I’m Not Sure
“Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting at my doorposts.” Proverbs 8:34 NASB
Blessed – Chapter 8 of Proverbs is the personification of Wisdom as feminine divinity. It does not mean that there is a divine female. We’ll leave that to the invention of the Virgin Mary some two thousand years after the author penned these words. Proverbs 8 calls each of us to open our minds and hearts to the ineffable and then grind the whole kernel of spiritual experience with the millstone of reason. Both are necessary. Gather the whole grain of experience. Feel it. Taste it. Enjoy it. Then work on it.
The process requires two important cautions:
- “To have no faith is callousness, to have undiscerning faith is superstition.”[1]
Faith unexamined is a belief in magic. It might offer comfort. It might promise power. It might even make you feel “saved,” but it’s still magic, still superstition, until the millstone turns.
2. “In my research, I found that what silences our intuitive voice is our need for certainty.”[2]
Grinding isn’t the whole game. If you thought that subjecting your spiritual experience to the millstone of reason would give you Truth (with a capital T), then you’ve been led along the Greek path toward Certainty (with a capital C). After 2500 years of epistemological investigation, that Greek path ended in the bankruptcy of the mind. Certainty is a dangerous myth, a mental disease that has wreaked havoc on Western faith since Plato. It leads to the pit of despair or the battlefield of argument. One might even say that certainty is a sin. “ . . . a sense of false certainty, a compulsive and deceptive sanity, a tyrannical victory of the common-sense view which always sees objects as objects, but at the cost of something else which was seeking recognition, something that was more to do with imaginative than with common-sense reality.”[3]
A discerning faith plus an awareness of spiritual intuition are the real foundations of the biblical man. The Western guillotine did nothing but separate head and heart, leaving a dead body of doctrine in a basket of religious blood. If we want to experience God, we must begin with experience, not with cognition. But if we want to enjoy the experience of God, we will need to think about our relationship with Him. A heart on fire is a smoldering ash heap without a head in the clouds.
Topical Index: certainty, superstition, intuition, Proverbs 8:34
[1] Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, p. 159.
[2] Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 88.
[3] Martin Miller, On Now Being Able to Paint, cited in Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 66.
