I'm All I Know

Ultimate Truth is ineffable.
While I can tell you I’ve met God face to face, there’s no way I can tell you much about it. My brain got lost before it got started. The human mind is not capable of processing that level of experience and existence. So it was some other faculty of mine which did it all, and I sincerely wish my brain would do a better job of listening to that other part of me. But in the end, all you can get from me is my pitiful attempts to organize how I’ll respond to the imperatives of that encounter with God. Whatever I have to say will of necessity be merely my reaction, my response.
Having read and discussed interminably the various systematic theologies of some really smart people, I can tell you they take their brains too seriously. They somehow imagine their minds can work out all the necessary details, so if they can just get you think like them, the job is done. There is no way any human on this plane of existence can tell you God’s nature, or much of anything at all. They can only tell you what they are going to do about it, how they are going to think about it — if they really encountered Him at all. So every grand theological construct is no more than the personal experience of one or more folks making the best they can of implementing their own imperatives. In that sense, there isn’t a one of them really right about it, such that you need to go along with their story. Go ahead, take a look at what they’ve got to offer, but don’t ever buy the notion you have to swallow the whole thing. It’s the same basic fact we all have some common elements as humans who share so much, but of necessity each of us must have some unique choices and ways, or we die.
I will warn you every religious organization I’ve encountered or heard about is far more exclusive, and on the wrong grounds, than God likes.
But it’s not simply what appeals to your fancy. You can’t trust your brain to accurately discern what’s really true; it can’t know. It wasn’t designed for that, though it loves to boast it can handle everything that matters. No, it’s just a tool for organizing something it can’t really understand, and it can’t understand anything that really matters. Its rightful place is to take its cues from another part of you which does understand as much as any thing in Creation can understand. When you examine the story told by anyone else, all you can do is compare notes, and embrace things you recognize. You will inevitably find someone doing or saying something better than you do, and it’s good and right to pick up on that. Still, whatever you come up with, whatever you hold at any given moment, must be completely and totally yours. It must be the best you can make of something utterly impossible, yet utterly necessary.
Even saying all that is just the best I know for me.
On the other hand, having struggled so hard to follow the inscrutable twists and turns of where this has led me, I can honestly say I am utterly at peace. The only thing gnawing at me is the urge to share it, that I’ve never quite done enough, or done it well enough. It’s not like I’ve arrived. Every moment is a fresh call to struggle, but I figure I’m engaged in the right struggle, and that’s what I have to try to tell. It’s that paradox which says the struggle itself is my peace. I didn’t find some treasure trove of answers; I’ve found the right question for me to ask. The question itself makes more sense than anything which has come before. Not that I could put that question into words you might grasp, but perhaps you’ll at least get the idea there’s something worth chasing, that whatever it is I consider being utterly at peace is possible for you.
Don’t mistake someone else’s peace for your own.
If you are curious about it, I can tell you for the last decade or so I’ve known I was just an arrow in the quiver. Whatever it is I’m really supposed to be doing can’t be done right now. All that vast pile of stuff I have written so far is just a tiny slice of what’s possible, not because I’ve failed to try, but because the context doesn’t exist yet. By no means will I pretend to know what it is I’m waiting for, but I do know it’ll be pretty obvious what it comes. The other faculty in me has told my brain that. For all I know, the right context may never come. I am assured that’s not the right question. Rather, it’s all about making sure I’m ready for it, in the sense I’m looking for something really different from what I see right now. As you might expect, this is a big element in some of the other stuff I write about here.
I don’t take myself that seriously, and neither should you, but if something I write rings a bell, take it for what use you can make of it.