Why
do so many people - even the ones ready to believe there IS a God -
reject the God of Christianity out of hand? For a possible answer, let's
look at a parable.
Imagine a snail. A special, magical snail.
We'll call her Shellie. You can tell Shellie is special because her
shell is sparkly, and you can tell she's magical because she has a tiny
unicorn horn. And wings. (Just go with me here.)
Now suppose Shellie the magic snail has a mystical vision of a human being. Let's say... Jeff Goldblum.
Shellie is awe-struck and overwhelmed (this was during Goldblum's Jurassic Park
years) and rushes off to report to the
other snails what she's seen. In trying to describe Jeff Goldblum,
however, Shellie largely has to rely on the things he is NOT. She will
explain that this being has no shell, no eye stalks, and leaves no trail
of slime. And some of the other snails, having had similar visions of
Jeff Goldblum, start to get an idea of what he is like.
Ah, but here come the Philosopher Snails, the snail society experts. These Philosopher Snails have had no visions of Jeff Goldblum, and therefore only take away from Shellie's vision the negatives, or the things Jeff Goldblum is not.
The Philosopher Snails decide that since Jeff Goldblum has no shell, he must
be a blob of jelly. Since Jeff Goldblum has no eye stalks, he must be
blind. And since Jeff Goldblum leaves no trail of slime, he must wear a
giant diaper.
The Philosopher Snails agree that Jeff
Goldblum is to be revered, however, and start teaching the other snails that
the highest level of existence is to be a blind blob of jelly wearing a
diaper. Any snail who tries to say otherwise - to explain that Jeff
Goldblum has a definite shape and form and even eyes - is dismissed for being too superstitious, radical, or stupid.
In
this parable we are the Philosopher Snails, and Shellie and her
fellow vision-receiving snails are the prophets of old. These
prophets and saints saw glimpses of God in all His overwhelming
power and joy. They realized that God so surpasses human limitations
and qualities that they had to use negatives to describe Him: unlimited, immaterial, infinite. (Not limited, not material, not finite.) The prophets used negative descriptors, but they knew first-hand the overwhelming positives of the living God.
Then we come along, and as we look at the divine records the prophets left us, we tend to take away only those negatives to form our impression of God. We don't have their first-hand experiences, so our picture of God is more a blank sea of what He isn't than what He is.
In fact, the
more we learn about God the less human She can become in our minds, which
is both good and dangerous. It's good because God is far
BETTER than humans, so of course we should strip away the human flaws when thinking of Her, things like selfishness or
pride or cruelty. The danger, though, is that while stripping away human weaknesses, we fail to replace them with divine strengths. Eventually we can take away so much that we're left worshiping a vague, faceless non-entity; an impersonal God who's nothing more than a bright
light in the clouds, or a vast darkness beyond the galaxies.
So what can we do?
Living out our faith is the answer to this negative-based, incomplete
picture. A single moment of honest repentance or joyful
gratitude will remind us that God is not some abstract light in the
clouds, but a living, opinionated, active Being working for our good.
Of
course we should try to fill our minds with Scripture and knowledge about God, but we need more to truly know Him. If you want to solve the mystery of Schroedinger's
Cat, then at some point you have to put down all the research and hypotheses, get up, and go open the box. So it
is with God. To paint an accurate picture in our minds, we need more than the chapter and verse; we also need our senses. We need an experiential
knowledge of Him.
As long as we are like the
Philosopher Snails, relying solely on the written records of those who
came before, and ignoring our own responsibilities to experience the
divine, we forget that others HAVE experienced God - and
more fully than we can ever imagine. We forget that such a divine experience
is even possible. We forget that our limited, negative-based knowledge
of God - awe-inspiring and overwhelming as it is - is merely a remnant of what those prophets before us experienced first-hand.
Suggested Reading: Psalm 34:4-22
Study Questions:
1) What do you see when you try to imagine God?
2) Do you think there is a danger in having a mental picture of God? Why or why not?
3) Have you ever had an experience with God that confirmed something you already knew about Him - something that made your knowledge more real?
4) Have you ever felt closer to God than you do now? If so, when? Why do you think you felt differently then?
5) What can you do tomorrow to experience God more than you have today?
*****
Original Text: Imagine a Mystical Limpet
Why are so
many people prepared in advance to maintain that, whatever else God may
be, He is not the concrete, living, willing, and acting God of Christian
theology? I think the reason is as follows. Let us suppose a mystical
limpet, a sage among limpets, who (rapt in vision) catches a glimpse of
what Man is like. In reporting it to his disciples, who have some vision
themselves (though less than he) he will have to use many negatives. He
will have to tell them that Man has no shell, is not attached to a
rock, is not surrounded by water. And his disciples, having a little
vision of their own to help them, do get some idea of Man. But then
there come erudite limpets, limpets who write histories of philosophy,
and give lectures on comparative religion, and who have never had any
vision of their own. What they get out of the prophetic limpet's words
is simply and solely the negatives. From these, uncorrected by any
positive insights, they build up a picture of Man as a sort of amorphous
jelly (he has no shell) existing nowhere in particular (he is not
attached to a rock) and never taking nourishment (there is no water to
drift it towards him). And having a traditional reverence for Man they
conclude that to be a famished jelly in a dimensionless void is the
supreme mode of existence, and reject as crude, materialistic
superstition any doctrine which would attribute to Man a definite shape,
a structure, and organs.
- Miracles
B) Original Text: "Not Naked But Reclothed"
Our own
situations is much like that of the erudite limpets. Great prophets and
saints have an intuition of God which is positive and concrete in the
highest degree. Because, just touching the fringes of His being, they
have seen that He is plenitude of life and energy and joy, therefore
(and for no other reason) they have to pronounce that He transcends
those limitations which we call personality, passion, change,
materiality, and the like. The positive quality in Him which repels
these limitations is their only ground for all the negatives. But when
we come limping after and try to construct an intellectual or
"enlightened" religion, we take over these negatives (infinite,
immaterial, impassible, immutable, etc.) and use them unchecked by any
positive intuition. At each step we have to strip off from our idea of
God some human attribute. But the only real reason for stripping off the
human attribute is to make room for putting in some positive divine
attribute. In St. Paul's language, the purpose of all this unclothing is
not that our idea of God should reach nakedness but that it should be
reclothed. But unhappily we have no means of doing the reclothing. When
we have removed from our idea of God some puny human characteristic, we
(as merely erudite or intelligent enquirers) have no resources from
which to supply that blindingly real and concrete attribute of Deity
which ought to replace it. Thus at each step in the process of
refinement our idea of God contains less, and the fatal pictures come in
(an endless, silent sea, an empty sky beyond all stars, a dome of white
radiance) and we reach at last mere zero and worship a nonentity.
- Miracles
C) Original Text: O Taste and See
The
Christian statement that only He who does the will of the Father will
ever know the true doctrine is philosophically accurate. Imagination may
help a little: but in the moral life, and (still more) in the
devotional life we touch something concrete which will at once begin to
correct the growing emptiness of our idea of God. One moment even of
feeble contrition or blurred thankfulness will, at least in some degree,
head us off from the abyss of abstraction. It is Reason herself which
teaches us not to rely on Reason only in this matter. For Reason knows
that she cannot work without materials. When it becomes clear that you
cannot find out by reasoning whether the cat is in the linen cupboard,
it is Reason herself who whispers, "Go and look. This is not my job: it
is a matter for the senses." So here. The materials for correcting our
abstract conception of God cannot be supplied by Reason: she will be the
first to tell you to go and try experience - "Oh, taste and see!" For
of course she will have already pointed out that your present position
is absurd. As long as we remain Erudite Limpets we are forgetting that
if no one had ever seen more of God than we, we should have no reason
even to believe Him immaterial, immutable, impassible and all the rest
of it. Even that negative knowledge which seems to us so enlightened is
only a relic left over from the positive knowledge of better men - only
the pattern which that heavenly wave left on the sand when it retreated.
- Miracles
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