Father Richard explains how living with paradox can open us to experience the mystery of God:
The question we must ask ourselves is, “How do we live the contradictions?” Live them—not just endure them or relieve ourselves from the tension by quickly resolving them. The times when we meet or reckon with our contradictions are often turning points, opportunities to enter into the deeper mystery of God. I’m deliberately using the word mystery to point to depth, an open future, immense freedom, a kind of beauty and truth that cannot be fully spoken or defined.
Many mystics speak of the God-experience as simultaneously falling into an abyss and being grounded. This sounds like a contradiction, but when we allow ourselves to fall into the abyss—into hiddenness, limitlessness, unknowability, a void without boundaries—we discover it’s somehow a rich, supportive, embracing spaciousness where we don’t have to ask (or answer) the questions of whether we’re right or wrong. We’re being held and so do not need to try to “hold” ourselves together. Please reflect on that.
This might be the ultimate paradox of the God-experience: “falling into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). When we can give ourselves to it and not fight it or explain it, falling into the abyss is ironically an experience of ground, of the rock, of the foundation. This is totally counterintuitive. Our dualistic, logical mind can’t get us there. It can only be known experientially. That’s why the mystics use magnificent metaphors—none of them adequate or perfect—for this experience.
Mystery is not something we can’t know. Mystery is endless knowability on many different levels. Living inside such endless knowability is finally a comfort, a foundation of ultimate support, security, unrestricted love, and eternal care. It usually takes much of our life to get there; it’s surely what we mean by “growing” in faith. Each soul must learn on its own, hopefully aided by observing other faith-filled people.
The source of spiritual wisdom is to hold questions and contradictions patiently, much more than to find quick certitudes, to rush to closure or judgment as the ego and dualistic mind want to do. The ego wants to know it is right. It wants to stand on its own self-created “solid” ground—not the mysterious solid ground of the abyss. This is why so much religion remains immature and is often a hiding place for people who want to be in control instead of people trained in giving up control to a Loving Presence.
A mature friend or a good spiritual director will companion us as we learn how to negotiate the darkness, how to wait it out, how to hold on, how to live in liminal or threshold space. The dualistic mind just doesn’t know how to do that. The dualistic mind cannot deal with paradox, but the nondual mind can. In fact, it almost relishes and revels in mystery. Nondual consciousness is at home inside of the abyss.
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1.
“God is at home, it is we who have gone out for a walk.“
– Meister Eckhart, 13th Century German Preacher
What do you think this quote means?
2.
“We do not preach great things; we live them.“
– North African Christian Saying from the 3rd Century AD
What we do is more important than what we say.
3.
“‘[Josiah] defended the cause of the poor and the needy, and so all went well.
Is that not what it means to know me?’ Declares the Lord.“
Currently, I am halfway through Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination: A Theological Biography by Conrad Kanagy. It is amazing.
Just before Covid hit the world, I began reading Brueggemann’s work and found it to be incredibly timely. There are many people for whom the Prophets only pointed to Jesus, which is a massive disservice to the Prophets as a whole.
The Nevi’im (Prophets) existed because they were called by God to rail against and to hold accountable the religious and political leaders of their day for having lost the plot, for having accepted bribes, for failing to implement true justice, and for being more oppressors with their power rather than liberators.
Brueggemann is a biblical scholar with his emphasis being on the book of Jeremiah.
According to the biography, Jeremiah 22:16 caused a radical shift within Brueggemann to realize that “the cause of the poor and the needy” IS the knowledge of God, not a cause or an effect, it IS the knowledge of God.
4.
“To hope for all souls is imperative; and it is quite tenable that their salvation is inevitable.“
– G.K. Chesterton, British Catholic Author
It has been a long time since I divorced myself from the version of Christianity that has a morbid fascination with Hell and damnation. In all honesty, being raised Lutheran, they were never really a part of my framework or understanding…
Over time, though, I came across figures who I looked up to from church history who also disbelieved that the unconditional love and grace of God would damn anyone eternally. Figures such as GK Chesterton, Soren Kierkegaard, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, George MacDonald, and so many others.
After stumbling across these figures, I chose to go back to the original languages of the Old and New Testaments and was pleasantly surprised by what I found… whole passages talking about the restoration, reconciliation, and renewal of ALL.
I believe it’s in there, folks, we were simply told not to find it in the English translations that already downplay it. The Good News is good for ALL.
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