I was a pre-med student until my first Chemistry test. In fact, my first two years of college were a struggle for me. The transdisciplinary academic requirements for a liberal arts education were demanding (I stole a C in Discreet Math, aptly named I thought) , and I was homesick. But I survived and finally upon entering my junior year I could declare my major; English it would be; so I then fell in love with the richness of the college experience and the world of knowledge: the prose of Melville, Joyce and Faulkner; the poetry of the Romantics; of Hardy, Yeats, Eliot and Auden, and Stevens and Frost and Dickinson, and….. We would stay up late at night and argue with all due passion why Ireland arguably produced the three greatest literary artists of the twentieth century; Yeats for poetry, Joyce for prose, and Shaw for theater. We were awash with all this knowledge, our passions for the world and the world’s beauty called into life….And then they made me graduate…and sent me out into the real world wherein no one much cared about the last six lines of The Waste Land, or the meaning of the Sea Eagle in Moby Dick.
And then some twenty five years later a mysterious thing happened. I entered seminary and found again the thrill of learning. New Knowledge in a new discipline. Knowledge/ology….(Logos may be translated: spoken knowledge). Theology (God Knowledge); Christology (Christ knowledge); Ontology (knowledge of being); Eschatology (knowledge of end times) Soteriology (knowledge of salvation) The passionate conversations with class mates come round again after so many years, all of us awash again in the richness of learning about the faith: Its history, its sacramental and interpretive witness. And then they made me graduate and sent me out again.
In all of this I have learned a few things: That to apprehend the truth and beauty of our world and of our faith, one must do the hard work of enlightening one’s mind; a meaningful spiritual life does not come easy. It is not free. It comes over time. It comes through impassioned discipline and the desire to know; and more importantly that precious knowledge must be put into practice, and the great mystery is that we find in enlightened practice a far more profound knowledge there waiting for us like an old friend from home. To practice the faith is to get first hand knowledge of who God is. To know God is to practice God…Enlightenment for the good of the whole. God, Godself, enlightened compassion inspired and enfleshed for the world God made; God, enlightened sacrifice for the creation entire; we, God’s people, enlightened to bear mercy and compassion; we God’s people enlightened to bear kindness and justice and peace to a world that darkens before our eyes. It is the practice of the faith in the dark corners of our world that engenders the knowledge of the faith; to practice God is to know God… new knowledge that will again empower our practice….a palindromic truth of the Faith…..Knowledge for the world’s sake set loose begetting new knowledge….It is the way and practice of salvation itself; and it is now high time to begin… again.
Great stuff once again, Jim. So much about what has become the new mainstream Christianity seems to be about the cutting off of thought, the silencing of doubt, and the reductive oversimplifying of what is passed as truth and right.
The foundation of faith is its unsurety, and that is what gives us cause to question, explore, and reason. To doubt, imagine, and interpret.
It would seem that the modern academy has lost its use for God, but this is only because of the way the His most vocal supporters have demonized the privileging of genuine questions over artificial answers.