Talking back..

I am spending this week at Trinity School for Ministry for the Ancient Wisdom, Anglican Futures conference. As I've always been the type to talk back, there's plenty of blog fodder here. How tempting to (as I am doing right now) sit in lectures and use this space to talk back to the lecturers, to think out loud a bit, to percolate.

An unintentional theme of the conference seems to be the need to know. Its that Protestant, Enlightenment, Baptized Humanistic viewpoint that just wants to know. So we seek and ask (great stuff there) and expect that somehow our small finite minds have some hope of understanding. Two temptations then emerge, the desire to explain away what we don't understand and the subconscious humanism that believes we have, as a human family, grown in our understanding from generation to generation. The latter problem is epidemic in the west, where we value our own learning so greatly that we dismiss the African as ignorant and backwards, and quietly assume our ancestors were uneducated and underenlightened.

Across the screen this afternoon have appeared the words "the Age of Reason" in the speaker's notes. And even this common title is a symptom of the disease, for it implies that the ages before were unreasonable, underdeveloped. Enlightenment assumes a dark age, the Academy seeks to add to the body of knowledge, further our common understanding.

But in reality it is not an adding on, progress, but in fact an exchange of goods. For our modern technology we have exchanged our connection with the cycles and seasons of earth. For our knowledge of facts and figures, sciences and such, we have exchanged our comfort with mystery and true magic. And we come to assume that cycles and rhythms, magic and mystery are primative, that these are not things we need.

But the life of the church shows otherwise. A rationalized faith is one that is just as easily rationalized away. When we let our opposition set the rules, we are destined to lose the game; yet we consistently allow the world, the secular culture, humanism and darwinism and rationalism set the rules. And in doing so we lose the magic, we strip away the mystery. And when we have done so, we are reduced to pointless rationalization or empty emotionalism, and the heart is separated from the head.

But the point of mystery is to unite the rational mind and the emotional heart. To experience something with the senses that can be explained only partly to the mind, to be consumed in a sense of "wonder and radical amazement" (to borrow the words of Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel). For we cannot begin to understand the infinite without also beginning to understand that we are finite. We cannot rationalize the mystery, the creation of our God, because it is bigger than we are, always expanding, growing faster than our own minds can catch. How much less can we control the Creator, who was and is and is to come.

We do theology in community, but even the "hive mind" cannot fully grasp the mystery. This is what we signed on for, something bigger than ourselves.