Not Knowing

This is an idea that I've been thinking of for a while but is kind of hard to explain. 

That being said, I will try. Here goes nothing.

In faith one must accept--sooner or later--that God is unknowable. Or at the very least, unknowable in total (no matter how confident you may be in your personal relationship with the divine, you cannot pretend to know all that is God). This is the most commonly referred to idea around not-knowing and it is the great conundrum that has stumped religious thinkers for millennia. The simple fact is that no matter how much one thinks about God, or studies theology, or debates on dogma, language will eventually fall short. Experiences of God cannot be classified easily and anyone who attempts to describe them will inevitably feel frustrated in the effort (see 2 Corinthians 12:1-4*). We can explain all we want--a valuable and interesting exercise in its own right--but at some point we must acknowledge our limits and return to the time honored concept of "mystery". Because that, in the end, is God. That is faith. It's beyond language and experience and understanding. It is vast and amorphous and confusing. It's something that we can never be certain about even if we are certain about the feeling. It's trusting that there's something bigger than us and that we are not totally alone.

But my sense of not knowing goes beyond mystery. It goes beyond believing in something ineffable. What "not knowing" has come to mean to me is the glorious recognition that I have fallen short before and will surely fall short again but in that fall there is an opportunity to learn, to see what I had not seen, and to understand just a little bit more of this wonderful and challenging thing that is life. So often when I assume I have something figured out, when I assume that I have someone pegged, when I assume that I know what is best, I get walloped with the grace of failure. One could say this is a situation of pride coming before the fall--and there is a little bit of that here--but I feel that this sensation goes beyond any misplaced confidence or hubris. Because my ideas or assumptions beforehand were rarely wrong they were just incomplete. And when faced with new facts, when confronted with an expanded picture, I recognize that I didn't know; that I was thinking simplistically and I had grown overly assured of my own place in things. The messiness of life and the varied shades of gray, the definite reminder that there is more to the story than I had first thought--these are all opportunities to let God in. To admit fault, to recognize my limits, and to embrace the fact that God--that life--still has a lot more to teach me. When I embrace "not knowing" and I get over any attempts to control or shape things, I am given the opportunity to experience what is in front of me and to be present to all that I have (as easy or as hard as that may be). 

And that, I believe, is where God is; in the uncertainty of the present. When I stop knowing--or stop trying to know--will I begin to understand. 



* The point I am trying to make is unfortunately subject to translation but I am inclined to follow the logic of something like the Contemporary English Version (and though I won't pretend to know much about these sorts of things, I don't think I'm swimming entirely against scholarly consensus with this)

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Corinthians+12&version=CEV