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Not Knowing and the Crucifixion of the Intellect

Posted on February 17, 2011 | Leave a comment
He went out, not knowing where he was going.
Hebrew 11:8

Waiting in the check out line, I indulge in my guilty pleasure – scanning the headlines of the National Enquirer. BILLY RAY RAGE: DISNEY DESTROYED MILEY CYRUS! GAGA-MADONNA WAR ERUPTS! I resist pulling an issue of Celebrity News off the rack to catch up on Tom and Katie. I save that for the beauty salon, when I am less apt to run into someone I know.

Back home as I haul in the groceries, my dog gives me a good sniffing, reading me front and back like a newspaper full of local scandals. All of us critters seem to be created with curiosity, as we wave antennae, bounce sonar, phosphoresce, and sniff out the news of our world and of one another, often shamelessly poking our snouts in our neighbor’s crotch.

Such knowledge – lurid, informative, or life saving – may empower, entertain, set us free, or provide our supper. Knowledge opens doors to invention, opportunity, and innovation.

The Bible understands that the highest kind of knowledge is knowledge, not of my neighbor’s stupid acts and reckless behavior, but of God. Knowledge of God is not for sale in the supermarket check-out line, but is given free through growing intimacy with Holiness. Knowledge of God flows from creation, scripture, people, even, sometimes, the check out line at Savemore, but, most significantly, from companionship and personal communion with the Holy One. Such knowledge and understanding develops through the exchange of love in the experience of a life shared with Christ through prayer. Like my dog, Elijah, one begins to know God, because I have sniffed at God long and often enough to recognize his scent.

Understanding of God is arrived at by literally standing under, that is to say, by lowering and humbling oneself. We stand beneath God, looking up, aware that we see only a portion of what is there. In faith we surrender to hints and intimations, glimpses and sudden dazzling displays of grace.

But inquiring minds want to know! We yearn to know where our lives are headed and to grasp with our minds what is and what shall be. We hunger to secure ourselves. We hitch ourselves up to institutions, college degrees, causes, and ideas. We cinch ourselves into relationships of aggression or hate, boredom or lust, dependency or bullying. We set our agendas and bind them to our foreheads.

Yet, deepening knowledge of God always asks us to trust. As we know God more, faith becomes the consent to knowing less and less about most everything else. As Oswald Chambers wrote, “God does not tell you what he is going to do – he reveals to you who He is.” Such not knowing is almost certain to make us really anxious.


Have you ever been asked to crucify your intellect, to kill that inquiring mind that has to know everything, understand and control everything, and be right all the time? Your life experience may lead to the painful crucifixion of your intellect. On this Golgotha, pinned by the circumstances of your own experience, you find that nothing you can figure out or find out or do can move you out of this impasse. You, left hanging there, can only wait, trust, and abide in love not knowing.

In a time of such acute unknowing we are likely to be filled with an overpowering panic and rising anxiety to secure ourselves with certainties, assurances, undeniable truths, and absolutes. 

 

Now the Lord said to Abram: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I shall show you.” Genesis 12: 1

Seventy five year old Abram and his wife, Sarah, showed a great deal of courage heading off on a journey on the word of the Lord alone without a clear destination. They had no maps, realtor photos of their new home, or contracts to wave before the querulous neighbors. They headed out in obedience under the cold moon and starry skies into a great unknown.

Though I doubt if it happened this way, I like to think of the old couple heading down the road to nowhere, waving their hats, urging the camels forward, and hollering, “Let ‘er roll!”


You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss than upholstering a rut

James Broughton (Little Sermons of the Big Joy)

The Sanctuary Foundation for Prayer
Read more about prayer www.fromholyground.org,
Contact the author lross@fromholyground.org, www.fbook.me/sanctuary
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A Hand Caught Beyond Death’s Grip

Posted on April 26, 2010 | 1 comment
I offer this week the closing portion of a Readers’ Drama for Easter, Quem Quaeritis? (Whom Are You Seeking?)  The drama is a conversation among a narrator, the three women who come to the tomb to tend to the body of Jesus, and the angel who meets them with the words, “He is not here. He is risen.” A poetic exploration of the meaning of the resurrection, the drama weaves back and forth between contemporary and historical settings. I wrote it over the course of a year in which I meditated, read, and prayed about the resurrection.
NARRATOR
Christ,
at once giver and receiver,
the one who bore
and was raised
that who thrust forth
and who was penetrated,
the willing victim
the union of opposites
now bids us
rise from the dead kingdom of duality
to a realm of holiness and power
that transcends categories
of human making.
THIRD WOMAN
“See the holes in my palms?
Have you anything to eat –
a bit of fish to chew,
some bread?” he asked,
extending a hand
caught beyond death’s grip.
FIRST WOMAN
On the afternoon of the day my friend died
in a hospital bed in Iowa City,
my daughter and I made cookies.
In the Kansas kitchen overlooking the finch feeder
while seventeen finch gobbled
two pounds of thistle seed
(95 cents a pound at Allen Farm and Feed),
we measured flour and brown sugar
butter and ginger
and mixed them in the yellow bowl.
Patting out the dough on the cookie sheet,
we stopped to taste.
“Umm very good!” she said.
There while she stood on the orange chair
with a brown apron hanging to her ankles,
I saw for the first time
how the smooth curve of her cheek
presses against space
with such exquisite beauty.
SECOND WOMAN
How is it that we have come so far
yet missed so much?
FIRST WOMAN
How is it green fields tumble in the wind
and tulips pierce last fall’s leaves,
spearing death neatly
with pale green blades?
SECOND WOMAN
How is it that we
afflicted with resurrection fever
drowse through it all
like sleepwalkers?
We hobble over the land,
our actions:  jerks and twitches
random, impotent tossings in our sleep.
THIRD WOMAN
The hand I clasp
has a hole in it.
The cheek I kiss
wears the odor of nard.
The eyes I behold
contain celestial vistas.
THE ANGEL
Once divinity
sprouted
underneath a woman’s heart.
She who had been so empty
walked in fullness.
Now Earth,
who carried patiently
the son of humanity as he ripened,
contracted
the forces of deliverance,
squeezed him
through the narrow channel of the cross,
disgorged the stone
in a rush of living water,
and thrust him
wet and slippery
into the arms
of the astonished church,
which at the same instant
held
the body of Christ
and became it.
ALL WOMEN
Oh then Mary’s joy
swelled into our song.
FIRST WOMAN
And we,
SECOND WOMAN
magnified by our plentitude,
FIRST WOMAN
spied Infinity kicking
in our finitude.
THE ANGEL
He is here.
Read more about prayer at
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Contact Loretta at
lross@fromholyground.org, www.fbook.me/sanctuary
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