experto crede

Experience.

This leads me to the final leg in my four-legged stool: experience. My life so far can be measured in two segments, before and after I went through Henry Blackaby’s study, Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God. Drawing from the examples of Noah, Moses, Mary, and countless others throughout the Bible, the study emphasized not only the uniqueness of each person’s encounter with God, but also the underlying truths that could be trusted whenever God is present. The guiding principles that arrested my attention were that as disciples of Christ, we ought to be taking the time to discern where God was already at work, and joining God there. This seemed a valuable antidote to all our eagerness to do God’s work in our own strength and wisdom. It also reassured me that it was normal to expect interaction with God. It was also the first time I had been asked to reexamine whether I had ever been guilty of presuming to do God’s work without God’s help. It simultaneously whet my appetite, and caused me to relax. In subsequent years, even as I have yearned for God to let me participate in something great in his grand scheme, I have also been able to more calmly recognize the quiet, routine workings of the world God made. Through this less obvious, sustained, prevenient grace, God daily, incrementally draws people into restored relationship with each other and himself, and it is easy to see when you have eyes to see it. The point, Blackaby seemed to suggest, was that it doesn’t matter the scope of the project or one’s involvement in it: the point is to recognize the work of God and participate in it, wherever one is called. In this, he affirmed that any good result of this divine and human co-restoration of the broken world is rightly to God’s credit, not ours.

This did, however, leave me with one empirical problem. If everything good was God’s doing, either by virtue of creating, sustaining, redeeming, or restoring, whose doing was the bad? Similarly, if my Spirit-enlightened reason was responsible for my grasping the good and the true, how could others who did not know God also grasp truth and goodness, sometimes even better than I did? This is where an encounter with the poetry and art of British Romantic William Blake, and his “synthesis of opposing dialectics,” seemed to offer some help. Blake envisioned the world as a kind of yin and yang, where good and evil were inextricably involved with one another for their identity, existence, roles, and actions. In a dynamic, cosmic interplay, good and evil participated in each other, leading Blake to marvel,

Tyger, tyger burning bright
in the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
could frame thy fearful symmetry?

...Did He smile his work to see?
Did He who made the Lamb make thee?

In the usual slipperiness between thought and speech, it must be said that one could easily interchange destruction for evil, nurturing for good in the images of the tiger and the lamb, and that destruction is not always evil, or nurturing always good. These things depend on definitions, context, and much more. But the principle remained indelible for me: the world is a mixed bag. Because I live in the world, where good and evil are so intertwined, it follows that sometimes I percieve God in the same way. This is my limitation, that I must always compare the Creator to the created. Precisely where one comparison breaks down, though, it seems another begins, and C.S. Lewis’ beaver puts it nicely in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe when he says of Aslan, the lion, “Safe? Of course he isn’t safe! But he’s good.” This, for me, can only describe the God of the Old Testament, of Revelation...and the God who allowed Hurricane Katrina to happen.

If our experience of God leaves us often with these strange and disconcerting paradoxes, it also assures us that God will defy our every category, that he will burst out in spring when when we expect indefinite winter, that our prodigalism will find its shocking, opposite reaction each time we come home repentant, and that there is a remedy for each yet unfulfilled longing or expectation, if we will recieve it in God’s time. One of the most delightful shatterings of my own preconceptions about God occurred in college, when I was reintroduced to the feminine imagery of God, who defies gender in a way our language cannot. When I lost my mother and grandmother to cancer in close succession, it was helpful that I could already see God mothering me, and that this did not contradict the more familiar role as heavenly Father that I had been raised with.

“Let us make man in our image,” God said in the act of creation, and “Male and female he created them.” I have experienced the powerfully formative roles of gender in family, in friendship, in the academy and in the Army, but never more powerfully than in marriage. It is no coincidence that the very conversation in which I at first objected to dating my best male friend and future husband in college is the very conversation that continues as we explore and adjust our roles in relationship to each other and the rest of the world. If we have a daughter, she will reap the benefits of our very fruitful debate on the subject of what it means to be a “woman who fears the Lord”--in the form of such empowering freedom that I shudder to think how she might eventually break our hearts with it. However, the same would be true of our son, who, in the process of becoming “a man after God’s own heart,” may veer off and become someone who we don’t even recognize. In this, we undertake the same risks as God does--the risks that come with bringing someone into the world who bears the weight of their own choices, and for whom justice, truth, love, and mercy will mean what he/she makes them mean through observation and experience.

My experience of gender is one of the most defining lenses through which I interpret my faith. Resisting the urge to dwell on the repressive, marginalizing experiences of girl and womanhood (on the larger human stage, not necessarily in my own life), I do identify with Madeleine L’Engle’s understanding of “mankind” as referring to all of us. I can be as expansive and generous about this as the other actors in a conversation are willing to admit their need for. If, however, a they cannot acknowledge the historical subjugation of female experience that blatantly prefers “man-kind” where “human-kind” could have been used, or attaches positive connotations to “bachelor” but negative ones to “spinster,” etc., I feel the need to point out this injustice--as a co-restorer with God--of fallen culture and language. It is my rational conviction, looking at the whole trajectory of Scripture and Church tradition, that we were never meant to fall into the confines of these gender-based, linguistic and cultural roles in the first place, and my experience validates this. (This entire post could have read “s/he” every time I refer to God, and I would have done it in good conscience. I made a decision to presume the most generous understanding of God’s self-revelation of our givenness as male and female, both image-bearers of God. Plus, I feel it’s uneccessarily awkward in English, for our lack of a personal, gender-neutral pronoun.) My reasonable response to the reality of gender is that we do not know nearly as much about it as we claim to. We are discovering every day that both men and women can surprise us by (in a Godlike way) defying the categories in which we place them. We also wrestle with the nature and nurture of our seemingly unavoidable differences, celebrating them where we can.

Approaching women in Scripture, I must take each passage in its cultural context, if I am to avoid a crippling interpretation of womanhood that misappropriates particular messages specific to times and places as transcendent or applicable to us all. As a response to church tradition regarding women, I won’t make the ordination of women a stumbling block for other Christians, but I will always prefer to attend churches where women are allowed the full expression of spiritual service and leadership to which they are called. As for experience, I will hold my own with an open hand, recognizing that any understanding of gender this side of heaven is incomplete and therefore still morphing. I will avoid anything that leads me to be dishonest with myself or others about the woman I am becoming before God, even for the sake of community.

Neatly, this discussion of personal experience in faith leads back to the role of reason, since it is only reasonable to critically examine how one’s experiences might color the interpretation of Scripture, buy-in to Church tradition, and future experience.  In this, we are all captive to our bodily lives--we have only our five senses and one brain to integrate them, which, while impressive its its faculties, still limits us to our unique perspective. Perhaps it is part of the divine comedy that we experience this and work it out in the context of our relationships to the world around us. The constant struggle to discern between substance and shadow, truth and error, beauty and gaudiness, is ongoing, and it requires our utmost, individual awareness, attention to the Spirit and reliance on each other. I am reminded of the logic Bassanio unveils to Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, as he answers the riddle designed by her dead father to choose her husband. Three caskets of lead, silver, and gold each present a riddle to would-be suitors, but only a man who chooses correctly will find her portrait inside the casket and be allowed to marry her:

So may the outward shows be least themselves:
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness of fair ornament?

All the arts and sciences we can devise still echo that groaning of creation described by Paul in his letter to the Romans which, like the pains of childbirth, expresses the hard labor of becoming. We struggle to say what we mean, to create and preserve beauty, to participate in justice and peace--but never perfectly. That Christ shared in this embodied, spiritual existence, providing us with his example of redemption in a broken world, and leaving us the help of his Spirit is the most lovely and hopeful news I can think of.