Friday, October 11, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
 Dark trust
If it is by the finger of God that I drive out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you.
This image overwhelms my imagination. The Kingdom of God isn’t Republican or Democrat, that’s for sure. The Kingdom of God belongs in heaven, I usually think, but Jesus tells me its immediacy is reflected in his power to remove demons and their power over me. I don’t know much about demons, but Jesus knows plenty. He knows how their sly deceptions confuse me and invite me to think there’s something wrong. With me.
Perhaps there is, but often … there isn’t.
Sometimes I question myself, as do we all. Isn’t there some way I can get beyond my self-doubt and follow with enthusiasm the path God carves out of my life, the one he made just for me? I think this must require surrender on my part, and again it’s confusing to know if I’ve surrendered or not. My false self, which resembles those dissembling demons, keeps questioning everything.
Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.
I think of myself as a gatherer, a follower of Jesus who shares with others what I learn and receive from him. I’m doing that right now. I am not against you, Lord. I am with you. I don’t want to leave my clean house and come back to find it riddled with seven other spirits, thank you very much.
This conversation with myself and God assumes things about God that don’t seem quite right. My pictures of God are not enough. Ron Rolheiser has something to say about this:
When we try to imagine God’s existence and come up empty, that failure is not one of faith but of our imagination.  It’s not that God doesn’t exist or has disappeared. It’s rather that God’s ineffability has put God outside of our imaginative capacities. Our minds are overmatched. God is still real, still there, but our finite imaginations are coming up empty trying to picture infinite reality. The infinite cannot be circumscribed by the imagination. It has no floor, and it has no ceiling, no beginning and no end. The human imagination cannot deal with that.
 God is ineffable, unimaginable, and beyond conception and language. Our faith lets us bracket this for a while and lets us picture God as some idolized super-hero. But eventually that well runs dry, and our finite minds are left to know the infinite only in darkness, without images, and our finite hearts are left to feel infinite love only inside a dark trust.
There are a couple of Greek words for these ways of experiencing God: kataphatic (the super-hero in the sky, so to speak) and apophatic (when we’re left inside a cave with no light, left only with a sense of God’s presence). Rolheiser thinks we will always, eventually, find ourselves inside the cave. In that darkness, faith, trust, belief, hope, and patience all play their part while we wait with confidence on the Kingdom of God.
(Galatians 3, Psalm 111, John 12, Luke 11)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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