AS FAR AS I CAN SEE

When a mother reaches a hand down and her child in response raises his hand and takes hers, and the two of them proceed across the street in cooperative harmony, the child is acting in the obedience of faith. There is no coercion offered or apprehended, and there is no motivation of reward on the child’s part. The child’s faith in his mother’s love is so full that there is no room for calculation or hypothetical thinking of any kind, just as the mother’s love leaves no room for manipulation. The mother’s perfect love reaches, the little boy’s perfect faith responds, and where their hands join, there is a perfect bond of understanding.

Language cannot be a part of God. Before language was, God was. Language had to come into existence to fulfill one of God’s projects, so the project itself could not have been formulated in language. But how can utter stillness have intentionality? We have no conception of that, nor could we.

What we do have, nonetheless, is an admonition to know, by being still. That means that there is a knowing that comes before or under language, a knowing, I suspect, for which language is an obstacle.

And this, I also suspect, is what Paul is saying when he advises to let the Holy Spirit pray for us. (It is certainly not to start babbling, aloud or otherwise, in some unknown language.) The Spirit must also be a stillness that yet shares and receives intention, a stillness that cradles creative love.

Our theology of God is like a stick figure compared to a human being.

Let’s suppose there are such things as angels or devils, and that, in our understanding of “time,” they predate our own creation. Does that mean God has always had company?

By any reckoning that our understanding of God can support, angels and devils are created beings, so they clearly will not answer.

Then press the question in any way we can, substitute anything at all – anything at all – for “angels” and “devils”, yet still we arrive at God, alone.

And as God has said, “It is not good to be alone.”

We use words – don’t we? – to communicate to God? But is there any reason to think God even understands words? What need would God have for language? And if God knows what we need and what’s best for us and others before we pray for things, what do words – just noise, after all, whether vocalized or not – what do they add? What more do they add for God to take into account?

This is not an argument against prayer, but against words.

And nor does God use words to communicate to us, as far as I can see. It is not, of course, that God cannot learn any and all languages. It is that “learning” (like “speaking”) don’t function in reflection about God. They are attempts to bring God down to us, whereas God’s revealed intention is to bring us towards Him.

This is not an argument against listening, but against listening for words.

To say that there is an element of will involved with belief is true, and yet it hides as much as it reveals, perhaps even more. For it presupposes that we know what a belief is, and what a will or an act of will is. We use these and many other notions to get outside of ourselves and coordinate with others and with the particular circumstances of the world in which we find ourselves. They are in that way like hands and feet. Our hands and feet have no ‘meaning’ underlying their activity. We can say this, even though “meaning” itself is only useful in certain conversations, because we are currently having one of those conversations.

What we have is an individual dealing with the world. From outside we observe the individual and note certain consistencies. We use the language of “belief” and “will” as a verbal shorthand for discussing the individual with others, even if the others are only imaginary. (This is not to offer the “meaning” of the words, except in a very esoteric conversation.)

And what about from the inside?

Ah. Now we approach the community of God, where the conversations are of an entirely different nature.

Since this journal is, at bottom, a way of discussing my own religious beliefs, it is I hope, not too great a handicap to confess that I do not know what beliefs are, in the philosopher’s sense. I could not stand up under Socratic questioning about what they are; I can neither define them nor distinguish them in a fully satisfying way from other concepts like trust or faith. Contemporary philosophers, of course, like to define things in terms of hypotheticals and counterfactuals – in terms of what someone would do or say if something else were the case – and that is certainly a good form of mental exercise and enjoyable in its own way, especially when done in company with others of similar disposition. But I am not clever enough for that conversation, nor do I have patience enough to wait until its conclusions have all been examined and certified by at least a respectable majority of those who are.

So I must muddle along in the old-fashioned way of talking about beliefs, as if the topic were one intelligible to those without rigorous training in epistemology and linguistic analysis. I know – and I use ‘know’ advisedly, since I can’t define it either – that this procedure will leave some questions unanswered, and will almost certainly not satisfy those who march under a bleaker standard. But forgive me if I compare them to the child who demands a written guarantee of safety, complete with corroborative testimony and perhaps an independent measurement of depth, before releasing the tire and joining the children already splashing about in the forest pool below.

It isn’t Christ’s project to teach believers about the material world, but about the world of the Spirit. Great errors in understanding Jesus stem from a failure to appreciate the nature of the classroom in which we find ourselves.

So, when Christ instructs us not to worry about tomorrow, we must not rush to put that advice to the world’s test. If we do, we will find it to be very questionable, and we will be tempted to qualify or interpret it, in order to render it compatible with common sense and everyday observation.

But Christ is not saying that worrying impedes worldly success; there is no such testimony from Him to be cross-examined.

The worry Christ wants vigilance towards is our intellectual preoccupation with the possibility that we are being deceived by our horror of meaninglessness. That horror is certainly real, but it lies deep, too deep by far for us to reach. Its assuagement must be left to the Spirit. But our deference to it is something over which we have at least some control, and that is is the object of Christ’s instruction for believers.

For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and His ears are open to their prayers.

~1 peter 3:12

Peter is addressing Christians, not judging the world. (The Christian position towards the world is not as judge, but as guide.) Nor is he drawing a line between Christians, between the more or less righteous.

He is teaching us how to pray.

We are not advised to hunger and thirst after the righteousness of others, but after our own.  It is that personal desperation that solemnizes our prayer life, and draws God like a flower to the light.

The reward for the Christian is to see God.  Then it is a delayed reward?  A gift we receive once we have been fully purified?  And brought into the presence of the Almighty?

No.  Jesus is clear that seeing God is not reserved for another realm.  “He who has seen me,” he says, “has seen the Father.”

The reward for Christian living is to see God.  When you engage in acts of mercy in secret, God will reward you.  You will see God.

But I have been charitable in secret, and I still have not seen God?

O but you have done so.  In the mirror.

A path in its essence is a promise.  Someone from long ago is communicating with the traveller, making a commitment to show the way to a destination.

Walking on a path is therefore in essence an act of trust, of faith in someone unseen and unknown.  We stay on the path rather than cut through the woods or across the field, not because it’s an easier journey – it may be or not – but because we trust its promise.  Our obedience to the path is not coerced; it is in cooperation with our faith.

The path of the just is a path of trusting obedience.