Holy Bewilderment<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Author Debie Thomas finds a worthy model of \u201choly bewilderment\u201d in the faith of Mary, revealed at the Annunciation (Luke 1:26\u201338):<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The second line I appreciate in the Annunciation story describes Mary\u2019s confusion: \u201cBut she was much perplexed.\u201d. . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is not that the Annunciation leads her out of doubt and into faith; it is that her encounter with the angel leads her out of certainty and into holy bewilderment. Out of familiar spiritual territory and into a lifetime of pondering, wondering, questioning, and wrestling. She was much perplexed.<\/em> Or, as she puts it to Gabriel: \u201cHow can this be?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like Mary, I was raised with a fairly precise and comprehensive picture of who God is and how God operates in the world. If anyone had asked me to describe God when I was fifteen, twenty, or thirty years old, I would have rattled off a list of divine attributes as readily as a kindergartner recites the alphabet: \u201cGod is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. God is Three and God is One. God is holy, perfect, loving, righteous, merciful, just, and sovereign.\u201d. . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n What an interesting shock reality has been. Who knew that my life with God would actually be one long goodbye? That to know God is to unknow <\/em>God? To shed my neat conceptions of the divine like so many old snakeskins and emerge into the world bare, vulnerable, and new, again and again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n This, of course, is what Mary has to do in the aftermath of Gabriel\u2019s announcement. She has to consent to evolve. To wonder. To stretch. She has to learn that faith and doubt are not opposites\u2014that beyond all the easy platitudes and pieties of religion, we serve a God who dwells in mystery. If we agree to embark on a journey with this God, we will face periods of bewilderment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But this frightens us, so we compartmentalize our spiritual lives, trying to hold our relationships with God at a sanitized remove from our actual circumstances. We don\u2019t realize that such efforts leave us with a faith that\u2019s rigid, inflexible, and stale. In his wise and beautiful memoir, My Bright Abyss<\/em>, poet Christian Wiman writes,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life\u2014which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived\u2014or have denied the reality of your life. [1]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In other words, it\u2019s when our inherited beliefs collide with the messy circumstances of our lives that we go from a two-dimensional faith to one that is vibrant and textured.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Holy Bewilderment Author Debie Thomas finds a worthy model of \u201choly bewilderment\u201d in the faith of Mary, revealed at the Annunciation (Luke 1:26\u201338): The second line I appreciate in the Annunciation story describes Mary\u2019s confusion: \u201cBut she was much perplexed.\u201d. . . It is not that the Annunciation leads her out of doubt and into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21891"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21891"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21892,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21891\/revisions\/21892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n