The reality of spirituality
There are many ideas within Christian spirituality that contradict the facts of reality as I understand them. A statement like this offends some Christians because they believe if aspects of their faith do not obey the facts of reality, they are not true. But I think there are all sorts of things our hearts believe that don't make any sense to our heads. Love, for instance; we believe in love. Beauty. Jesus as God.
It comforts me to think that if we are created beings, the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality, and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality, that it would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality, or it would not be reasonable.
When we worship God we worship a Being our life experience does not give us the tools with which to understand... Eternity, for example, is not something the human mind can understand. We may be able to wrap our heads around living forever (and we can do this only because none of us has experienced death), but can we understand what it means to have never been born? I only say this to illustrate that we, as Christians, believe things we cannot explain. And so does everyone else.
[...]
[W]hen we reduce Christian spirituality to math we defile the Holy... Many of our attempts to understand Christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me. The little we do understand, that grain of sand our minds are capable of grasping, those ideas such as God is good, God feels, God loves, God knows all, are enough to keep our hearts dwelling on His majesty and otherness forever.
-- Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller
posted by Laughingcow at 5:40 pm
1 Comments:
:) Thanks for your response, glad you liked it, and I would definitely recommend reading the book in its entirety, not because it's perfect (no book is), but because context is important. ;)
With regards to that last paragraph (if I understand you correctly), I definitely agree that the process of drawing near to God, attempting to understand and decipher His word, these are crucial in our relationship with Him. However I think Miller was specifically referring to instances where people try to explain Christian spirituality through mere human logic -- "mathematics" -- and discard everything else that falls outside of it -- that's what he disapproves of. Of course, the process by which we deepen in our relationship with God should never cease, and I definitely agree that it should go so far as to be our "entire purpose of being." :)
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