Imminence, Transcendence, and Contradiction

 

Photo by Gabriele Stravinskaite on Unsplash

Contradictions, paradox, and bewilderment evoke exploration, reverence, and wonder. If what and who we worship is fully knowable, definable, and controllable, then we are worshipping idols of our own making.

Rather, the prophet Isaiah voices the message of a God whose thoughts and ways are higher than our own, thus offering a description of divinity.

We protest that we have no frame of reference for such a being.

Exactly, no frame because frames confine, no reference because uniqueness has no category, no "a being," since it implies one among others.

While a systematic theology may be useful for talking about God within the context of our experience, it is inadequate at knowing and seeking God is the vastness of Godness.

Quantum physics is helpful to my theology because it expands my appreciation of contradiction. And that is in the cosmic realm within the mysteries of space-time. The brightest of our brightest intellectual lights and professorial thinkers are as perplexed as the rest of us when their thinking is exhausted and their paradigms exploded or, in some cases, imploded.

Then, those of us who are of faith are projected into an undefined space beyond space where we affirm that there is a Thinker/Knower/Speaker-Creator/Lover who transcends even infinity into a reality we deem eternity. There we meet that which has met us in glimpses in time and space and, indeed, the smallest spaces.

That imminence is as mysterious as the transcendence.

The cosmic metaphor that best described it for this small brain is the contrast and comparison of the sub-sub-microscopic, uncharted territory of the sub atomic universe and the uncharted and overwhelming expanse of the universe beyond us.

That would be enough, within creation, to make us eternally dizzy, but then, we are told, that they are somehow woven into a web of strings and waves and particles that can almost be here and there at the same time as if time were something we had any idea about.
And any God fit to be God is greater than all of that.

And we think we can push God around with our clever labels and limitations!

What we know, we have been told, given flashes of, and seen in in the incarnate reality of revelation and meeting. It is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, but it is enough to take us on to the next step of beholding and then, to the next.

I agree with Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. Without a theology of contradiction, I am diluting my concept of divinity.

And, I add here, "wonder" is, in our realm, at the heart of all things wonderful and bewilderment is the price of receiving a Word from God in the wilderness where we retreat to seek God.