beyond understanding

If you understand it, it is not God. —St. Augustine, Sermon 117 on John 1:1

 

…there’s a difference between doubting God and doubting my understanding of God, just as there’s a difference between trusting God and trusting my understanding of God…

                     Brian D. McLaren, Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working                        and What to Do About It (St. Martin’s Essentials: 2021), 92.

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I admit it

I don’t understand

 

I don’t understand why bad things happen to good people

I don’t understand why horrible people flourish

 

I don’t understand politicians who lie

And those who are willing to put profit above people

 

I don’t understand why children get sick and die

I don’t understand the obsession with guns

 

I don’t get all that stuff in the Bible that doesn’t line up

 

How on one page we read that God is love,

and on another page we find a God of retribution and torment

 

on one page there is grace and redemption

and on another weeping and the gnashing of teeth

 

really?

 

I don’t get why those who talk mostly loudly about God

seem to reflect God the least

I don’t understand how a faith build around a person of compassion

One who was willing to sacrifice all to be hope and peace to the earth

 

has become a faith system build around domination, greed,

retribution and coercion

 

I hear all the shallow platitudes

God will never give you more than you can handle!

Everything is for a reason!

God has a plan for your life!

The Bible says it; I believe it; that settles it!

 

Tell those things to the Psalmists

Or perhaps to Job

Or Kohelet

 

Or even Jesus,

who sweated blood in Gethsemane

and cried out from the cross,  “Why!”

 

let’s face it

there is a lot we don’t understand

there is a lot we will never understand

there are things that don’t seem fair

there are things that aren’t fair

 

and that reality we call God?

that divine energy that lurks in our souls?

 

That too is beyond our understanding

 

and that is OK

 

we cannot wrap out limited minds

around the infinite

 

we will grab bits and pieces

and find (and use) images that partly explain

 

and there are the self revelations…

the creation

Jesus

own selves, little incarnations

 

but we won’t get it

and doubt is part of faith

 

but a lack of understanding does not mean we have

to abandon faith

 

our time in the valley of unknowing

often leaves us with experiences of Sacred

we cannot express but only know

 

I doubt that I will ever understand the Sacred

and how the divine energy works in this world

and in my life

 

but still it remains

that power, that love that is beyond understanding

and that I will cling to

like a vine to the branch