ah i was so much older then...

As I look backwards on my life, one thing is clear: I now value unknowing more than certainty. Its not that a don't crave clarity, I do; but at a deeper level I am aware that knowing is not the same as understanding. Like Fr. Richard Rohr says: 

When I am faithful to meditation, I quickly overcome the illusion that my correct thinking, or thinking more about something, can ever get me there. If that were so, every good PhD would be a saint! You see, information is not the same as transformation. Even good and correct thinking is trapped inside my little mind, my particular culture, my form of education, my parental conditioning—all of which are good and all of which are bad. Great mysteries are naturally experienced and known within our small and limited contexts, so we should be much more humble about our own opinions and thoughts. How could the Infinite ever be fully or rightly received by the mere finite?

One of the under-appreciated blessings of failure is discovering how much we don't understand: wisdom is not guaranteed with age, yet longevity offers us the possibility of acquiring humility if we are willing to learn from our mistakes. Such openness not only makes room for authentic insight beyond our opinions, but also creates the possibility for holding different perspectives together at the same time with the awareness that they all can be true. Some call it paradox, others say trust, but whatever your description non-binary living embraces truths more profound than mere data. Karen Armstrong is helpful when she writes: 

One of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp. We constantly push our thoughts to an extreme, so that our minds seem to elide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence. . . . Language has borders that we cannot cross. When we listen critically to our stuttering attempts to express ourselves, we become aware of an inexpressible otherness. “It is decisively the fact that language does have frontiers,” explains the British critic George Steiner, “that gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvellously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours.” 

She goes on to observe that many in the West lost the ability to trust unknowing given the modern quest for certainty. Born of the marriage of science and industry, our perspective shrank to include only factual, quantifiable truth. We call it bottom-line thinking and it has its place - no one wants an engineer working on a bridge to rely only on intuition - but its dominance has caused our imaginations and souls to atrophy. The fundamentalism in religion and politics that so drive contemporary life is rooted in binary vision. Armstrong continues:

We are seeing a great deal of strident dogmatism today, religious and secular, but there is also a growing appreciation of the value of unknowing [and unsaying]. We can never re-create the past, but we can learn from its mistakes and insights. There is a long religious tradition that stressed the importance of recognizing the limits of our knowledge, of silence, reticence, and awe... One of the conditions of enlightenment has always been a willingness to let go of what we thought we knew in order to appreciate truths we had never dreamed of. (In the 21st century, we) may have to unlearn a great deal about religion before we can move on to new insight.

My spiritual tradition speaks of this as "dying to self." Both Jesus and St. Paul taught that "when I was young I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and acted like a child; now that I have matured, the time has come to put childish things away... for now we see as through a glass darkly, later we shall see face to face." The 12th chapter of St. John's gospel is illustrative: it begins with Mary of Bethany anointing the feet of Jesus with precious perfumed oil in anticipation of his death - a death that will usher in resurrection. Next we read of a plot by those who hate Jesus that is designed to re-kill the resurrected Lazarus in order to kill the Jesus movement with fear. 

Finally Jesus tells his disciples a truth about death that is greater than death: "Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor." Jean Vanier has learned that one of the ways we die to self involves acquiring wisdom through humility.

To grow (to ripen or mature) is to learn to die. Is this not the ultimate meaning of our lives? As we grow we leave behind us many things. If we spend time weeping over the past we become imprisoned in that past. We must certainly grieve what we have lost, but we must live freely the new realities of the present and we must wait in hope for new life. And so each one of us will makes the final passage of death, waiting for that new gift which we shall welcome; the embrace of the eternal.

Having discarded 40+ years of written sermon material this past week, and taken the time to read through samples from each of the decades, I was reminded of how just how much I thought I knew when I started ministry. All these years later, I suspect that St. Bob Dylan got it right when he sang, "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that know." In any event, such is my prayer for the time that remains.