Let me speak in the abstract – never much fun to read but sometimes helpful, especially where there are people you love and refuse to embarrass.
Here is a decision to be made. You’ve just read Thomas Kelly and you are listening for the Inner Voice of the Holy One. You are trying, with every ounce of your rational being, to think clearly about the issue. And, oh, how you pray -- with every ounce of your spiritual fiber you pray.
First, you try to stand in one place and ask all of the pertinent questions and from that space, an answer, a response seems to be right.
Then you mentally move to another position and ask the questions again and, oh no, a different answer, even the opposite answer, seems to be right.
The first answer seems to be helpful to some and perhaps harmful to others and then stand in another place and a second answer seems to help and hurt entirely different people. Different answers create different consequences -- all of the consequences a sad mixture of good and bad. There is no response that avoids hurting everybody.
Look around and discover that there is no way to make everybody happy. No matter what you do, or if you do nothing, somebody will be disappointed and perhaps angry.
Read the scriptures carefully and discover that all of the biblical precedents are grounded in cultures very different from our own applying the rules about loving others inevitably looks different than it did in the Bible
What to do?
There can only be one response and I wish that there were others. After doing all of the research that can be done and after praying all you can pray and thinking your best thoughts and listening for that Ultimate Inner Voice, in the end you simply do the best that you can and pray God’s forgiveness if you are wrong. You take a chance on the best that you know and trust that God’s mercy is grander than his judgment.
Don’t you just envy those who never seem to face ambiguity, who are blessed to live in an “either-or” universe, who enjoy a world of purest black and white, who live in a community that needs ask no questons? Aren’t they fortunate to never wonder about another point of view or to struggle with partial answers. Aren't they fortunate to never need to throw themselves on the grace of God because they finally could do only the best they knew? Aren't they fortunate?
Probably not!
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3 comments:
Those you speak of who "never seem to face ambiguity" are also the same ones who feel the need to fight all the time, accusing the rest of us of not preaching the gospel and trying to rid the church of heretics; sorting everything into their black & white categories. Interesting.
Resolving ambiguity... it seems any effort to resolve ambiguities is motivated by my own insecurities. My attempts to resolve them attempt to establish a position of power over them.
To be Christ-like... accepts that ambiguity is human and security is divine. My sense of ambiguity leaves me feeling vulnerable and less secure so that I feel compelled to turn to God. Such was Christ's experience of the cross as the ultimate abandonment of self-security, pointing me to the heart of faith.
Resolving ambiguity... it seems any effort to resolve ambiguities is motivated by my own insecurities. My attempts to resolve them attempt to establish a position of power over them.
To be Christ-like... accepts that ambiguity is human and security is divine. My sense of ambiguity leaves me feeling vulnerable and less secure so that I feel compelled to turn to God. Such was Christ's experience of the cross as the ultimate abandonment of self-security, pointing me to the heart of faith.
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