Yesterday was not great. I felt off, weak, and really weepy. I hate it when that happens.
Then God showed up. I never cease to be amazed at the way God speaks in clusters of events and experiences. This happened to me yesterday and this morning again. Yesterday, I had a long drive to make, so I listened to a podcast from the Bible Project called How To Read the Bible Part 5: Why isn’t there more detail in Bible Stories. Jon and Tim discuss how the Biblical stories intentionally leave out detail so that the reader can enter into them and fill in their own detail. This allows the stories to take on many lives and speak in many ways to multiple readers. It is the Jewish way of narrative and meditation.
Then this morning I read some more in Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality by Richard Rohr. This is a wonderful book that I look forward to completing. Rohr speaks of spiritual development as a progression through the three “ways” or paths of consciousness. He says,
(1) We start with tribal thinking; (2) we gradually move toward individuation through the dialogue of election, failure and grace; (3) then there is a breakthrough to unitive consciousness by the few who are led and walk fully through those first two stages (Moses, David, many prophets, Job, Mary, the Magdalene, Jesus, Paul). We could describe it also as (1) Simple Consciousness, (2) Complex Consciousness and (3) Non-Dual Consciousness or “the unitive way.”
This third way of knowing is less like the Greek/Western way of intellectual assent and agreement, and more like the Hebrew tradition of relational knowing. The Bible invites us into this, in the way the Jon and Tim talk about it. Rohr says it is an invitation to mystery.
Mystery is not something that you cannot understand, but it is something that is endlessly understandable!
It is that necessity of personal experience that grounds all true religion and is constantly illustrated by story and character in the Bible. The great figures in the Bible do not just “believe,” they somehow know. But they know mysteriously. Let’s give a concrete example. Christians speak of the “paschal mystery,” the process of loss and renewal that was lived and personified in the death and raising up of Jesus. We can affirm that belief in ritual and song, as we do in the Eucharist, but until people have lost their foundation and ground, and then experienced God upholding them so that they come out even more alive on the other side, the expression “paschal mystery” is little understood and not essentially transformative. Paschal mystery is a doctrine that Christians would probably intellectually assent to, but it is not yet the very cornerstone of one’s life philosophy. That is the difference between belief systems and living faith. We move from one to the other only through encounter, surrender, trust and an inner experience of presence and power.
Biblical knowing is more akin to face-to-face presence. It is a full-body knowing, a cellular knowing, and thus the word often used for “knowing” in key biblical texts is actually the word for “carnal knowledge” or sexual intimacy!
This is why we can read the Bible, and enact the words of institution and share communion week after week without it getting stale. Well, if we allow ourselves to enter into the mysterious, relational knowing, it doesn’t have to become stale.
I pray that I am centered in the One God who knows me, so that I can know that I am known and loved. This, then allows me to look at you, to know you, and to love you. It is when I forget my center that I start to sink.
That happened to me yesterday. I have been running hard for the past three weeks and I nearly had a breakdown. The words of God, channeled through Jon, Tim, and Richard this morning have helped me get centered again. It is through these experiences of emptiness, renewal, and God’s speaking through others that we continually, and mysteriously, know God more. Thanks, guys.
glad you had a glimpse which nourished you!
I needed to hear this so badly. Thank you for reminding me who loves me, as I have also been floundering.