Tuesday, August 28, 2012

The Cave of Wonder(ing)


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[1] 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.


[1] By we, I mean everyone, but mainly Christians – Christians of the past as well as the present.

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