If I am not negligent in my spiritual practices, I pray a handful of the psalms every day. Below is one of the psalms, that as I pray its few short verses, I find myself lying to God in several ways.
O Lord, I am not proud; I have no haughty looks.
I do not occupy myself with great matters, or with things that are too hard for me.
But I still my soul and make it quiet, like a child upon its mother’s breast; my soul is quieted within me.
O Israel, wait upon the Lord, from this time forth for evermore. (Psalm 131)
I will pass by in silence on the part about not being proud. You who know me are asked to suppress your scornful laughter.
For a long time, I was quite satisfied to lie when I said “I do not occupy myself with great matters.” Occupying my mind with things that are too hard for me is like catnip. Nothing lures me like an opportunity to read some dense book of theology that is way over my head.
Because I had no intention of giving up the pleasure of theological rumination, I ignored this part of the psalm, but I needn’t have. There is nothing wrong with what St. Anselm called “faith seeking understanding.”
The psalmist is not making a case for blissful ignorance. Rather, the psalm warns us against imagining that the infinity of God can be fully comprehended by our limited intelligence. A god who was small enough to be fully comprehended by human thought is not the God who is all in all. But this doesn’t mean God remains a complete mystery either.
God is always disclosing God’s own self to us – shining forth love and light. The most complete disclosure of God’s nature and God’s will was in the incarnate Christ. But God does not explain things like why God bothered to create a universe in the first place or why this created order, for all its wonder, is also often a ruthless agent of death and destruction.
For normal people who don’t read a lot of theology, the questions that shake us are not intellectual, but questions arising from the pain and uncertainty of our lives: ‘Why has this happened?’ ‘Am I okay?’ “Am I loved?’ ‘What is my destiny?’
The answer to these questions is not intellectual.
Neither is it anti-intellectual. Giving up our desire to understand God’s ways is a failure, not only of curiosity, but a failure to love. Would you ever cease wanting to know more of the one you love?
The answer to the questions that are ‘above our pay grade’ is confidence in God even when we can’t be confident in our intellect, even when we don’t have the answers we crave.
“Like a child upon its mother’s breast,” we have latched onto God for sustenance, warmth, and protection. What we receive at God’s breast will grow us into all God intends for us.
Prayer: Holy Wisdom, when I am troubled by things in my life I cannot understand, hold me close and quiet my restless mind. Feed me with yourself, satisfy my very being, not just my curiosity.