Today I am full of the futility of trying to explain God. I am so easily sidetracked, so easily led into justifying God's existence. Who am I to say that God is? My very choice of words and expressions seem to limit him, to conform him to my perspective, and reduce him to my understanding. His utter reasonableness is lovable to the human mind, but he is not fully comprehended in reason.
Can love be sorted and counted? Can the vast glories of nature be measured and regulated? Even the natural laws we have been thousands of years attempting to plot and graph through scientific study - magnificent study, that! But after all, we are forced to admit that the the complexities of nature, while full of logic and something even beyond logic, somehow transcend our grasp. No one who has studied astronomy or biology can say we live in a simple universe. Even that which we can confidently say that we "know" is with regularity interrupted by the "black holes" that appear in even the best organised of our understanding.
He is, that is all. But the "all" is the ground of morons unless the "is" - who and how such a God is - is somehow comprehended.
What brilliant mind dreamed up the God of the Bible - a God who is at once fierce and lovable, the one from whom earth and heavens flee, and the babe lying a manger, him whom to look at is to die, and the one who takes note of a sparrow's fall - ? What alliance of creative energy produced even the idea of this God - the one who speaks worlds into existence, laughs at those who waste themselves in opposing him, dwells in light inaccessible... and accepts responsibility for our choices, at the cost of his own pain?
The great thinkers of our history - Plato and da Vinci and Confucious and the Buddha and Einstein and Marx - those magnificent ones are flea brains by comparison to the authors of such a God! Tell me who they are -let me just bow at the feet of the being or beings who are wise and deep and noble enough to as much as imagine such a God - were he a fiction, I would worship even them!
And still, the great challenge of those who have seen him, heard him, touched him, is to communicate him - not that he is, but who he is, in the feebleness of words and lives. The Word, God and with God, was wrapped in swaddling bands at his birth. His story was written largely by uneducated laymen. If my life be one long struggle to know and communicate him, though I fail, I die satisfied.
Oh, he is - enough. What else ever can be?
2 comments:
jennypo, your blog left me feeling inadequate in the way i have, very haphazardly, been raising my children. it has caused me to be aware how unpurposefully i have been living my life. what are my children going to think of me when they are old enough to search for purpose and reason? i am saying this in a negative way, but it is a very positive thing - if a difficult one to realize, and even more difficult to change. i see the need to analyze my habits, beliefs, etc... not just let life happen to me, and to my family! thank you!!
Jen, you have put into words the questions and thoughts in many minds. Thank you for giving me the incentive to get to know this God on a more intimate level.
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