I stood in the cold parking lot, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, inhaling the second-hand smoke from his cigarette. I’ve always liked cigarette smoke. My friend stood a few paces from me, his black hood pulled over his narrow and hawkish face, cutting off the light from the lamppost so that only his nose and white teeth were visible to the white light. His long black beard, lined with grey, was framed by his thin black hair that spilled out of the hooded portal like a dark river.
A cloaked Rasputin smoking a Marlboro.
A prophet or a hermit, with an affinity for death metal. It’s true - I’ve never seen my friend without some obscure death metal band shirt on. Always black. He was telling me about a vision he has in his mind regarding God and destiny. His vision goes something like this:
I imagine this field, right? This field of workers. All bent low and stooping to their scythes, or whatever, and they’re all busy toiling away. But off over there is a forest, we’ll say an enchanted forest. Because every forest is really enchanted.
He smiles and leans in, gesturing with his hands like he’s conjuring a spell.
And out of this forest drifts a song, or a melody of voices, out across the field. Some workers pay it no mind, others wave it off grumpily. But some…some raise their heads from their labor and begin to look around.
He raises his face to meet mine. His eyes are wide as if to imitate the wonder of the imagined workers.
“What is that?” They ask themselves. And slowly they drop their tools, stand upright, stretching their backs, and begin to wander towards the woods. The enchanted woods, right? They wander to it, as if in a dream, feeling compelled to follow the song. Others don’t. Others stick to their work. But the few who follow are the ones who heard…and listened.
Anyway, that was my vision the other night.
He pulled al long drag from his withering cigarette and send the plume heavenward in tribute.
Over the past year I’ve grown tired. Very tired. What is it Bilbo said? Too much jam and not enough bread, or something like that. The very notions of what the world “is” are becoming muttled and torn. The slick and rational scientific explanations for my experiences, other people, and the cosmos have aged like the contents of a fruit drawer in a dead fridge. Moldy, squishy, and entirely unappetizing.
That’s where my friend came into my life. He exists like this ethereal being, the quest giver, on the outside of my frame. In the periphery of my zeitgeist, he keeps pulling the camera frame to him to show me the stars. He’s a sort of Tyler Durden to my, well…Tyler Durden. If Tyler Durden was an Eastern Orthodox father of four who loved star gazing.
You see, I’ve been a Christian most of my life and I’ve always possessed the “answers” to the questions. I was raised under a brand of tutelage that taught me to wield the analytical scalpel, the apologetic pliers, and the rhetorical forceps masterfully. And I’ll be fair and say that I am immeasurably grateful for it and I love using those tools. Always will.
I believe in them.
They’re real tools.
But recently I’ve begun to feel like Truman on the Truman Show when he starts to notice the patterns and interpret the patterns and realize the patterns seem off or obtuse to his intuition. The patterns lead him to understand how small he is, how confined, and how big the “outside” reality is - outside the dome.
It’s not that my faith in God is dwindling. By no means. I am hungrier for Christ than ever before. And by no means am I deconstructing! Rather I am CONstructing beyond the strictures of what my upbringing can answer; what a rational, materialistic, empirical, “scientific” formula can answer.
Because no amount of math, science, reasoning, or rhetoric can make a sunset more beautiful, an Elk’s call more haunting, or my wife’s eyes more intoxicating. They just are - my intellect be damned.
So what is it that points at and mocks my intelligence, my knowledge, and my academic strivings? What is it that dares me to believe the stars are the spirits of ancient Kings and heroes, with a spindly finger (wrapped in flowers) beckoning “COME HITHER!”
What is that White Stag that calls me?
→ MYSTERY ←
I feel that the tradition of Christianity I’ve grown up in has been extremely effective at raising up thinkers, but not so great at raising up song-listeners, cave mystics, or poets. Great at theologians, not so great at desert prophets or fireside story tellers. So cerebral that the mystery has been squeezed out, drop by drop until a dried (but extremely well catalogued) husk remains.
(Again, don’t mistake me: Thinkers, apologists, and theologians are good and Godly and beautiful and necessary for the health and correction of the Body of Christ).
But my Christian Protestant ancestors were iconoclasts and statue breakers and now I’m left with Churches with no domes or statues and names like “First Baptist”, like someone held a race and they broke the tape. As if they were first to discover some artifact or map a new content. You wander inside and the nearest thing they have to paintings are the flannel graphs and paintings of wealthy (dead) donors and deacons and pastors. The nearest thing they have to statues are the lone, wooden crosses adorning everything (CUZ JESUS AIN’T ON THE CROSS NO MORE).
Now, without throwing too much shade at the Reformers or their progeny, I will narrow my grievances to one point and one alone.
They destroyed the mystery.
No, that’s not right.
Because I don’t believe you can actually destroy a mystery.
You can only stop talking about it; put it in the corner of the room and put a blanket over it, or bury it in the backyard next to the dog. But you can’t kill it. It’s still there and you know it.
And it’s that knowing that gnaws at you, like a rat at the baseboards or a leak in the attic.
You’ll notice eventually.
It’ll always move closer.
You won’t be able to bear it any longer, after you have no more baseboards and the ceiling is falling in and you’re soaking wet.
Half inch by half inch.
All you can do is search for the bottom of the mystery, like the bottom of a cave or a can of Pringles that your hand is too big to fit into. And that’s the most wonderful thing about the mysteries of God: they’re unplumbable. Meaning that they can never be made known and thereby rendered NOT mysterious. They are mysteries by their very nature of being extensions of God, who is mysterious. God is a mystery, a Holy and relational mystery, but a mystery nonetheless.
So what can you do?
You can listen to the mystery, pocket your tool, and follow it into the woods.
For after a time, if you’re paying attention, you’ll hear words coming out of the grave behind the shed or from under the sheet and they’ll be in a language you don’t understand. A language you once knew, but not anymore. Maybe if you asked the neighborhood child, with dirty knees and twigs in her hair. Maybe she’d know.
But what are those words?
Stories of Saints.
Fairy tales.
Tales of snakes, gardens, floods, giants, wars, kings, demons, angels, gods, fire, love, justice, and a naked God on a cross.
Cosmic scandal that weaves itself into a tapestry so huge and violently colorful that it makes the Naturalist vomit and the New Atheist punch the air in impotent anger.
For you see, our God, (the Christian God of the Holy Scriptures revealed in Christ Jesus who died on the cross and rose again after having defeated death and ripping a certain curtain) is so wild and so untamed that he cannot be fully known, or even partially known to any scientifically satisfactory extent.
Did you hear me?
God cannot be fully known.
For if he was, then he wouldn’t be God because we’d have no need of him. For to be known is to be named and to be named is to be owned. And we will never own God. That’s why God had Adam name the animals as part of his purpose, to have dominion over them. Naming is oral, it is eating, it is the total capture of a thing. That’s why slander and lying are so reprehensible and why God warns us that the tongue can burn forests down. Words are a bear trap. Name it and claim it, as the saying goes.
And you can’t name God. What name did God give Moses at the burning bush?
I AM THAT I AM
What a painful, awful, wonderful, terrible, perfect name for God. He is because He is. He is.
He just is.
How the hell can you know something like that? How the hell can you begin to understand a God whose only understandable name is something akin to “EXISTENCE”?
You can’t. And thank Him for that.
So anyway. I’m off on a journey into the misty forests and mountains, hunting for a “Mossy Christ”, as Martin Shaw calls Him. If you need me, I’ll be sitting beneath an icon of Christ, weeping for it all. Maybe smoking a cigarette.
Sincerely,
BTW