How Do We Know What We Know About God?

Almost every day, I exchange emails about God with a longtime friend of mine. Over the years, he has become reformed in his theology and literal in his reading of scripture. I am neither, and that makes for some spirited emails.

His last email reaffirmed his belief in sola scriptura (“scripture alone”) as the first and best source of knowledge about God. That led me to start wondering just what I believe. I see the Bible as too full of contradictions, counterpoints, and cross-currents for all of it to be entirely, literally from the finger of God. And yet I do think it contains enough sacred wisdom to be taken seriously and thoughtfully.

Then it hit me: maybe the best way to know about God is to know God.

Isn’t this true of our human relationships? We can hear about someone from her friends and professional colleagues. We can Google her to learn about her background. We can read what others have written about her. But there is no better way to know the person than to build a relationship with her.

That explains why prayer, especially silent or contemplative prayer, is so valuable to the life of faith: it puts us in touch with the Source of all things. We open ourselves to God. God opens himself to us. When we enter that space of prayer deeply, day by day, year by year, we become intimately acquainted with the God of all things.

It is a relationship.

And out of that relationship, we can begin to approach faith’s other “ways of knowing”: scriptures, the writing of sages and theologians, the wisdom inherent in tradition, and our own experience. We see everything through the lens of our deep connection with God.

Here’s an example. The book of Exodus tells a story (4:24-26) in which God meets Moses and tries to kill him. My literalist friend, taking this story as a historical account, seeks to figure out why God would, with no apparent motive, kill the servant he sent to liberate Israel the chapter before. Because the story mentions circumcision as the palliative that averts God’s anger, my friend ties it into the Jewish law requiring circumcision for the men of Israel.

Meanwhile, I read this story and see nothing that resembles the God I’ve come to know. I turn the story every which way, seeking some metaphor or symbolic meaning that I can draw from the text. I get nothing, so I assume the story was either an erroneous insertion or perhaps a fragment of a larger story whose context might make sense of it.

Notice something here. Both of us wrestled with the text. Both of us tried to find meaning in the story. I do think it’s important to take these stories seriously, because otherwise we might miss the great wisdom they hold. In addition, our reading of scripture, in its turn, can shape the understanding of God that comes from our personal connection—just as our friends’ insights into someone can help us see something in her that we might not have seen otherwise.

But by starting with the relationship and incorporating the rest, we give ourselves a more flexible way to understand our faith tradition and apply it creatively to a time and a culture that are so very different from the land of Canaan millennia ago. This “relationship epistemology” may, in the long run, make our faith more relevant to confront the world’s most pressing problems and more accessible to the seekers of our own age.

P.S. One other little twist about the developing a deep connection with God: it can turn your life upside down. We’ll dig into that in another post.

Those Annoying Limitations That Never Go Away

In a few weeks, I’ll be heading down to Holy Cross Monastery for a mini-retreat. I’ll meet with my spiritual director, write, read a good book, and soak in the silence. It occurred to me, however, that before the retreat I should visit my therapist, or get my meds adjusted, or somehow screw my head on straight before I go be all spiritual.

Why?

I always do this sort of thing. I have to be in the “right” frame of mind before I say Morning Prayer. I cannot pray immediately after eating too much, or watching NASCAR, because I’m not spiritual enough. Goodness knows, I can’t visit a bunch of monks without being spiritual enough.

As I ruminated on this, it suddenly hit me: after three decades on this journey, I still can’t accept the love of God as unconditional. So to earn the Divine acceptance, I continually strive to present God with my “best-dressed self.”

What nonsense.

And yet it’s my nonsense. I am always astounded when, just as I think I’ve resolved some of my personal issues and can “progress” to something else, up they pop again. They might take a different form, or appear at a deeper level, but there they are.

My therapist describes this graphically, by drawing a spiral with an upward trajectory. Sure, we make progress of a sort—we get a little better at dealing with issue X, or just living with issue Y—but in that progress we keep returning to the same old trash.

I wonder if it’s an exercise in humility—which I define as an awareness and acceptance of one’s place in the universe. I have been created as one person. I have been given exactly one set of strengths and weaknesses. So every time the same old issue keeps cropping up, it reminds me of my one-personness, and humility grows.

On a related front, we have no idea whether our limitations might actually help us help one another. How many times have you shared a personal weakness with a friend, and it meant so much to her because she struggles with the same thing? Or she’s made a bit more progress on that front and can offer you a new perspective? Or, by admitting your weaknesses, you allowed her to exercise her empathy and compassion?

And just like that, you’ve glimpsed another lesson of humility: that we need one another to become fully ourselves. That lesson can inspire us to strengthen the bonds that connect us—and to work together on the problems that confront our world.

Blog Silence: Good or Bad?

A few days ago, a reader harangued me for not posting since August. Her comments have merit—you can only read Job’s exquisite rant so many times—but they got me thinking about the whys of not blogging.

There are, in fact, several reasons why I went dark in September. Some of them are the usual suspects: illness, overwork, full weekends, overwork, a focus on my book manuscript, overwork, etc. On another level, however, I just didn’t have anything to say. There were a few ideas floating in my head, but none really blossomed into a full post.

Which leads me to today’s question: What’s wrong with that?

Blog advisers insist on the necessity of posting something every day, or you’ll lose your readers. And maybe that’s true. But it also speaks of a much deeper dynamic at work. The emphasis is on quantity rather than quality, on talking rather than listening. Reflection—letting an idea come to bloom by itself, midwived by time and silence—is grossly undervalued.

This dynamic, of course, isn’t limited to the blogosphere. The business world routinely sacrifices depth of thought in its obsession with speed (the only way to keep up is to skim the surface). As a media-influenced society, we seem to lurch from one all-consuming issue to the next: from moose hunting to lipstick on a pig to God knows what next.

But here’s the problem: by communicating without reflection, by moving at warp speed through ideas and issues, we lose the ability to think through things with any depth. That makes it far more difficult for us to focus on substantive issues and sort them out.

This gets really important in public life, where staggeringly complex issues are too often reduced to sound bites. As a habit of mind and spirit, reflection gives us the space to take a moment, ponder any given “truth claim”—and, as often as not, see through it. Reflection helps us peer into issues, see their complexity for ourselves, and start pulling at the various strands within them to make some coherent sense. From reflection and silence emerge the questions that will probe behind the conventional wisdom to the substantive issues beneath.

Once that starts happening, we might have a shot at addressing the reality of issues. By appreciating their complexity, we’re more inclined to approach them (and the players on various sides) with humility, realizing that no one person can possibly come up with an answer to something so large.

Does all that explain my silence for the past six weeks? Goodness, no; it happened as much by accident as anything else. But maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Maybe contributing to the silence is as important as contributing to the conversation.