A Search for Ultimate Answers
Questions like these fascinate me: why life? why religion? why human existence? why churches? why anything at all? This searching litany reminds me of patients who obsessively plead for conclusive facts: why me? why did it happen to me? why do I act as I do? We might end up speculating, at best, but identifying possible causes never seemed to change much in a person’s life. For my own catalogue of inquiries, I possess no final answers.
One patient described in these words a different approach. At his last session, he told me what our time together had meant to him: “When I came into therapy, I was teetering on the edge of a precipice, a breathtaking drop into a canyon whose bottom I could not see. I implored you to tell me why I was standing there and why I could catch no glimpse of the abyss’s floor. You never answered me. Instead, you somehow got me to move about fifteen feet to the left, turn sideways to the right, and from that vantage point peerdown between the canyon walls. In the distance I could see a river running out of it. From that moment on I no more felt trapped.”
The “somehow you got me to move” happened through shifting his “why” questions to “what” and “how” ones. As he balanced on that dangerous edge, I explored with him “what” he would like to have happen and then “how” he could do that. Day by day, we inched a torturous journey fifteen feet leftward.
When I finished four years of graduate theological studies, I knew about the Catholic Church, from its New Testament beginnings to its post-Vatican II present, all anyone could ever imagine. However, I realized at what a cost: I now knew less about God than I did when I began that heavyweight academic process. (Sort of like George Bush in Iraq: he lost Osama because he could more easily tackle Saddam; as the Church became intellectually more certain about God’s will, Divine mystery faded into its eternal mists.)
I first considered this a terrible state of affairs. Then I lucked into Paul Tillich’s Courage to Be and the God beyond God, the God we cannot capture by our minds or put into some secure rational box. I came to realize that I had to shift my focus (go fifteen feet to the left) from defining the Almighty to “catching God in the act.”
That happened in various ways: time vanished as I gazed at an awesome Mt. Rainier looming over me; I seemed to disappear as I entered into healing imagery with another; I lost both of us lovers when the vibrancy of presence became the only reality: no subject, no object, only the relating.
In those and similar moments I had some experience of being absorbed into a bigger/greater reality that took over running the show of me and my life. I suspect this touches Paul’s experience which fueled the exclamation: “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me.” I would add with the evangelist Luke an intimation of “the God in whom we live and move and have our being.”
I know what it feels like to be pulled up into the greater-than-me. It happens when I dare to flow outward in love. I need only to get out of the way and let Life live me. I know, not because I have answers, but because I have been there.
