When I woke up this morning, it came to me. It's one of those old dilemmas where you lose your balance at the peak of understanding and slide down a slippery slope toward one extreme or another before getting stuck in a gutter. In this case the contest was between the head and the heart. We get tired of trying to understand and not knowing and forgetting and being wrong, so we give up and relax into bliss as if a nice song were the solution to everything. After we've had a rest, we find that the world is still falling apart and we want to discover how things work so we can put them back together. Neither the head nor the heart has all the virtue. They have to work together and sometimes take turns.
There is another dilemma in the Genesis story involving obedience and autonomy. Genesis makes God a lawgiver and judge promising reward and punishment. It was a good story and it stuck because it fits with the common experience of not knowing what we are doing, needing rules as easy answers to difficult problems, making choices, and dealing with consequences. We remain capable of outgrowing, testing, modifying, even breaking rules. You do something and events prove you right or, more likely, wrong. If wrong, you get the boot, but now you know something you did not know before. The alternative to static obedience is taking a chance when you aren't sure. Then you are more sure; you have moved on a step.
I am used to thinking of God as the ultimate truth
obscured by opaque ignorance
and by the dazzle of what I presume to know.
What if God is here on this side of the mystery
probing it with us
as we bend the rules into tools
to peek around opacity and errant belief?
What if the God of being
is the God of becoming,
exciting us to risky experiment
and promising novelties full of surprise?
What a story that would make!
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