CONVERGENCE
I've come to believe that balance is key in all things and never more so than when we approach spirituality. Someone once said there's a season for every activity of man, and I think this is right. What's more, once one learns to value both knowledge and mystery a very strange thing can happen: they can converge into a single experience, working in tandem to reinforce each other. For in understanding there is always a bit of wonder and in wonder a bit of understanding. Poor philosophy would have us believe they represent an opposing dichotomy, but I've not found this to be true. Life is full of irony, the least of which is that knowing can always infuse life with mystery and wonder can always infuse life with sensibility.
I tire of hearing that God belief makes no sense. God makes perfect sense. It’s all in how you regard it, what you consider sensible. But God is also wondrous, impenetrably enigmatic, and I don't anticipate it will ever be any other way. I'm happy living in both worlds. It is my home, and I find it suits me.
It's so much easier to go through life creating lines in the sand and demanding things be designated as belonging to one side or the other, but this is oftentimes an unnecessary and arbitrary human contrivance. It's easy because we have a beggar's scrap of security in knowing where everything is supposed to belong. But such meager security doesn't provide much comfort and it certainly isn't faith.
A remarkable teacher I once knew asked an assembly how many whiskers it takes to constitute a beard. Is there a definitive, critical number beyond which a beard exists, but up to which a beard does not? What is that number? Where is the line? Is there a line? We can recognize a beard and we can likewise recognize a clean-shaven face, so there must be a line somewhere - right? If there is, it's buried deep within the nebulous places that faith resides, nested within the difficult matters of life, where concrete classifications and definitive answers are not readily available or do not exist.
The relationship between understanding and wonder is just such a matter. One is tempted to either adopt a rigorous methodology of rational inquiry and skepticism in order to dissect God or go the opposite route and totally detach their mind from the process. If I'm being honest, I do not believe either is a faithful approach or a path to wisdom. The heart and the mind are not night and day, but more like sunrise and sunset. Under the right conditions, you can hardly tell the difference. Their stillness melds into one uniform experience, where the sun neither rises nor falls - a quiet, indescribable serenity where the difference no longer carries any meaning.