayed with our family for several days before he embarked to his hometown to see his relatives. He often visited our family whenever he had to do his mission works in Jakarta. While he was with us, he shared a lot of things with us about the Orthodox faith.

I felt an affinity with what he told us. It is because being a Christian from an abangan Javanese background with a tint of priyayi culture, something rang a bell in me. In the Javanese mystical tradition, God is spoken of as Sejatine ora ana apa-apa, sing ana iku dudu, ‘In truth there is nothing, thing which is, actually is not’, in the sense that in the very reality God is ‘nothing’ when expressed by human speech. What human speech and ideas can say about God as ‘is’, the ‘is’ of these human speech and human idea about God, ‘is not’ when the reality of God in Him is concerned.

So when Fr Daniel related the Orthodox idea of apopathic approach of God, that God is ‘unknown in His essence’, with this familiar Javanese belief, my Javanese soul was rekindled. It is this very mystery of God that I lacked and tried to bury when I became a Protestant, yet it had never gone away.

Also, Fr Daniel connected the Orthodox teaching, that God in His ‘essence’ is unknown which means God is unapproachable in the depth of His Being, yet in His ‘energy’ He can be experienced through His Holy Spirit—thus God is closer to man than his own soul—with that of the twofold reality of God in the Javanese mystical belief that God is ‘far’, yet ‘near’, or ‘unapproachable’ yet ‘dwells in each of us’.

It reminded me of Javanese belief that God is Adoh tanpa wangenan, nanging cedhak tanpa sesenggolan, ‘So far away without limit, yet so close by without being able to be touched’. He is far away without limit, because He is unapproachable as no one knows God’s Essence, yet He is so close by, because through the Holy Spirit God causes His Energy to dwell within us.

Again I was amazed when Fr Daniel related between the Incarnation of Christ in which the Humanity of Christ is united to His Divinity in His One Person without confusion, without mingling, and without separation and without division, and the Javanese mystical idea of Manunggaling Kawula lan Gusti, ‘The Union between the Servant/Creation and the Master/Creator’.

The Humanity of Christ is of course in the nature of ‘servant/kawula = creation’, and His divinity is in the nature of ‘Master/Gusti = Creator’. Therefore I could see that Christ is the fulfillment and the key toward achieving this Javanese yearning for Manunggaling Kawula lan Gusti.

Furthermore, the idea of salvation as théosis, ‘deification, divinization’, that Fr Daniel shared with me truly flabbergasted me. Fr Daniel related this Orthodox teaching on théosis to the Javanese teaching on Sangkan Paraning Dumadi, ‘The Origin and Destination of Creation’.

According to Fr Daniel, by virtue of the union between the humanity and the divinity in the Incarnation of Christ, the power of death that dwells in the humanity of Christ was defeated and destroyed by His divinity; therefore the humanity of Christ was raised from the dead. Death has been destroyed through His resurrection; while death is caused by sin, therefore sin is also defeated by this same resurrection of Christ. The resurrected body of Christ could not be defeated by death and sin anymore, the undying life of His divinity was now revealed through His resurrected body.

Therefore the resurrected body of Christ is now the source of that undying life, or that eternal life, which is the life of the divinity of Christ Himself, namely the life of God. As the resurrected body of Christ is now imbued with His divine life, therefore that resurrected body of Christ is now ‘divinized’ or become partaker in His divinity, without itself changed into God in its essence.

Those who believe and are united to the death and resurrection of Christ through faith by virtue of baptism are united to this divinized resurrected body of Christ. The resurrected and divinized body of Christ is now in heaven in a glorious form, and those who are united to Christ in His glorious resurrected body through faith expressed in baptism and living the life of Christ in His body, the Church, will receive the same glorification or divinization. What Christ is now in His glorious state; that is what they will become. Therefore Christ is the origin and source of that ‘eternal life’.

The emphasis on life eternal, reminded me of Javanese mystical insistence on finding Sejatining Hurip, ‘The Essence of Real Life’. From Fr Daniel’s explanation, I could see how Christ is the ‘Origin’, Sangkan, of the Eternal Life, and Christ is also the Paran, ‘Destination’, of that Eternal Life. Christ is the essence of Javanese belief in Sangkan Paraning Dumadi.

Those are the essence of the high philosophy of Javanese mysticism espoused by the priyayi Javanese. But being also raised and brought up in the abangan side, I felt the emphasis of ‘meal’—I mean ‘the Holy Communion’—as being central to Orthodox Christian life, which reminded me of the centrality of the slametan common meal ceremony in the abangan variant of Javanese culture.

In short I felt so overwhelmed by the way Fr Daniel related Orthodox Christianity to this Javanese oriental belief and culture, and I found nothing alien to my culture as a Javanese in Orthodoxy. It is so natural to my oriental mind, it is so true, it is so beautiful, and it is so Eastern. I do not have to fight against my easternness in the way I am thinking, as I have been trained so far in Protestantism.

— Fr Antonius Bambang Setiatmodjo