A note for getting back on track

One special thing about the God of the Bible: he is a being of opposites, not via inconsistency, but via the limited nature of the human language.  Our adjectives—terrible, beautiful—and ideas—justice, mercy, love, holiness—are all too limiting.  When you get to know him, he no longer looks contradictory or fracture, like a mural of traits soldered together into a convoluted ceramic idol.  He looks like a person.

I don’t prefer the poetry of Walt Whitman, but this sentence he wrote, while utter crap, hints at what I am trying to say, not about small, twisted, limited humans trying to justify their inconsistencies, but about the Lord of Hosts, the God of Multitudes.  “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

So I do not, with these contrasting pictures from I draw from nature, want to say, “God is impossible to know with reason” or “God is distant and horribly, complicatedly full of oxymorons.” I am not a follower of Emmanuel Kant.

I am a follower of Jesus Christ.  He said, “You shall know the Truth.” You shall know!  We can know. And we can know Him, and through Him, the beautiful paradox of the Most High God.  “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

And the Father inspired David to say, long ago, that “the firmament declares the glory of God.” The world, flawed as we have made it, still sings through all our white noise.  Our reason, science, pets, history, food—it all says something about Him.  It all says complex stuff.  For God stands at juxtapositions.

And—I want to find him there.  Guided by the HandBook that tells me what he looks like, I want to push through the jungle of reality and see the glimpse of his coattail that Moses saw.  Without the Handbook, how could I identify him?  But without the world around me—well, I would be missing out to have a beautifully illustrated bird guide on my shelf, and never use it to go out bird-watching.

That’s what we’re doing.  Bird-watching.  God-watching.  Because we are Juxtapositors, and our Master stands in the Paradox,  so that’s where we go.  Into the Juxtapositions!