Mary Robert and I just attended the Spring Clergy conference of our diocese. Dr. Catherine Keller, process theologian extraordinaire was our presenter. In her opening lecture she spoke of two modalities of knowing having to do with knowing self, knowing one’s environment and knowing God. The first mode of knowing she calls knowing ignorance. This is the vast field of what we don’t know, that infinite horizon of truth that we approach with great reverence and humility. This is the luminous infinite field of knowledge that calls us into new revelation and into truth told anew…ever illusive and ever present…ever unfolding from its hiddenness, offering truth speaking, singing the world into being… new paradigms, new things and ways. This is the enlightening presence of mystery that draws, beguiles seeker and mystic and pilgrim like bees to honey…It requires diligent relationality, humility, persistence and courage. It is an intimate process that is life long and perhaps beyond…It requires strength of the imagination…and will surely surprise and awe.
The second mode of knowledge she calls ignorant knowledge. This is a dogmatic ideological fixed set of beliefs that eschews process, openness and possibility…a willful ignorance as it were. This type of knowing insists on its own way…and scapegoats that which threatens its self sufficiency and certainty. It is the mode of knowledge that on an institutional level gets us into wars. It is ignorant knowledge that has perpetuated global warming up and against a decided agreement in the scientific community on the causes of climate change. Rush Limbaugh, and bigotry in its myriad manifestations, icons of ignorant knowledge.
We must live into our mystic tendencies as people of God; we must embrace the beautiful potential of the great unknown that wants more than all things to be known intimately. It is God’s way, is it not, that to truly know, one must go the way of unknowing, as T.S. Eliot puts it. To know the light, one must embrace the glowing dark. There seems to be an emerging trend these days among the world of nations that embraces the art of collaboration…an institutional modus operandi of respecting what we don’t know about each other, and therefore being open to knowing more truly each other…a new relational way of solving problems and creating collaborative potential…a way of humble and respectful knowing of things hidden before…an artful and gracious process of becoming the sacred Commonweal God intends for all people in all places. Perhaps as humankind we have begun in earnest to embrace our knowing ignorance.
Seek, O pilgrim, the great unknown, that luminous other that calls to us from just nearby…and you will begin to know, face to face, God’s own knowledge of a paradise here and now, that will enlighten, to the utter surprise and joy of all, the universe, in all her infinite beauty, entire.
