Article from Epistle to the Presbyterians, October 2005
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I have spent almost all of my adult life questing for intimacy with God but I am less inclined now than ever to say that I know or understand God. But I am more than fine with that. Ann O’Shaughnessy of Heron Dance recalls Sam Keene once saying, “The longer you know someone, the deeper his or her mystery becomes.” Yes! Yes! I believe that to be true with all my heart. That has been my experience with God.
Thus, I am turned off mightily by the shrill certainty with which so many churches and Christians speak about God these days. Talk about blasphemy. How can anyone presume to speak with surety about the God whose name is “I Will Be Who I Will Be”? But, oh, how great is our proclivity for finding a box into which to stuff the God of our own construing! Doctrines and dogmas can be instructive if they are lightly held but many times they comprise the smug and inflexible liturgy of those who worship at the altar of orthodoxy.
Twenty-five years of marriage and I have no sense that I am getting closer to knowing all that there is to know about Kim. Indeed, in moments when I contemplate her life and her own being instead of viewing her as an appendage to my own life, the mystery of who Kim is both in and beyond the character and circumstances of her life deepens. Her life is large and there is always more to come, more to understand, and more to love. When I try to squeeze Kim into a mold of my own desiring, our relationship turns perfunctory. But when I allow myself to explore and savor the mystery and the wonder of her unique life, that is when, ironically, “two become one” and married life becomes married love.
My relationship with God is similar. For too many years I was content to learn about God from secondary sources…theological textbooks, seminary professors, church school teachers, preachers, articles, small groups, and journals. All of those resources were good and helpful, but insufficient. I thought that if I learned enough about God that knowledge about God would turn alchemically into experiences of God. But I was wrong. Knowledge about God simply remained knowledge about God. I also noticed that different faith traditions and their adherents often made competing claims about God, each asserting that theirs is the right idea, the correct theology, the proper interpretation. God and religion seemed to be part of the problem, not a solution, to a peaceable world and life.
I hungered for experience of God, for relationship. I began to be intrigued by the rich inner life of Jesus. While some may think of Jesus as a revolutionary of sorts, and I include myself in that number, I came to the realization that he was first of all a contemplative. It was from his deep, interior (esoteric) relationship with the God of the universe, so deep that Jesus once said that “I and the Father are one,” that his active outer (exoteric) life of teaching, preaching, healing, and justice-making flowed. It was because Jesus was “alive from the center” of his life that he spoke and lived with authority. Jesus did not so much live a life derived from God as one merged with God with all of the resulting compassion, hospitality, wisdom, passion, joy, and courage so emblematic of both his life and death. That is why the early church so deeply identified Jesus with God, even calling him “Son of God.”
That rich, interior connection with God, and thus with the oneness of all life, is open to us all as well. And not just Christians. The illustration I used in a sermon this summer (borrowed from Matthew Fox) about God being the great, underground River into which the wells of all the various traditions can tap, is apt. God is One. Through the well I know best, the Jesus tradition, I want to descend into the River. I tried to talk about that this summer in my preaching series on awareness and consciousness and wordless prayer, a form of meditation. But now I want to enter into the deeper mystery of the One I want to love, of God, and so I have asked the person who is more centered in the contemplative tradition and experience than anyone I know, to help me, to help us. I use not one iota of hyperbole when I say that what our guide can teach you can, if you do your part, change your life.
© 2005 First Presbyterian Church