The more miles I log on this winding spiritual journey of mine, the more I realize what I don’t know—and that what I don’t know is far less important than I used to think it was. Faith isn’t really a head game, after all. Faith is all about unknowing.
Faith as I see it is a little like paddling down an uncharted river. With time and practice (and plenty of mistakes), we learn to read the currents in the river and figure out where they might take us, to listen in the stillness for signs of rushing water ahead. In truth, we enter every turn utterly blind to what may be around the next bend. In faith, it's impossible to know where we are until we're there.
As we travel down our faith rivers, we might stir up a couple of whitetail does grazing along the riverbank, or a blue heron roosting, or a row of box turtles sunning themselves on a downed tree limb. We won’t find them unless we look. How often we fail to look! It’s conceivable we might spot an elusive bobcat or a moose. Maybe we’ll encounter a boulder, or a sandbar or fallen trees that block our way. If we’re not paying attention, we may find ourselves heading toward a waterfall—or over it. We really can’t know until we get there. We only know where we are when we pay attention.
Faith is all about relationships. Each relationship with God is entirely unique. And each relationship matters. Each relationship means everything—to us, and to God. In faith, we really don’t know what we’re in for until we’re in it. Until we learn to look and see and sense and wonder, we miss out on a lot. In fact, I think most of us miss the hints and scents and hidden presence of God in us and around us most of the time. It’s not because God isn’t there. It’s because we’re not paying close enough attention.
If nothing else, the Information Age has taught us that we’re in charge of everything that we know. If we push the right button, we get what we want. If we push the wrong button or don’t get the results we were hoping for, we try again. We have created lots of options for ourselves. Some of us treat our faith, our religion, our churches, as a set of choices over which we have control. We come to believe that if we push the right buttons, or say the right words, or find the right community, or read the right books, that we’ll get what we’re looking for—that we’ll arrive where we hope to arrive. We treat the Bible as a book of definitive answers that point us where we want to go. However, when we read scripture more carefully, attentively, faithfully, we find that it simply urges us further into our journeys. What we fail to realize is that our religious words and traditions and songs and prayers make up the river of God upon which our faith floats. Sometimes we confuse the river for the journey. We don’t move the river—the river moves us. We can only know where we are by paying close attention.
The older I get, the more I respect the mystics—those witnesses who, more than anything, practice paying close attention to God. Mystics don’t try to explain God. They certainly don’t try to control God. They simply paddle their way down the currents, paying grateful attention to the God-full sights and sounds they encounter along the way. Sometimes mystics encounter God directly. But most often they—and we—simply find evidence that God is near. We recognize the Artist by the artwork. Mystics don’t try to analyze or explain the properties of God as much as simply floating in God’s mystery. They don’t try to fight the currents of God that carry them around various curves and bends in the journey—they simply do their best to read the currents and allow themselves to flow into God, and allow God to flow into them.
If we learned to view ourselves more clearly as the ground in which the currents of God flow, and if believers learned to read these currents more closely and to follow them, I think we might discover closer intimacy with God. The 13th century German Dominican mystic, Meister Eckhart, reminds us that God is God IN US. The apostle Paul reminds us that our one God and father of all is above all and through all and in all (Ephesians 4:6). As soon as we let the currents of God carry us, and trust in God’s buoyancy, our faith journeys can continue—into the mystery of the God who awaits us, with us, around the next bend in the river. It takes courage and trust to lift our feet off the ground and let the currents of God carry us away into The Mystery. This is faith. This is the journey to which God calls us. We can’t move into God until we let ourselves go and let God take us how and where God will.
