Rohr, Palmer: The Holy Mystery
Guest Writer: Trent Palmer
"…For fifty years we should all basically stop using the word God. Because . . . we normally don't have a clue what we are talking about!" Down through the centuries Christians have used God to support all kinds of ungodly things – “wars, prejudices, and dominations” of all kinds. Instead, Richard Rohr suggests, we should approach God with humility and simply refer to God as "the Holy Mystery". Perhaps then we might recognize and accept over time that “we understand very little.” (Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance, pg. 89).
Langley Divine Dance
For many of us, the faith we have inherited and been taught is a source of great stability, and supports our understandings of life, God, and ourselves. We draw great comfort from this . . . until we find ourselves unexpectedly challenged and confronted in our beliefs, sometimes even by our scriptures and our own faith community. That can be quite unsettling and threatening.
In a passage from the Gospel of Matthew (22:23-33), some Sadducees angrily approached Jesus, concerning his teachings on the resurrection. The Sadducees held no belief in life after death, and they attempted to show Jesus the flaws in HIS thinking on the subject. The Sadducees did what we often do when our long-held beliefs are challenged . . . they became defensive, argumentative, and tried to justify themselves. This, sadly, sounds very familiar in our current divisive political and social climate.
In those moments when we are challenged in our thinking, we too, like the Sadducees, can struggle to hold onto our little mind thinking - where anyone who challenges my ideas is the enemy, where confusing or paradoxical thoughts must be wrong, and where things that cannot be seen or touched, must not be real. Or . . . we can open our hearts and our minds to the Holy Mystery, who invites us to live humbly with things we don't understand, to chew on ideas that challenge our thinking, and to wait patiently for a new understanding that is deeper than the one we now hold.
Trent Palmer, first published in Morning Reflection, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, December 11, 2017