Opening to the Sacred

March 8th, 2010 | 2 Comments

In The Case for God, Karen Armstrong talks about “this hinterland between rationality and the transcendent.” It’s the place where our thought, ideas, and intellectual life have taken us as far as they can, and we need a different kind of knowing in order to experience God.

The intellect is part of our spiritual path. It carries us past the limited notions of God that constrict our assumption of what religious life entails. It brings the fresh breeze of new ideas, which prepare us to see what we have missed. It shows the limitations we have put on God, and the experience of God, of which we were unaware.

But we can’t live into a new faith, or any faith, by intellect alone. An expanded idea of God doesn’t have much impact on who we are or how we live unless we develop a connection to God—asking, seeking, waiting, inviting, listening. In Armstrong’s words, “Religious insight requires not only a dedicated intellectual endeavor to get beyond the ‘idols of thought’ but also a compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood. . . . It require[s] kenosis, ‘negative capability,’ ‘wise passiveness,’ and a heart that ‘watches and receives.’”

Armstrong’s book mirrors this process. It summarizes and analyzes a long and complex history of how people have understood God. She places our current theological thinking in the context of history, the better to see how we arrived in this place and how best to move forward. Yet her work points to an understanding of God beyond definition or certainty, experienced in mystery, expressed in poetry and in love. It’s a book about what cannot be expressed in books.

Ideas are important; I thrive on them. Yet at a certain point ideas no longer satisfy. It’s like driving to the mountains to go hiking. At some point, you have to get out of the car.

I experience another kind of truth in the light turning gold as the sun rises, the purr of a cat under my hand, the voice of a loved one. These are openings to the sacred, to the sense of being deeply and truly alive.

I’m asking myself whether I’ve spent too much time reading theology and not enough reading poetry. Where is the balance between intellect and experience? Do you see one as more credible, or trustworthy, than the other?

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A Church of Unknowing

March 6th, 2010 | 2 Comments

I’ve just finished reading Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God (Knopf, 2009). It’s a big book to wade through, but the clarity and grace of her writing make it a pleasure. Even more, her ideas stimulate my own thinking. I won’t try to do a review or a summation, but here is one aspect that resonates with me.

One of the gifts of The Case for God is that Armstrong articulates clearly how the modern Western mind came to equate truth with certainty, knowledge with logic and definitions, and credibility with science. Even more, she shows how this way of thinking resulted in a notion of God disconnected from the heart of religious longing.

Rather than allowing language and logic to carry us to their limit, then point us toward the mystery that cannot be named or known, we settled for a list of God-traits. Our idea of God defined a being, with specific attributes, sitting at the next-higher level of creation. In Armstrong’s words:

The process that should have led to a stunned appreciation of an “otherness” beyond the competence of language ended prematurely. The result is that many of us have been left stranded with an incoherent concept of God. We learned about God at about the same time as we were told about Santa Clause. But while our understanding of the Santa Claus phenomenon evolved and matured, our theology remained somewhat infantile.

We need an understanding of God that holds up to our experience, and allows us to build a life around our faith. Armstrong points to the work of Gianni Vattimo and John D. Caputo as thinkers who embrace a way of seeing God that can speak to our time. She mentions in her notes a collection containing works by both of them, After the Death of God, edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins. I haven’t read it, but I’d like to.

This is how Armstrong describes Caputo’s view of our experience of God, and the unknowing that is “truth without knowledge”:

So how does Caputo see God? Following Derrida, he would describe God as the desire beyond desire. Of its very nature, desire is located in the space between what exists and what does not; it addresses all that we are and are not, everything we know and what we do not know. The question is not “Does God exist?” any more than “Does desire exist?” The question is rather “What do we desire?” Augustine understood this when he asked, “What do I love when I love my God?” and failed to find an answer.

An encounter with such mystery leaves us open, without certainty, thrillingly alive and humbled with awe. It points us to a reality that transcends our ordinary experience, calls us to be awake, and encourages us to seek ways of living out the ineffable truth that we are given.

Is it possible to live out this kind of truth in community? Can a church be built on faith that professes uncertainty and not knowing?

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Reason for Hope

January 23rd, 2010 | 4 Comments

I’ve been reading Pierre Teilhard de Chardin over the past few weeks, absorbing The Divine Milieu a little at a time. It’s a wise and deeply hopeful book, relevant to the perennial issues and questions that arise in everyday life.

One of those issues is the pain that is part of human experience, as in the pictures we see in the news. Teilhard ascribes suffering not to the will of God, but to the fact that creation is unfinished, still moving toward the full expression of abundant life made possible in God. Humanity may be subject to heartbreak, but we are part of a creation in which God works even through tragedy towards strength and healing. The world in its current state cannot escape “shocks and diminishments,” but God works through them to bring about something better. In Teilhard’s hope-filled worldview, “Not everything is immediately good to those who seek God; but everything is capable of becoming good.”

Teilhard’s deep faith in God’s intention for creation means that suffering is never the last word, and that darkness and confusion will be transcended. Life may sometimes be difficult but it is not meaningless. Our individual experience is part of a larger framework, which helps us resist the darkness and isolation that invites despair.

When I see the world’s compassionate response to disaster, it appears Teilhard is right. When someone says that losing a job eventually led them to more meaningful and satisfying work, it supports what Teilhard is saying. For other hurts there are no pat answers. Sometimes we cannot see the pattern in which pain and loss are a part.

But I want to believe with Teilhard that the aspects of life that seem to yield only meaningless suffering will be places touched by the powerful life force that is God. Believing that the spirit of God within humanity is always working towards a good creation, even through darkness and pain, is a reason to keep going. It’s a reason to know that our lives matter. It’s a reason to hope, and that makes all the difference.

What gives you reason to hope?

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