“If God’s incomprehensibility does not grip us in a word, if it does not draw us on into his superluminous darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, close-hugged truths in to the strangeness of the night that is our real home, we have misunderstood or failed to understand the words of Christianity. For they all speak of the unknown God, who only reveals himself to give himself as the abiding mystery, and to gather home to himself all that is outside himself.”
– Karl Rahner, “Poetry and the Christian”
“It is this nameless being that words try to speak when they speak of things that have a name; they try to conjure up the mystery when they indicate the intelligible, they try to summon up infinity when they describe and circumscribe the finite.”
– Karl Rahner, “Poetry and the Christian”
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
– Tao Te Ching, Ch. 1 (transl. Stephen Mitchell)
We live in a world obsessed with certainty, obsessed with decisiveness and having all the right answers. We start teaching our children, from a young age, that life is filled with tests, and that there will be right and wrong answers. And as we grow up, those early lessons take root and grow in us as individuals and in the ways that we shape our communities, our organizations, our broader society, and our belief systems.
When I was younger, I used to think I had things pretty well figured out. I had a clear sense of what I wanted and didn’t want out of life, where I thought it would take me, and the kind of person I would end up being. And of course there are through-lines that could be traced from my childhood to who I am now, and some of what I thought when I was younger I still hold dear today.
But I’ve also found that growing up is often about learning to be at home in our uncertainty. Over and over again through the years, I’ve had to question my assumptions and judgments. I’ve had to revisit conclusions made long ago, both about myself and about the world around me. I’ve had to let some of my expectations go, while at the same time learning to welcome the unexpected into my life.
Most important, perhaps, I’ve had to learn to let people surprise me.
It’s easy to think we know a person well, especially when we’ve known them for a long time. It’s easy to think we’ve got that particular relationship figured out and that we can know what to expect from it. But my experience has increasingly led me to believe that every person who comes into our lives – everyone, everywhere – can be an almost never-ending source of surprise and unexpected depth.
The difficulty is that we have to be willing – day after day, moment after moment – to actually be surprised. We have to be willing to see others, and the world around us, with fresh eyes. We have to be willing to look at familiar things in news ways, embrace our own uncertainty, and consider the possibility that we haven’t got everything figured out just yet. And that’s not easy.
At this time of the year, throughout the month of December, Christians mark the season of Advent. It’s a season of expectation, of waiting and watching. But it’s also, culturally, a time of extraordinary familiarity – the sights and sounds of the holiday season, especially as it’s celebrated in the West, are so familiar as to be almost routine. And, in fact, many people get so caught up in the routines and regimens of the season – the shopping, the errands, the decorating, the holiday parties and other special events – that the aspect of waiting and watching gets lost in the hustle and bustle and busyness of the season. It’s a time of year that, for many of us, is so often filled with expectations (both those imposed from outside and those we impose on ourselves) that the sense of expectation – the sense of watchful anticipation – gets lost in a blizzard of constant activity.
It’s interesting to note that, by the reckoning of the liturgical calendar, the beginning of Advent is the start of the church year, when the page is turned and everything becomes new again.
It makes me think back to a nighttime walk, some years ago, through a desert canyon in northern New Mexico. The moon was new, and the darkness seemed almost total when I first came into it. But, once my eyes adjusted a bit, I realized that the landscape was illuminated by the stars filling the sky – stars that had always been there, stars that I could now see better than ever before. The loss of familiar landmarks was disorienting at first, but it was also thrilling to see a new landscape surrounding me, in a place I had only ever seen by the brighter light of day.
It’s tempting to think that seeing new things requires going to new places. But sometimes all it takes is a new way of seeing. Sometimes we just have to let our eyes adjust – and be willing to “walk by faith and not by sight” – in order to bear witness to the birth of an entirely new world.
As Hamlet says to his old friend Horatio while the two stand together before the ghost of Hamlet’s father, “There are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
When we take the time to consider all this and reflect on it, then we can begin to enter into what Rahner so poetically calls “the night that is our real home.” When we let go of our well-worn thoughts and ideas, we make room for something new to be born, both in ourselves and in the world – even if that something new turns out to be stranger and perhaps a little bit wilder than we might be completely comfortable with.
When we step out into uncertainty, let go of our initial fear, and let our eyes adjust to that night – still luminous with stars and distant galaxies singing out across the darkness – then we can start feeling more at home in that uncertainty, more at home in a world of wonders and grace and unexpected surprises.
Which is to say, more at home in the very stuff of our own lives.
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