Leaping/Falling/Resting

After my last post, Jeremy rightly asked the question of how we “try God out”? This is an attempt at suggesting some possibilities. (And if you want to skip everything else, don’t skip the poem at the end.)

There is an old controversy between those who think one can rationally come to the point where the Christian understanding of God simply makes the most sense versus those who think it comes down to needing to make a “leap of faith” (a la Kierkegaard). I place myself pretty firmly among the latter group. Given lots of room for paradox and contradiction (which I rationally believe in), I think one can come to an understanding of Christian faith which is quite rational. But, psychologically speaking, I don’t particularly trust my (or others) rationality in any ultimate sense, and I don’t think most of us are particularly rational beings. We normally rationalize decisions that we make for emotional reasons.

So my response to the question is a suggestion of ways to consider making “the leap.” I would break this leap into two parts which I have previously thought of as the “trust and obey” combo like the old hymn suggests. Lately, I think these are actually two different parts of trust. The first is the kind of trust where you walk “out on a limb” (where the preacher says that trust is spelled R-I-S-K); the second is the trust of a “trust fall” where you fall over backward believing someone there will break your fall.

In other words, we actively try God out – in the first sense – by doing the things that we believe we are being called to do. A lot of times these actions may seem very sensible and appeal to our natural understandings; in these cases, there is not a lot of risk, but there is still a mild sense of trying God out because if we are faithful in these long term life choice kind of ways, most of us would feel that we see the very real fruit of those choices. When we feel like we are being invited to live out more radical and risky choices that are not always immediately sensible and don’t appeal to our natural (or selfish) understandings, then there is a more immediate sense of needing to try God out.

For me, one of the times that this was most true was when we had a signed deal on a house we loved a lot. We had a complete legal right to the sale but it seemed the realtor had made someone else feel they had a verbal claim on it. In spite of the fact that it deeply broke our hearts to give it up, we felt a clear sense from God that we shouldn’t take it. What made it worse was that we were desperate to move into town and there were no other places we liked at all. “Trying God out” in this case seemed like the only option and God felt very real to us through the process. Even before things worked out quite well for us in the end, we felt like God showed himself to us in this by confirming inside each of us that it was “good” to do this and that we would have missed that “good” if God hadn’t invited and enabled us to make that choice. Reading the Gospels, trying to apply them, and chatting with friends about what this really might look like should provide plenty of opportunities for us to try God out in this practical, sometimes ordinary-sometimes risky kind of way.

The other kind of trust can also be small or huge – mild or intense. This one seems a little more mystical and hard to put into words. Like the “trust fall” image, it’s like getting glimpses of God on occasion with an invitation to simply rest, to let oneself fall into God, into the deep “ok-ness” of the God-created universe (like Julian of Norwich’s “all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well”). I see this as a relatively continual spiritual saying yes to God as a choice of trust. Recently a poem on Kate Gorrie’s blog (brought by Rachael to the Celtic Service) said this incredibly well. Just hearing this poem (and responding with an inner, spiritual, relaxing into God) made me feel newly “put right.” I’ll close with it:

Of Course It Hurts
Karin Boye, trans. from the Swedish by Jenny Nunn

Of course it hurts when buds burst.
Otherwise why would spring hesitate?
Why would all our fervent longing
be bound in the frozen bitter haze?
The bud was the casing all winter.
What is this new thing, which consumes and bursts?
Of course it hurts when buds burst,
pain for that which grows
and for that which envelops.

Of course it is hard when drops fall.
Trembling with fear they hang heavy,
clammer on the branch, swell and slide -
the weight pulls them down, how they cling.
Hard to be uncertain, afraid and divided,
hard to feel the deep pulling and calling,
yet sit there and just quiver -
hard to want to stay
and to want to fall.

Then, at the point of agony and when all is beyond help,
the tree’s buds burst as if in jubilation,
then, when fear no longer exists,
the branch’s drops tumble in a shimmer,
forgetting that they were afraid of the new,
forgetting that they were fearful of the journey -
feeling for a second their greatest security,
resting in the trust
that creates the world.

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