On Knowing and Not Knowing

The disciples came to him and asked, "Why do you speak to them in parables?"  He replied, "To you it has been granted to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but not to them. For those who have (hold) will be given more, till they have enough and to spare; and those who have not (hold not) will forfeit even what they have.  This is why I speak to them in parables; for they look without seeing, and listen without hearing or understanding.  The prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled in them: "You may listen and listen, but you will never understand; you may look and look, but you will never see.  For this people's mind has become dull; they have stopped their ears and shut their eyes.  Otherwise, their eyes might see, their ears hear, and their minds understand, and then they might turn to me, and I would heal them" (Matt. 13:10 ff).

 

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Certain truths can be known only if we are sufficiently emptied, sufficiently ready, sufficiently confused, or sufficiently destabilized (Richard Rohr:  Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 126).

 

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As a teacher, I always want to make things as clear as I can, as easy to access as possible.  I want to explain the hidden meanings of things, to have the light of understanding come on in my students.  Jesus did not even try to explain His mysteries.  He put them out there and allowed the multitude to not understand, to walk away shaking their heads.  How hungry He must have been to pour out into their hearts the sacred truths that could change their lives and give them peace!  But all He could do was to point them in the direction they needed to go; He could not make them go there.

 

The problem with "church" is that it wants to give people the conclusions it has come to over a long period of spiritual discernment and faithful prayer.  And the church does this because that is what people want.  From the time of Mt. Sinai when the people told Moses, "You listen to YHWH and you tell us what He says; we are too afraid to face Him ourselves!" most people really don't want to go through the long process of facing God.  And yet, when they are told what God says, their immediate reaction is "Who died and made you king?"  "Who are you to know and to say what God says?"  This was the Israelite reaction to Moses in the desert, and it is the same reaction of the church family today.  They want the "short formula" for obeying God; they do not want the journey to His heart and mind.

 

If our churches could teach people and "honest and humble process for learning and listening for themselves -- i.e. prayer" (Rohr, p. 120), they might come to wisdom in a calm and peaceful way.  When the church tries to force conclusions without teaching people how to come to those conclusions themselves, there will always and inevitably be a pushback against "authority."

 

St. Paul said, quoting Deuteronomy, "The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart" (Romans 10:8).  This is not to destroy the written word or tradition by any means, but rather to achieve a balance between the "Inner Knower," accessed by prayer, and the "Outer Knower," Scripture and Tradition, or Church Teaching.

 

When Jesus taught in parables, or when He spoke plainly-- "Unless you eat my Body and drink My Blood, you will not have life within you"-- the disciples understood the words He spoke as little as anyone else.  But they went to Him, who "alone had the words of everlasting life," asking for understanding.  The Truth was in Him and was/is Him.  We access it -- understand it, see it, hear it -- only through conversation with Him.

 

For those who know how to see, we live in a sacramental world -- every bush flaming with the glory of God, in the words of one of the English poets.  The bush is not God, but it reveals God; it is a sign of the power and presence of God.  How many cannot go beyond the sign to the presence?  We need the "signs" of Scripture and Tradition, the teachings of the church, but if we cannot see into them for ourselves, and thus go beyond them to the presence of God, we are as blind as the Pharisees whom Jesus addressed in the words of Isaiah.

 

The reason I eventually stopped debating religious truth via the Internet was a hard-learned lesson:  Communication experts tell us that meaning is more than 2/3rds communicated by context and nonverbal messages.  If we see or hear about words without knowing how, when, where, by whom, and with what inflection or emphasis they were said or written, we are about 100% sure to misinterpret what was said.  This is one reason gossip is so dangerous; it almost inevitably communicates the wrong message, even if it gets the quotation right!

 

Paul says, "We must not teach in the way philosophy is taught, but in the way the Spirit teaches us:  We must teach spiritual things spiritually" (I Cor. 2:13).  And how do we teach spiritually?  That is the most difficult question of all for a teacher, who naturally wants her students to understand "the deep things of God."

 

In the same passage quoted above, Paul says that only the Spirit of God probes the deep things of God, and only the Spirit of God can give us "the mind of Christ."  So as a teacher, I must encourage and push my students toward the Holy Spirit, Who alone reveals Jesus Christ to the human heart.  He is the Wisdom of God made flesh -- and He dwells among us even to this day, though we see Him not.

 

God took on flesh to walk with us through our days, on the journey through the desert, to point out on the path the birds of the air and the flowers of the field.  He is waiting to pull back the veil which hides the sight of God from human/natural seeing, and to patiently come to us disguised as our life.  He was made flesh and dwells among us!  Today, He is here, in the events of the day, in the people we meet, in the conversations we have -- if only we know how to see, how to hear, and how to understand!