When I started high school, math homework started to
actually challenge me. Sometimes I would sit there and could plug things into a
formula and get the right answers, but I didn’t understand how the formula
worked, and that really bothered me. I would ask my mom for help, and she would
give an honest effort, but sometimes, she just couldn’t explain things to me in
a way that made it click. For awhile, every time she couldn’t help, I got
really distressed. I would lash out at her, or sometimes cry. But I was never
actually frustrated with my mom. I was frustrated because I couldn’t
understand. I was angry because I didn’t get it.
Understanding. That’s what drives me. It always has. And not
just in math class. I want to understand people. I want to understand why the
world is so broken. I want to understand who you are and why you are that way,
and to understand what’s been going on inside your heart that provoked you to
answer ‘How are you?’ with ‘ok’ rather than ‘good’ today.
I ask a lot of questions and I very rarely settle for an ‘I
don’t know.’ At least not for long. There’s always more to know. Always more to
understand.
For awhile now, this desire for understanding has found a
home in the realm of God things. Except ‘desire’ seems too placid of a word for
what I actually feel; ‘voracious obsession’ might serve better. I am wildly
obsessed with understanding God. And I want God to make sense.
But the weird thing is, I feel like I
do understand God. When I am with God (I’m not gonna even try to
unpack that loaded statement right now), I feel like I know God. I know that
God embodies words like
embracing,
inviting,
compassionate,
redeeming,
and
curious. But it’s when we
talk about God; that’s what I want to make sense. I hear so many words come off
of pages and out of mouths and these words just don’t make sense. There are so
many phrases that have such huge implications and complex meanings that are
thrown around like toddler’s speech. I feel like a fool when I muster up enough
courage to admit that “
I don’t think we really
know what ‘sin’ is”; it’s almost as if I were to challenge the idea that
the red skinned, white fleshed seed-bearing fruit in my lunch bag is actually
an apple. Unspoken judgments rain down on me from the faithful bible-quoters:
You grew up in church your whole life. Your
ignorance cannot be excused. But I feel as though there’s a whole world of
people for whom this God that is so casually talked about, with such complex
language, does not make sense to. And if these people are anything like me,
they are turned off by the huge, silent and hollow cave of Christianity that
should be resounding with questions.
At this point, I feel like I don’t want to be known as
someone who dwells in that Christian cave. I want that cave to be hospitable to
my own questions and the questions of others, but even though it might be able
to receive them, I don’t trust it right now.
I think I’ve been aligning myself in a curious position over
the past few months, where I live in some middle ground. I believe in God and I
believe in the redeemability of the Church, but I don’t believe that the Church
is very hospitable to the whole group of people for whom the Church’s complex
language does not make sense to. And
thus, I want to dwell in this middle ground and build up a new, perhaps
temporary, cave for all the questions and angers and sadnesses and apathies of
people who have become disenchanted with and unimpressed by the church.
So I am in this new dwelling and I have lots of questions,
and I desperately want answers.
One thing I’ve really wanted to know lately is what,
exactly, does God do? And what doesn’t God do? I want to know what makes things
fall into one category or the other. I don’t know why I feel the need to
understand that so much. Part of me wishes I could just dwell more in the
mysterious and not feel so compelled to understand, but another part of me
wants to throw up a little in my mouth every time I hear people say “it’s not
up to us to understand God’s ways.” It’s such a common response to questions
about judgment and why bad things happen, but I think what bugs me most about
it is that it’s only the answer to questions about bad things, never the
response to good things. If someone asks “Why me? Why did I survive the car
accident?” the answer is much more likely to be something about the grace or
love of God, not “well, it’s not our place to understand God.” If someone asks “how
do you know she went to heaven?” the answer usually has to do with a correct
amount and style of belief and the infamous grace of God. We claim total
understanding when God “does” good things. But when bad things happen, it’s like
we’re so afraid of what that implies about God that we just shut up our fears
with the answer that God is so holy, we can’t possibly have a clue about what
he’s up to. Yeah, maybe God is holy (what do we mean by ‘holy’?) and maybe
there are things God is involved in that make us raise our eyebrows because we
can’t see the whole picture, but I don’t think God wants us to just stop at “Oh
well, I don’t get it. I trust you, God” any more than my 10th grade
math teacher wanted me to stop at “Oh well, I don’t get how the formula works.
I’ll just trust that it’ll get me the answers I need.” Sure, both situations
make it possible to get by alright, but I don’t think God is set on you not
understanding certain things about God.
I think there’s a further desire under all of my thirst for
understanding. I think I desire to understand so that I can better love. I
think part of me wants to understand how God acts in the world – in what ways
God is active and in what ways She is passive – so that I know how to ask God for
help. You see, I am certain that God is redeeming the world. But I don’t want
to just know that God is redeeming
it. I want to know how He’s doing it.
That way I can be more helpful in the way I’m involved. It’s like in any good
organization: a worker knows what the vision for the company is and roughly how
it operates; they know what their responsibilities are and what they can expect
from their supervisors.
I struggle with there being ambiguity and both yes and no to
what God does, because then where do you draw the line? We laugh at people
praying for a parking space and believing it was divine intervention when they
found one, but then get on the defensive when someone suggests that praying for
healing from cancer is just as nonsensical. Are they really apples from the
same tree? Or are these in two different categories – one being magic that God
can’t work and the other being magic God can work? What kind of healing does
God directly do? What kind of healing does God only do through the use of others?
How much more complex and realistic is God’s healing than what meets the eye?
Perhaps
God is limited by some of the same things we are; if a person is not in a
proper physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or communal state, they may not
be receptive to healing. And maybe that has nothing to do with how much they
want to or don’t want to be healed or how much they believe in or don’t believe
in God.
The reality of it is that people are so complex and the
complexity of people plays into how receptive they are to the help of others. I
can help an alcoholic who has a lot of drive to get well a lot better than I
can help an alcoholic who can’t even get sober enough to occasionally talk to
me about his problem while he’s dry. I imagine this is how it is when we ask
God for help, too. And when you enter into a scale of how hard people are
working or how much ‘faith’ they have it gets fuzzy. And then where is the line
drawn? And is that really fair? It seems about as fair as taking a middle class
straight white male and a poor homosexual latino woman and saying that if they
work hard enough, they can both get whatever they want out of life.
I am not seeking simple answers, by any means. But I want to
understand more of the intricacies of what God does and doesn’t do, and how he
heals. Does my obsession with this distinction come from my strong lingering
ideas that God is the man behind the curtain, “out there somewhere,” rather
than present and moving through the world?
That being said, as much as I have a deep-seated need to
understand more of God, I also have a lesser felt need to dwell in ambiguity
and desolation, as well as a need to view the people who say things that peeve
me with much more grace. I’m far from skilled at being patiently thirsty and
graciously frustrated.
