Standing in Not Knowing

November 5, 2017

Cate Thorn

All Saints' Day     1 John 3:1-3     Matthew 5:1-12

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Today I find myself standing in a place of not knowing. I’m not sure it’s the place I’m meant to be standing seeing as I’m in a pulpit, in church where there’s often expectation that some form of knowing will be promulgated.

Surely on this All Saints day, the poignant and powerful time when we risk remembering, drawing close our loved ones who have died, is the context we should speak with confidence of hope and promise?

Of course to stand not knowing is not necessarily to stand without confidence. Perhaps the challenge is to be confident to remain standing in the discomfort of not knowing. To stand not knowing and remember the saints of years gone by, loved ones whose loss exposes our essential vulnerability to love and to life. Made aware of our mortality, not-life-as-we-know-it, death, is for all of us. To stand not knowing and expect there to be saints in our day, perhaps more alarmingly that we embody saintliness in the life we inhabit, expect such example to be embodied in the lives of those yet to come.

Not knowing, what is that exactly? Is it an in-between knowing state, a transition time between certainties, a stumble before we’re grounded, find our feet again? Or might it have its own integrity? We struggle, I think, to find words to articulate our very real experience at times such as death. And the words we do find are unlikely to withstand the harsh scrutiny of reason, logic, science, intellect or plain common sense. So, quite reasonably, rather than taking time to dwell with and learn from what we do not know we hasten from the encounter.

For some the explanation is this physical world, our physical bodies are all there is and we should expect no more than what we know. The tangible reality of this life we know is the limit, anything else is imagining and wishful thinking. We should expect to take responsibility for living well and rightly, to align with ways of living that enable the flourishing of the life of all creation. These are not deferred to some after this life time or expectation of God tweaking, resetting the dial to make things right intervention. After all it’s not as if we haven’t been given enough clues of ways to live in relationship with one another and the world that lead to its life bringing transformation – even as we never quite get there. Today’s Beatitudes from the gospel remind us there is consequence to our choices, consequence to the way we live. Our habits of behaviour have outcomes; the way we live reverberates throughout creation.

So is there no more than us, is God a creation of our highest ideals, as Lloyd Geering suggests, the sum of our meaningfulness known by the way we live and are together? I think it’s important to sit with this as part of our not knowing in this season – to let ourselves consider this could be so. For, you see, this too isn’t provable one way or the other. For some it enables them to live well, to orient themselves in the world, to focus on this life, giving well and generously, not depending on some unprovable God concept to put things right later. For others God so imagined diminishes the horizons of life and hope, removes the potential in and possibilities for life, burdens them, for life thus becomes a self-creation and they may be ill equipped, with few and poor resources to build with.

The reality for most of us is we spend a good part of our lives in busyness, creating and participating in worlds of certainty and purpose. We negotiate our way through the expectations and responsibilities of our society, with our desires and drives for individual expression and authenticity. Most of us function well enough most of the time, unquestioningly enough, expecting perhaps not so much, that life is as it is. We might agitate for this or that, seek to right this wrong or protest that injustice but probably don’t test the bounds, the boundaries of life over much. Despite our best laid plans however life or perhaps I should say death has a nasty habit of breaking in to our complacency and disrupting the order of our days.

Death faces us with not life, not life is something we do not know. We experience rather than know our response. We can speak of what we do know of these times. Stripped bare of our certainties, we’re made aware of how constructed our lives are, how secure they seem and yet how vulnerable when the lynch pin of life is pulled. All that’s been our world shrinks, our priorities diminish and we’re left wondering what matters most. And it’s surprisingly little, reduced to what’s most precious, to relationships, the way we care, nurture, support, sustain one another, to the memories, images, taste, touch, sounds, the intangible experiences of life. We discover curious things about love, of how it is a lived, embodied thing of how easy it is to speak of love honestly and truthfully, of love’s mutuality - that we lose part of ourselves when we lose a loved one. Despite that we dedicate most of our lives to doing, creating, participating in this physical world, necessarily and fruitfully, paradoxically we discover what matters most, sustains us and affirms who we are, is the intangible tangle of relationship.

Not knowing opens up a space in us, opens us up. Our certainties are somehow suspended for the world, our world, is no longer as it was and we are less sure of who we now are, how we are to live now. Curiously when we’re gathered together in our not knowing all of the differences between us are there with us and we remain together. We need one another in such time, we need the resourcefulness of our difference to piece us, a world together again.

Today we talk of death and life, of our comfortable familiarity with the physical, tangible world and perhaps less comfortable familiarity with the intangibility of relationships that prove most essential to us of relationship, we talk of whether life is just this world or more than just this world. Differences arise in our wrestle with mortality which have repercussions in our understanding of divine presence, in our living, what we hope for, the parameters of the world. For all our eloquence, however, all we can truly say is without death there is not life, without tangible there is not intangible and that we know what life is this side of death. Not knowing is how we live with such paradox with integrity.

Not knowing allows us to dwell with paradox and learn from it. Life and death are both present there, the reality that we dedicate most of our life to real and tangible things even though intangible relationships are our foundation. When faced with death we stand before what we do not know together, together in our not knowing. With all our differences we’re opened to each other, opened to understand, to see the world, who we are, who each other are more generously. It is our differences that teach and challenge us to consider anew our choices and understandings to negotiate life with all its paradox.

Our saintly call, the Beatitudes today reminds us, is to be people who make God’s justice real. Yet we humans are complicated, obtuse and obstinate creations, determined too often to follow the urgings of our own hearts and wills. Through encountering, entering into, engaging with the difference of others, with their struggles, trials and tribulations, wrong turnings and missed truths, perhaps even testing or trying them on for size, we learn a lot - about how and whether and what we choose and about ourselves. Do we test our choices and understandings by insulating ourselves from other options, from difference, or by encounter with them so we develop resilience and honest truthfulness?

On this day when we speak of ourselves as saints of this age, we’re aware the paradox of life is that opposites co-exist, it is our call to walk alongside poor and rich, mournful and joyful, merciful and merciless, peacemaker and warmonger, rejected and accepted. To alleviate suffering, be courageous in face of ridicule when we dare to insist this world can be one of just dealing and equitable sharing. We tell a story grounded in Christ yet with edges open to be surprised by God also in the difference of others. As we’re open to hear, willing to engage with difference, we can tell a more complete story of our world. A world where injustice is known because of justice, inequity because of equity, which of these comes to prevail depends on the wideness of our inclusion of difference in the face of all we do not know. You see the world’s story doesn’t necessarily or inevitably have to unravel the way it most often does. Today I stand before you, still in my not knowing yet I stand not alone but in the company of the saints of days and years gone by, in company with you, the saints of this day. Together blessed by our differences, we saints of one particular faith story can be part of unravelling the story differently, incarnating in word and in deed a just and equitable world that includes and values the richness of difference.