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I’ve started reading Catherine Keller’s Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement, and I’ll be honest, I’m probably not going read much more of it for now. I don’t disagree or recoil from the argument she constructs. It’s just that her particular theopoetics are a headier approach to not-knowingness than I am up for. Don’t get me wrong, I love not-knowing - it makes space for awe, wonder, mystery, eternity and everything-ness/nothingness. But this text and her words work muscles that, for myself, have been too over-used for too long, and I’m hungry to sit with texts that expand my capacity to dwell in love, to listen to my heart, to give and receive care and compassion. I live too easily, too reflexively in the complexities of my head. I think, for the moment, I just need build out the pathway toward a simpler heart. All that being said: I appreciate where she is going, even if I don’t want to ride in the same car. I need not-knowing as much as she does. An ever-shifting, horizon of hidden-away unknowability, interconnection and impossibility allows me to breathe. Without that, I feel myself trapped, stifled, bored. It is only, if one concedes that one knows virtually nothing about God that one can begin to recover the presence of holiness in the flesh of ordinary existence. ~ Richard Kearney, quoted in Cloud of the Impossible
This is a kind of freedom. And I’ll add this: we are unknowable too. You and me, and us and them. Here we are made in God’s image, whatever the unknown, unknowable process called God happens to be. I place my faith in not-knowing. I do my best when I know don’t know. The brilliant darkness of a hidden silence… ~ Pseudo-Dionysus, quoted in Cloud of the Impossible
And I love living in an unfolding, entangled interdependent impossible universe more than I like thinking about it. I love the mystery, the interconnection, the glimpse of infinity, the speechlessness and the humility that mystic entanglement evokes. I don’t trust any mystical experience that isn’t humbling. Knowability, for me, isn’t safety. It is grandiose stagnation. I need the un-pin-downable, undefinable wordless hidden Divine in order to feel my infinitesimal size and shape and properly. Not some kind of being. No. ~ Pseudo-Dionysus, quoted in Cloud of the Impossible
We are living, always, on the brink of the unknowable impossible, and maybe more so now. What else are we trying to communicate as we continuously repeat the word “unprecedented” whenever we try to describe the era we are negotiating? We have lost our precedents. The impossible unimaginable creates possibilities when everything we have understood about the world is breaking down. Why must the unknown/uncertain frighten us more than horrors and cruelties that we know about? Might we imagine a trustworthy uncertainty? I’m going to tell you a dream I had that repeatedly came to mind as I read through these first few chapters: I dream that the goal of living is to learn to live as happily and harmoniously on earth as souls do in the afterlife. The key to this is to transform conflicts and problems into possibilities, however minor or major. It seems that there is a very simple method for this and I (and all of us) have already been given the instructions: We must mentally pause, temporarily freeze time in any scenario we are embedded in, any decision we make, any action we plan on taking and pray for an outcome that serves the good of all beings and God’s will. We must then surrender to whatever happens next when time resumes. There is no way to really know, with our human limitations, what the best or better outcomes might be beforehand, or how to achieve them. So we must use the pause-pray method, disrupt the flow of time and then trust that the course of events has been changed toward the best possible for all beings when we resume. It is also important to only ask for what you need with the pause-pray method, and no more. I practice this method on a walk with my reactive-anxious-other-dog-hating beagle and the situation is redirected. I try out the pause-pray over an empty refrigerator: “Give us our daily bread for the good of all beings and in keeping with God’s will” and when I open it there are five pieces of bread. Just enough. The method is so clear and elemental that it isn’t easy to practice. Zen-like it involves unlearning so many things. True masters can do it almost in real time, and continuously their pause-pray-resume-accept rhythm is so integrated that they don’t have to think or concentrate or remember. A dream-practice of living in a constantly recalibrating inherently uncertain, always unfolding universe. May my heart remember, in my waking life, to pause, breathe in awe and ground in love at the brink of the impossible.
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