unfinished thoughts

I'm finding answers before I can, or even care to, formulate the questions. They are jumping to catch me, but if I grab them then I don't know where to put them, so I let them go and stare at my hand. And still I ask the questions that the answers posed made me think of, because the truth is difficult. It lives like I do. Jesus lives. It has a personality, you might say. It hides like I do. It avoids being completely known. It slips out of my grasp. God why can't I know you? The reversal of this question, posed from God to me puts it in a different light. Imagine if God asks why He couldn't know me. What would my answer be?

Maybe in humanity knowing and loving fight over the mind's attention, and dangling between them are learning and living. He knows me and loves me, that is the divine miracle. To be Christ-like then is to let truth beat and torment and crucify you, but to conquer it with love.

Paradoxy thrills and enchants and frustrates and agonizes me. In my deepest moments of righteous depression, I find an ironic peace in believing resolutely that this is how it should be.

Jesus gave sight to the blind, but obscured the truth from those who think they see it. Just enough hope to live on, just enough confusion to stay humble. Give us this day Lord, our daily bread.

So which is it? I want my fortune cookie answer so I can go on living the same way with a cuter phrase on the end of my tongue.


Which are you: wise or foolish?
Wise.
Then you are a fool, for you are proud.
No, then foolish.
Then you are a fool. You said so yourself.


Pride presumes and oversteps... making us inconsistent, dishonest...making all that is visible the ugliness of human nature. When I am most sure, I am most vulnerable and likely to fall. But what price to pay to try and step boldly into the world? Can I presume to bring forth anything or will my efforts prove another courageous but pointless stand to disappear into a flash of insignificance? I don't want to know if the world is worthy of my suffering, but if my suffering is worthy enough to take on the world.

My most enchanting thought was also best phrased by Pascal:

"It is superstition to put one's hope in formalities; but it is pride to be unwilling to submit to them." --Pascal

What needs to be changed first Lord? The cruelity and injustice in the world or the way that I preceive it, measure it, and judge it?

These are unfinished thoughts.