Far too often it’s presented as a tragic either-or. Either we conjure up enough soul force and believe in our received version of God (however untenable that God may be), or as wayward apostates we abandon God.
But maybe there is a third way. Maybe we also have the option of holding that God as mystery. Maybe it’s okay if the whispers and rumours of God long precede God’s appearance. Maybe this too is a valid creed: I believe in God the Stranger Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth…
Of course, the Christian faith is nothing if God is not our friend. Here I raise my Ebeneezer, hither by thy help I’m come. But here is a paradox: our faith also holds that each day we must meet God with a blank slate. Each day we must confess that we do not yet know you, O God, so in your mercy reveal yourself to us. Otherwise, what is the point of prayer? Or at least prayer as it is conceived of in the greatest prayer book of all, the Psalms. Time and again, the Psalms give us language to long for God, to seek after God, and even to live with feelings of alienation from God.
A couple in a flourishing marriage are both known and unknown to each other. Even after decades of marriage, each day together has an element of unfamiliarity, as if it were their first. Beginning their morning rituals, they approach each other as stranger-friends and this keeps them from getting mired in stagnation.
How much more is this true of God, whose ways are unsearchable and past finding out.
It has been a surprise to hit my 30s and feel so much uncertainty about God. At first, I was tempted to feel bitter. I wanted to go to the divine customer service desk and demand my money back. But now I am oddly comforted by it. In this lack of certainty about God, I am beginning to see potential. Now, whenever God isn’t loving enough or big enough or wild enough, I hold a little funeral and look expectantly toward the dawn, awaiting a new conception of God. I repeat the prayer of Meister Eckhart from the 14th century, “I pray God to rid me of God.”
I now know that theophanies, though not wrong in themselves, will lack transformative power if they are rushed or premature. Freezing God in a static list of 14 fixed attributes or behaviours feels safe and perhaps nostalgic, but it will spell the end of our spiritual journey. A God of mystery, on the other hand, evokes endless wonder and possibility.
As Charles Wesley wrote in one of his countless hymns, “Wrestling, I will not let thee go, till I thy name and nature know.” Maybe the path lies in living as Jacobs—doubter-believers, pilgrims whose God is both friend and stranger, people who find God only after troubled nights. And even then a God who smites us on our hip sockets.
To pursue a God like that we had better settle in for the long haul, equipped not with a conjuring up of soul force, nor a divine customer service desk, but with a pair of durable sandals and a lifetime of patient wrestling.