Of Knowing Ignorance and Ignorant Knowledge

Mary Robert and I just attended the Spring Clergy conference of our diocese. Dr. Catherine Keller, process theologian extraordinaire was our presenter. In her opening lecture she spoke of two modalities of knowing having to do with knowing self, knowing one's environment and knowing God. The first mode of knowing she calls knowing ignorance. This is the vast field of what we don't know, that infinite horizon of truth that we approach with great reverence and humility. This is the luminous infinite field of knowledge that calls us into new revelation and into truth told anew...ever illusive and ever present...ever unfolding from its hiddenness, offering truth speaking, singing the world into being... new paradigms, new things and ways. This is the enlightening presence of mystery that draws, beguiles seeker and mystic and pilgrim like bees to honey...It requires diligent relationality, humility, persistence and courage. It is an intimate process that is life long and perhaps beyond...It requires strength of the imagination...and will surely surprise and awe.

The second mode of knowledge she calls ignorant knowledge. This is a dogmatic ideological fixed set of beliefs that eschews process, openness and possibility...a willful ignorance as it were. This type of knowing insists on its own way...and scapegoats that which threatens its self sufficiency and certainty. It is the mode of knowledge that on an institutional level gets us into wars. It is ignorant knowledge that has perpetuated global warming up and against a decided agreement in the scientific community on the causes of climate change. Rush Limbaugh, and bigotry in its myriad manifestations, icons of ignorant knowledge.

We must live into our mystic tendencies as people of God; we must embrace the beautiful potential of the great unknown that wants more than all things to be known intimately. It is God's way, is it not, that to truly know, one must go the way of unknowing, as T.S. Eliot puts it. To know the light, one must embrace the glowing dark. There seems to be an emerging trend these days among the world of nations that embraces the art of collaboration...an institutional modus operandi of respecting what we don't know about each other, and therefore being open to knowing more truly each other...a new relational way of solving problems and creating collaborative potential...a way of humble and respectful knowing of things hidden before...an artful and gracious process of becoming the sacred Commonweal God intends for all people in all places. Perhaps as humankind we have begun in earnest to embrace our knowing ignorance.

Seek, O pilgrim, the great unknown, that luminous other that calls to us from just nearby...and you will begin to know, face to face, God's own knowledge of a paradise here and now, that will enlighten, to the utter surprise and joy of all, the universe, in all her infinite beauty, entire.

Of God's Greening Love

I received something of a cryptic E-mail a few days ago. At first it looked like spam, but the sender's name was vaguely familiar, so I opened it. It was titled something like "in praise of God's greening love," and it went on to talk about the advent of spring, and the new gardens all around, and the renewing of the earth. It was a little too sentimental for my taste, or as my sons would say, cheesy, but I've not been able to get it off my mind.

It is told that once St. Francis of Assisi was asked what he would do if he knew for sure that the end of the world was imminent. His answer was that he would keep on hoeing his garden. We are the gardeners of Eden. We live in a paradise not lost, a theology the church likes to foist upon us, but in a marvelous paradise in which we are created to enable and participate in the greening, the restoring of it, from year to year, from season to season. K, to the curiosity of our incredulous neighbors, has dug up the grass in our front yard and planted a parterre vegetable garden...now at the center of our comings and goings...and we see from day to day its greening...its germinating potential...the hope it engenders...a living and apt metaphor for who God is and what God does. God is all about greening, setting life loose, making hope alive.

Our God hoes the garden, God's life and labor, bringing forever and always, new life. We know, if we but pay attention to the signs of nature around us, that God forever and always comes to us amid the cold barrenness of winter, bringing green shoots from the earth which will renew and sustain the life force, our souls as natural as the plants of a garden, raised, renewed, a new germination towards hope and love and life. So we never despair...for even in our dark winters...God is forever greening. God's greening life is the one life and light we forever share in profound intimacy, and life which we forever bear to our world with artful gardeners' hands. Get hoeing gardeners for winter is past and it is for us, God's sons and daughters, heirs of the garden, to bring life and life abundant.