I don’t want to talk about God anymore.
I don’t know how honest I can be here, but I resonate so much with Peter Rollins words in How (Not) To Speak of God. In the introduction, he quotes Ludwig Wittgenstein: “What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.” He juxtaposes this notion with an idea that he took from his time in what he calls the evangelical charismatic movement. “God is the one subject of whom we must never stop speaking.” So he ends up with this mashup of thoughts:
That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking. – Peter Rollins. How (Not) To Speak of God
For whatever reason, thoughts of God run me over every day.
One of the actresses in a play I’m currently acting in, (Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers, the next play opening at Taproot Theatre) recently joined a long line of folks from my past when she reflected that almost anything was an opportunity for me to begin “waxing philosophical.”
Frankly, I’d just as soon stop.
Obviously, the previous sentence is a lie.
I’m throwing in the towel.
As I wrote about a month ago, the feeling of being overwhelmed has short-circuited the blog. I’ve been spitting out unrhymed tetrameter ninety-to-nothing for months now, but when it came to constructing coherent, linear thoughts about the things that interest me in terms of spirituality, God, creation, art, and beauty, well…I’ve become far more reluctant to “wax philosophical” than I used to be.
I wonder what would happen if I just laid out the questions here. Along with the admission that finding answers to them isn’t really the game anymore. I can read C.S. Lewis and he’ll give me really good constructions and pretty amazing insights, as will N.T. Wright. Have I got time to put those guys up against the Marcus Borg camp, and do I really think I have the intellectual tools to logic my way through the conundrums and baffling inconsistencies? Does the deep mystery of life really yield to an Enlightenment reading of a Middle Eastern collection of sacred texts spun out over several thousand years? And is all that what will determine how we find God in this life, what we mentally assent to, whether we buy it in the deepest bones we’ve got?
But I want to have conversation about this stuff. To talk, to write, to wonder, to think. My personal credo begins with “We are not alone.” And I hold to that. What is the nature of our togetherness, though, we and the One whose being and presence defines our “not-alone-ness”? And here’s what I think I’ve finally figured out: sitting here thinking about it solves nothing, and yields less.
So here come the words. Talking about God again, or the loss of Him (see Insurrection, Peter Rollings again), and hopefully, more about the world, and the sheer love of the place.
Sure, I’ve heard that before…
