There Will Be Surprises

There Will Be Surprises

I find it’s pretty easy for people to nod along about the mystery of God: the boundlessness, the infinity, the unknowability, the all and everything, the mystery. But it seems a lot more difficult for us to settle in on what this bigness and this mystery must mean: everybody’s got it wrong.

I don’t mean to suggest that nobody knows anything of God or of divinity. Like the blind man at the elephant’s trunk, it isn’t wrong to compare that writhing muscle to a snake. But it does miss some essential something of the elephant, to settle just on this. It seems to me that each of us, an dall of our religions, cannot quite get our arms around something of the essential godliness of God.

And yet: each sect has its dogma to define and defend its patch of holiness: who counts, who doesn’t, who can say a blessing, and to whom. It’s one thing (maybe not a good thing) to use these traditions to keep your folks in line. It’s quite another thing, I think, when we suggest that God is subject to our habits: that our bread, our baptism is somehow holier than yours. How would we know, after all?

Among Christians, this bickering began all the way back with Peter and Paul, debating about whether Christians needed to be circumcised—to be good Jews—before they could be Christians. At the time, most converts were adults, so this circumcision thing was no small matter, so to speak. It’s not a bad thing to seek uniformity in worship—there’s nothing quite like the thrum within my breastbone when I rise inside a large and booming congregation, all praying the same prayer. But really, must we match within our pants?

The danger—the idolatry, I think—arises when we become assured that human signs and symbols say something of God. That God, for instance, can’t embrace someone who isn’t circumcised. It sort of shrinks him from the mighty God of psalm and hymn, I think, if he gets tripped up by a foreskin.

I think CS Lewis had it pretty right, when he said of the Final Judgement: There will be surprises.

I think the Quakers may be on to something, in their insistence on consensus. Who’s to say that irritating hold-out, that curmudgeon, that aggravating will-not-go-along is not the prophet in the room?

There will be surprises. Maybe this is all the dogma that we need. There will be surprises—maybe, if we took this as our creed, we’d be more careful with our judgments, we’d be more likely to forgive. This was a week of parables: the tiny seed that grows into a mustard tree, the leaven that swells all the bread, the treasure in the field, the pearl of great price. Surprises, every one.