"The kind of food our minds devour will determine the kind of person we become." - John Stott, Your Mind Matters

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Mystery and the Idolatry of Ourselves

Amazing Grace, by Kathleen Norris
progress: 88/384

After finishing my very difficult article on wrath yesterday afternoon, I returned to reading Book 3 - Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris - and was pleased to read her comments on mystery so quickly after writing my own thoughts on the subject. In her  article on "Annunciation," she writes about the discomfort modern Christians have with the concept of mystery, and their (our) tendency to resort to comforting and therapeutic language when worshipping. She uses words like "trite" and "impoverished." The consequence of this unwillingness to to be content with mystery and replace it with shallow interpretations in turn shifts the focus from God, whom we worship, to the worshippers themselves. She writes,

"Such language reflects an idolatry of ourselves, that is, the notion that the measure of what we can understand, what is readily comprehensible and acceptable to us, is also the measure of God." (72)

The question is, what kind of God would we have if we could fully understand Him with our own limited and broken thinking? He'd look a lot like us, in all the worst ways. We would be attempting to create God Himself into an idol of our own making. Yikes.

***

"'When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.'" — Jostein Gaarder (The Solitaire Mystery)

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2 comments:

  1. I haven't read this one by Kathleen Norris, but I'd like to sometime. Have you read her "Dakota"? That one really rings true, as we're living in the region she describes. It's helped me to come to terms with living in an environment whose geography and lifestyle are so different from any I'd experienced before and thus had trouble understanding and loving. I'm still not there yet, but her book has really made me see and think differently. -Julie

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  2. Hi Julie! I read Dakota for Maxine's Spiritual Pilgrimage class. I didn't know if I liked it at first, but as I began to write my own spiritual pilgrimage story for the class and reread my notes on it, I realised I liked it quite a bit! Then, after moving to rural Alberta, it has taken on entirely deeper meaning in my life. It's probably time to read it again. And as for Amazing Grace, read it - it's lovely!

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