Flexibility & Living With Not Knowing

No humourous morning posts here for me today. For one, I'm too tired. Not enough sleep, awakened early because it's already heating up too much to sleep. It's gonna be a 37 degree stinker here and there's that crap northerly wind thang starting to go down which creates hysteria in children and madness in adults. Time to stay inside and crank up the aircon - and even that has tinges of environmental/fiscal guilt about it, unfortunately. Like a pensioner, I have been planning my airconditioner consumption this summer, considering keeping costs down by venturing out to public places in the daytime on really hot days to save the bill at home, hehe. My granny would be so proud :) But 37 degrees - all the rules go out the window on such a day.

I have just received confirmation from Abebooks that both my books are on their way. Yippee. Like the junkie who knows that someone is coming over with their next fix, the world seems a friendlier place when I know two of my books are winging their way across the ocean. One is another Richard Rohr book, a man whose breadth and length of vision I am swimming in and drinking in, this one about the humanity of Jesus, called Near Occasions of Grace. I really look forward to reading what he has to say. "Earthy spirituality," someone called it in a review, which sounds pretty damn edible to me.

Thing is, if I had thought 7 or 8 years ago that I was going to be raving about stuff written by a Franciscan priest, I think I would have found it quite difficult to believe. I had quite a loathing for Catholicism back then. It was my favourite ranting stop. Particularly, it was to do with the whole veneration of Mary thing - it seemed so fundamental that this whole deal was taking something that just plainly wasn't there in the Bible and making something out of it to suit people's needs. These days, I still don't think the whole Mary thing is any closer to being reality, but I can definitely see how a refusal to acknowledge the female side of God in the Church as a whole has resulted in something like that happening to balance the scales. But I digress ... again.

So yeah. It's amazing where the journey leads. Sometimes it seems to almost double back on itself. I think that if we haven't changed our minds totally on some things over, say, a 10 year period then there's probably something wrong and we're not wading out deep enough. I have found the willingness to sit in not knowing - a difficult thing for Westerners - yields some pretty amazing goodies if we can stand the tension. It's the death Jesus talked of dying. The death to our own knowing what the hell is going on.

In times past of not-knowing, my well-meaning AOG attending Kenneth Copeland loving next-door neighbours said to me on more than one occasion, "Well, God is not the author of confusion," with the inference that because I was feeling confused about something, therefore I have dropped off that oh-so-narrow path. Bah to that. Where's the fun and the discombobulation in that? Where's the end growth? What kind of shallow roots that sort of journey provides. If we really are in some sort of relationship with God, then surely it stands to reason that we will be (often) disorientated if he is leading us in new directions? I can't understand how a religious system could get so damn intellectual about everything that it removes all the mystery and the not-knowing, an element of the experience so eloquently set out in the OT.

Well, it's been fun, blogosphere, but I need a break from this place today. I find that when I spend too much time on the net, and particular in the land of blogging, as fun as it is, it gets a bit disconcerting and disorienting and paranoia-inspiring. Just seems to be the nature of dealing in such a flat medium. This internet thing is way cool and way weird but it needs to be managed a bit better than I have been managing it this weekend :) Time to get out into 3D and get a bit more balance going today.