Some penetrating questions were posted in response to some journal entries during Holy Week, and I would like to spend some time engaging them further.
Anyone who knows me or something of my narrative, knows that the certainty with which I was raised has mostly evaporated. Granted, I do have a dry riverbed of ideological conviction remaining and my journey will likely never transcend that riverbed. Sometimes I see that dry riverbed as a scar on the landscape of my soul and in my good moments this same scar is an altar of remembrance. Though I can no longer drink of certainty’s waters, my dry riverbed of objective truth often serves as my invitation to look elsewhere for renewal.
Many specific questions where raised in last week’s replies, some of which echoed Brown’s book, “The daVinci Code.” BTW, if you have not read, “The daVinci Code” I recommend you thoughtfully engage the text with a book group, preferably with at least one fundamentalist (to keep things interesting); and as you read, to commit yourself, as you are able, to hear and to see and to learn, and to be present with your responses.
One of thoughts that I have been living with for years now, and was poignantly brought up is the notion that Christ-followers construct their entire lives based on dubious teachings. Of this claim, as best as I understand it, I stand guilty as charged. And I long to meet a person whose life in community is not socially constructed of dubious teachings. In the words of Chuang Tzu, “The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find a person who has forgotten the words? [They are] the one I would like to talk with.”
The work of people like Michael Polanyi and his tacit/personal knowledge, Jacques Derrida with his deconstruction as an act of love not to mention the entire world of the emerging sciences (complexity, chaos, nanotechnology, small world theories, network theories, sync’ing) are all in various ways helping humanity see through fresh eyes that all belief is built on a bed of faith. Thus the teaching of any belief is dubious, is open to doubt or suspicion, fraught with uncertainty and often unconvincing.
Fen-Yang said, “When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much.”
For those of us whose stories are full of teaching and learning for the sake of information retention under the assumption that right knowledge would result in God-honoring lives and have subsequently discovered our assumptions have made an ASS-out-U-and-ME. We have discovered that we are still messed up and full of questions, and struggling with the same stuff and so lonely, and so tired of the masks. It is that moment of desperation that we stand in a gloriously place, with an invitation to sacrifice our certainty and our objectified absolutes.
Though stopping there is an option that many post-Christian’s select for a season. Sophia may woo us further. There may come another invitation that is marinated in the first; this one invites the sacrifice our doubts and fears.
So, if one’s certainty is being sacrificed along with one’s doubts, what is one left with?
Peace, dwight
