Hard to Explain

There's something about the Old Testament readings this year.  They seem to me like the key that opens all the other readings -- the psalm, the sermons of the New Testament, and even a new angle on The Transfiguration -- the Bible story about which I've written and thought the most, second only to The Samaritan Woman at the Well.

Abraham's vision and the process by which he gets it...I don't understand it.  It seems arbitrary at best and dangerously close to pagan gibberish at worst.

But then maybe everything mystical seems that way.  Not even from the outside.

One of my favorite novels, from an incomplete trilogy by Patrick Rothfuss, talks at length about the difference between the waking mind and the sleeping mind.  A teacher trying to awaken the sleeping mind of his students stages a parable by asking them to extrapolate precisely where to place their hand so that when he tosses it, it will fall into their palm perfectly.  After giving them almost an hour to perform the task academically, he calls in a page and throws the rock at him and is overjoyed when he catches it.  The sleeping mind, he explains, is powerful.

The rest of the teacher's tactics are less clear.  They mostly involve trying to be inexplicable in provocative and secretly meaningful ways that will open up his students to intuitive understanding.  To push them past the rational and the step-by-step.

I think that's where a lot of young believers fall down.  When they can't make sense of doctrines or even more crucial elements of faith.  They're always tossing hum-dingers at the theology teachers at any rate.  And some of them seem almost desperate about it.  Certain they are missing something that would make a seeming contradiction properly clear.

But all of the stories today emphasize that faith isn't like that.  Perhaps all rituals are really about waking the sleeping mind or the inner spirit -- something I find myself talking about a lot in my Advanced Acting class with Michael Chekhov's technique.

The birds Abraham uses aren't the point.  They're simply a focus point for him to spend an extended amount of time in prayer.  The church should never be about worldly, political advantage or honor accorded to the "holy" and "righteous" in this life but about making ourselves better servants of God in whatever way He requires it of us.

And Peter's response to the Transfiguration has always utterly charmed me.  Because what else do you say when something that wondrous happens?  When you have done the hard work for years of trying to understand God's message and the real, new way of being in the world and then, like a sudden unexpected gift, it comes all unbidden?  Clear and glorious but just as beyond your comprehension as ever?

At least of your waking mind.

Because you could never explain to someone how you knew exactly where to put your hand to catch the baseball.  You could try, but if they asked any follow-up questions at all, you'd find yourself devolving into gibberish pretty quickly.

And you could never really explain an epiphany and spiritual experience to anyone else.  Read the saints' accounts of their visions sometimes -- they sound mad and strange and allegorical and all kinds of bizarre things.  Trying to put the spiritual life into the words of this mortal coil.

Rituals and revelations are inexplicable but you understand so beautifully well in that moment.  A you know how to act on it, even if you don't know what to think of it or how to explain it.  I find myself having to research other reasons for the things that come to me in more spiritual ways.  Just so I can explain why I care about it.

We like things explained, especially in the last century or two.  God's ways, the soul-changing experiences, have always resisted that.