Series on Waiting #4: A World That Cannot Accept Ambiguity

from dai​ly​galaxy​.com

A world that can­not jour­ney with the self, and can­not go deep, is also a world that can­not accept ambi­gu­ity and mys­tery. The promise of exper­i­men­tal sci­ence has been a black and white world—nature on the dock, inside a test tube. But as we all know by now, that promise has failed. The world is not black and white. And yet peo­ple are going back to this stance of see­ing the world as black and white. This was even more pro­nounced after the 9/11 Bomb­ing and the United States’ War Against Terrorism.

This is the 4^th Post in the AngPere­grino Series on Wait­ing. Click here for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

George Bush’s use of pro­nouns makes this very evi­dent: to not sup­port us is to be against us, to not join us is to be for them. Appar­ently, us would mean peace-loving, democracy-supporting Amer­ica and them would be the ter­ror­ists. It is really a return to the black-and-white world of the Cold War and Fun­da­men­tal­ism (iron­i­cally, the very enemy the US is fight­ing against!). The third para­dox of our time is this: that while technology’s goal has been to con­nect every­one in the planet, peo­ple are also build­ing walls to break the connection .

When we allow our­selves to wait, then we allow our­selves the pos­si­bil­ity of see­ing more than what is appar­ent. We give our­selves the chance at reflec­tion and contemplation—a long lov­ing look at what is REAL. Then we’re able to see the world as it is: more a mys­tery, than clear-cut and black and white. But this takes some time to see. It is usu­ally peo­ple who have gone through some dif­fi­culty that can see and accept this more. Expe­ri­ences like suf­fer­ing, fail­ure and death open us up to mys­tery more than any other experience.

At a cer­tain point in life, we real­ize that we are no longer chil­dren. We get hurt and we feel pain but nobody comes to com­fort us and blow away at the wound. We cry and the world does not stop. It just con­tin­ues with­out break­ing stride. Peo­ple we love die and they take away a part of us with them. We can fight this loss and remain indig­nant by act­ing like brats and as if the world owes us some­thing. Or we can embrace the bare facts of life: that pain is part of life, just as joy is part of it; that the world can be unfair, but there is good in the world; that friends can hurt us but it does not mean that we are ene­mies for life; that we are respon­si­ble for what we do no mat­ter how we feel; that love can remain long after the feel­ing is gone; that it is ok to make mistakes.

The world is a world of para­dox. And to lose sight of the para­dox is to see life as a litany of shoulds and musts not just for you but for other peo­ple as well. The world then becomes a world of black and white, of good vs. evil, of us and them. It is this men­tal­ity that has hin­dered real dia­logue among reli­gions and among peo­ples and has led to wars and killings in the name of reli­gion and in the name of “what we believe in.”

And because expe­ri­ences like suf­fer­ing, fail­ure and death open us up to mys­tery, open­ing up to mys­tery also becomes a thirst for mean­ing, for some­thing Tran­scen­dent and Ulti­mate, for some­thing Beyond. We notice that while the world that we have con­stantly searches for clear-cut answers to its ques­tions, there is also an accom­pa­ny­ing search for the spir­i­tual. Peo­ple dab­ble in the occult and in New Age for exam­ple, or buy books on spir­i­tu­al­ity and go on retreats. There was even a time when angels were “in”. Peo­ple col­lected angel fig­urines, prayed to their per­sonal angels, had angels guard­ing them each day of the week. Angels prob­a­bly reminded peo­ple of the spir­i­tual; that there is more to life than bod­ily expe­ri­ence. More to life than fail­ure and suf­fer­ing and death.

Tra­di­tion­ally, the Absolute (or God) has been described by philoso­phers and thinkers in many dif­fer­ent ways. Augus­tine and other medieval philoso­phers like Anselm and Diony­sius saw the Absolute as aitia (source) and telos (end) of the human being. Augus­tine writes, “You have made us for Your­self and our hearts are rest­less until they rest in You.” The rest­less­ness here is not just a psy­cho­log­i­cal rest­less­ness but an onto­log­i­cal one, which brings us back to the image of jour­ney. The Absolute is seen through many dif­fer­ent events in life such as inter-human expe­ri­ences that open us up to Tran­scen­dence. More recently, process phi­los­o­phy and the­ol­ogy have described the Absolute as Some­one Who draws us out into the future.

All these bring us to the real­iza­tion that the Absolute is Mys­tery. The Absolute is Mys­tery not because we do not have any­thing to say about Him (although in the end, we do end up in silence), but pre­cisely because there is so much to say and we can­not fathom the depths of this expe­ri­ence. Mys­tery is not blind­ness due to dark­ness; rather, it is blind­ness due to the super-abundance of light. It is akin to being blinded when you look at the sun.

Pre­cisely because we are deal­ing with the Absolute, our stance is activ­ity tem­pered with pas­siv­ity (or pas­siv­ity tem­pered with activ­ity). There is a desire for under­stand­ing tem­pered with the real­iza­tion that we can­not under­stand every­thing about Him. The under­stand­ing is never per­fect and com­plete. Of course the imper­fect and incom­plete under­stand­ing does not pre­vent us from hav­ing a rela­tion­ship with the Absolute. Rather, our rela­tion­ship with the Absolute also (and even more so!) goes beyond knowl­edge, pos­ses­sion and power. The rela­tion­ship is one where we see that every encounter with God is a new encounter. God is as Augus­tine so beau­ti­fully put it, “A beauty, always ancient, always new.” A per­son who falls in love with God, in a sense, is always falling in love for the first time.

So that there is a pecu­liar move­ment here. We wanted to be cer­tain, but our search for cer­tainty led us to mys­tery. What used to be a search for cer­tainty (which is a search for the black-and-white) becomes a search for mean­ing (which is often­times open-ended).