Have you ever noticed how much we love answers? Maybe we should rephrase the question to help us: have you noticed how much we love certainty?
We have an entire Western way of thinking, teaching, and learning based on logic, order, and answers. I’m not an educator, so I’ll leave it those people to debate the good and bad of that approach, but I do know that we can’t approach God that way. God isn’t a puzzle to figure out or a FAQ page to work our way through until we get all the answers.
That’s the part that rubs us the wrong way, and until we can embrace it, we’ll just keep fighting to grasp things that we probably weren’t made to hold.
We were made to be loved by God and to love God.
We’ve taken that and put it under a microscope in hopes of understanding it. But trying to understand the ways of God will ultimately leave us on the short end of the stick. Thankfully, the love of God can heal what the logic of God doesn’t answer.
[Tweet “The love of God can heal what the logic of God doesn’t answer.”]I love this quote from Richard Rohr, and I think it’s powerful enough to be the last word:
“My scientist friends have come up with things like ‘principles of uncertainty’ and dark holes. They’re willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories, but many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of ‘faith’! How strange that the very word ‘faith’ has come to mean its exact opposite.”
Selah.
