"God: Great and Awesome"

Monday, March 17, 2014

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I think that this reflection book is producing poorer blog reflections but perhaps more change in my own life -- which makes a kind of sense.  When I'm actually thinking through a new challenge to the way I see my faith, I am bound to be less eloquent then when I am talking about a concept where I feel myself on solid ground.  Of course, that's where growth happens -- in the incoherent mass of words.

My best friend and I talked about it once or twice -- mostly in comparison to her husband, who rarely wades into an argument (civil, friendly, philosophical, or angry bickering) but when he does, he always easily outmatches us.  She realized that her husband only argues when he has already figured everything out from every direction to his satisfaction.  She and I, in contrast, use the argument to DO that, to get to that place.  So you can't argue with him.

If some of the better entries on this site are Cameron arguing, this Lenten season has been me arguing to figure things out.

Today seemed the appropriate place to talk about it because for the first time it felt like familiar, well-trodden territory for me.  It's about the awesomeness of God and the insufficiency of any of the words we have to wrap around that.  I think I've said on here (it's actually a quote) that there are places words don't go -- that they're not meant to go.  The truth is, really, that words can only take you so far.

I adore words.  I almost said I worship words, and that might be nearer the truth.  If I am in danger of an idolatry, it may well be words.  So it is humbling for me to realize, again and again, that with words I will never do more than scratch the surface of the truth of God.  We who try keep smacking up against the same wall.  If you hit that wall too many times, you end up just sounding crazy.

You end up like the Battlestar Galactica hybrids (sorry, science fiction is one of my mirrors into the world and religion and even God) -- every word you say is precious and worth unwrapping, heavy with meaning and depth and poetry, and you babble it a mile a minute because you know that even though laden words cannot carry enough.  You try too hard, you forget that no one can hear you when you talk that fast and that crazy all at once.

But words can tell us a story that helps us glimpse the truth, and we can feel it, every so often, when we really look around and see -- really see, perhaps for the first time -- how elaborately beautiful our world is.  How wonderfully made is this paradise He has given us.  The words that unlock the door to that unknowable place -- for me the biggest key has been the Infinite God becoming Finite Man out of love for us.  I-- that's where my words stop.  I've tried to wrap more words around that until I feel myself going into wild mystic territory and I stop.  Because even my thoughts stop.  There's just a block over that.  I can't even.  It is too much love, too much wonder, too much joy, too much...everything.

God is good beyond our capacity to recognize it or even conceptualize it as a possibility.  We can no more see in twelve dimensions than we can use our words to reach the place where we would know God.

That's okay.  Sometimes all you need is a key.