God as Mystery

Brian McLaren (again!) : Poetry is sane because it floats easily on an infinite sea. Reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite: the result is mental exhaustion… The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

Reading about the Orthodox Church (Greek Orthodox in particular) I am struck by how easily they acknowledge the unattainable mystery of God. This creates no particular problems, faith struggles or paradox for them, rather, it emphasizes the trust we must all have in God (though I sometimes think I hate to admit it). A part of me struggles against this attitude, calling it "anti-intellectual" or "lazy" or "complacent". The rest of me knows that God really is all these things, and it is a sin of hubris to claim otherwise! How dare I, a mere created creature, claim to be able to understand the mind of God - the claim is ludicrous! And yet, is that not exactly what I complain about in connection with my lack of understanding about the "why" of the tsunami, of hell, of unanswered prayer, of failings and fallenness within the church?

I love it that the Bible is not purely reasonable - it engages with our emotions, it wails and cries out, as well as teaches. It has the language of love, of poetry, of doubt, of war and of mystery. We cannot understand it all, yet with the help of the Holy Spirit we can understand more than we think, if we listen with the heart and soul, as well as the mind.