Tuesday, January 18, 2005
questions that might not demand an answer
I can feel some sort of monumental shift occuring in the way I view existence. If I were to assign a theme to the past year of contemplation, it would be The Destruction of All Prior Concept of Wisdom, and the Infancy of its Proper Reconstruction.
I've had many self-satisfactions scorched beneath the burning eyes of Love, who does not fear the Truth. I have squatted, terrified, as the walls around the secrets of my heart came crashing down while my loved ones marched valiantly with trumpets and a loud cry, setting me free to walk in the light towards healing and forgiveness. I have clutched to dying misconceptions for as long as I could stand the stench, hoping I wouldn't have to leave the comfort of my narrow mind to search out the rugged, deadly beauty of Reality. And, in learning how it is we lay down our lives, I've wrestled with the devil as I've moved towards that far-away yet fast-approaching something called Life More Abundant and Free.
As my life underwent these drastic changes, my worldview changed along with it. Things I once took as Truth without question were now becoming less clear to me. The black-and-white sorting bins I'd shoved everything into had been refurbished with a whole spectrum of color. Life became more than the choosing between one of two simple options (good, bad; right, wrong; Christian, secular; Republican, Democrat) but a living, breathing organism! God became bigger than human logic, international politics, and America's Christian subculture.
During this time I have often felt confused and ill at ease, reluctant to speak too much. There were too many questions that didn't yield immediate answers. The logic trailed off in the middle of each dilemma. It wasn't so much that I was thinking of things I'd never considered, just that I was considering them in a whole new way. Some questions I've been wrestling with:
--How am I to love others?
--Am I arrogant? or, What is humility?
--How do I share the Gospel relevantly?
--How do I honor only God and never myself?
--What is the Church's role in government activism?
--Where is the line between legalism and hedonism?
--Will I ever know God's will for my life? Do I need to?
--What are my giftings, and how do they fit into the Body of Christ?
--What is art, and how should it be used? When does it become harmful?
I found this quote on a blog I like a lot, and felt God using it to speak further into something I've been thinking about a lot, reading Donald Miller and the Gospels and trying to get to the heart of what it's really like to have a relationship with the Living One, to live my life completely alive, without acquiescing to the unnecessary weights of this world and my own false preconceptions, to embrace the doubts along with the faith and hope in the love of the Lord to lead me through it:
***
All sanctity is born of conflict--of contradictions resolved, finally, into union. Logical reasoning has limited usefulness. For the landscape of human-kind’s spiritual world, the world in which we realize our most noble accomplishments and in which we suffer our most crushing defeats, is a landscape of virtually intellectually unresolvable dichotomies. Freedom vs order; self-help salvation vs grace, or even predestination; tradition and innovation; the simultaneous fallenness and exaltedness of human nature; eternity and time; the one and the many; stability and change; justice verses mercy. (Saint Thomas Aquinas observed that justice without mercy is cruelty, while mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution.) Imagine trying to have a debate about whether God’s nature was immanent or transcendent! In his many wonderful paintings entitled The Peaceable Kingdom, the Quaker artist Edward Hicks charmingly symbolizes for us an ideal of sanctity which involves the reconciliation of such opposites. The logical mind is offended by these dichotomies and seeks to come down on one side or the other of them; the same dichotomies provoke and stimulate the higher human facilities, the spiritual facilities, the facilities without which human beings are nothing but very clever animals. People of great sanctity somehow transcend these dichotomies without abandoning the truth on either side of them.
Humankind’s particular vocation, then, is a precarious balancing act. It is a vocation that can be carried out successfully only with wisdom and love. It is a vocation which cannot be guided by dogmatic assertions, which by their nature tend simply to prefer one side or other of these dichotomies. The gospels have in common with the techniques of Socrates and of Zen masters the fact that they question us, rather than tell us things. Legalism, lawyerliness, and literalism are the enemies of all true spirituality. Poetry and parable are its friends. When spiritual discovery is reduced to lawyer like debates, everyone loses.
***
More on this later, perhaps. More on the questions and how I've been thinking about them, certainly.
I've had many self-satisfactions scorched beneath the burning eyes of Love, who does not fear the Truth. I have squatted, terrified, as the walls around the secrets of my heart came crashing down while my loved ones marched valiantly with trumpets and a loud cry, setting me free to walk in the light towards healing and forgiveness. I have clutched to dying misconceptions for as long as I could stand the stench, hoping I wouldn't have to leave the comfort of my narrow mind to search out the rugged, deadly beauty of Reality. And, in learning how it is we lay down our lives, I've wrestled with the devil as I've moved towards that far-away yet fast-approaching something called Life More Abundant and Free.
As my life underwent these drastic changes, my worldview changed along with it. Things I once took as Truth without question were now becoming less clear to me. The black-and-white sorting bins I'd shoved everything into had been refurbished with a whole spectrum of color. Life became more than the choosing between one of two simple options (good, bad; right, wrong; Christian, secular; Republican, Democrat) but a living, breathing organism! God became bigger than human logic, international politics, and America's Christian subculture.
During this time I have often felt confused and ill at ease, reluctant to speak too much. There were too many questions that didn't yield immediate answers. The logic trailed off in the middle of each dilemma. It wasn't so much that I was thinking of things I'd never considered, just that I was considering them in a whole new way. Some questions I've been wrestling with:
--How am I to love others?
--Am I arrogant? or, What is humility?
--How do I share the Gospel relevantly?
--How do I honor only God and never myself?
--What is the Church's role in government activism?
--Where is the line between legalism and hedonism?
--Will I ever know God's will for my life? Do I need to?
--What are my giftings, and how do they fit into the Body of Christ?
--What is art, and how should it be used? When does it become harmful?
I found this quote on a blog I like a lot, and felt God using it to speak further into something I've been thinking about a lot, reading Donald Miller and the Gospels and trying to get to the heart of what it's really like to have a relationship with the Living One, to live my life completely alive, without acquiescing to the unnecessary weights of this world and my own false preconceptions, to embrace the doubts along with the faith and hope in the love of the Lord to lead me through it:
***
All sanctity is born of conflict--of contradictions resolved, finally, into union. Logical reasoning has limited usefulness. For the landscape of human-kind’s spiritual world, the world in which we realize our most noble accomplishments and in which we suffer our most crushing defeats, is a landscape of virtually intellectually unresolvable dichotomies. Freedom vs order; self-help salvation vs grace, or even predestination; tradition and innovation; the simultaneous fallenness and exaltedness of human nature; eternity and time; the one and the many; stability and change; justice verses mercy. (Saint Thomas Aquinas observed that justice without mercy is cruelty, while mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution.) Imagine trying to have a debate about whether God’s nature was immanent or transcendent! In his many wonderful paintings entitled The Peaceable Kingdom, the Quaker artist Edward Hicks charmingly symbolizes for us an ideal of sanctity which involves the reconciliation of such opposites. The logical mind is offended by these dichotomies and seeks to come down on one side or the other of them; the same dichotomies provoke and stimulate the higher human facilities, the spiritual facilities, the facilities without which human beings are nothing but very clever animals. People of great sanctity somehow transcend these dichotomies without abandoning the truth on either side of them.
Humankind’s particular vocation, then, is a precarious balancing act. It is a vocation that can be carried out successfully only with wisdom and love. It is a vocation which cannot be guided by dogmatic assertions, which by their nature tend simply to prefer one side or other of these dichotomies. The gospels have in common with the techniques of Socrates and of Zen masters the fact that they question us, rather than tell us things. Legalism, lawyerliness, and literalism are the enemies of all true spirituality. Poetry and parable are its friends. When spiritual discovery is reduced to lawyer like debates, everyone loses.
***
More on this later, perhaps. More on the questions and how I've been thinking about them, certainly.
