Voyaging to the Edge
Thoughts on the limits we tend to place on questions and doubts, and the great expanse of possibility awaiting us
“They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out.” Richard Powers, Bewilderment
There’s a tension that falls upon a forest right before a storm settles overhead. I observed this often while hiking in Colorado, especially during our first summer when we were still adjusting to the unpredictable nature of an extreme climate and high elevation. The temperature drops. The forest stills. The sun dims. The clouds gather. The smells change.
It’s not quite calm. It’s not quite chaos.
Nature is fraught with unpredictability. We want to traverse it easily. We want a clear way from trailhead to trailhead with blue skies and open trails. We want to master, co-opt, and define the dangerous. We want easy answers. We want others to succumb to those easy answers so we feel more comfortable in our limited curiosity.
But life is a “voyage across huge distances” from no knowledge to new knowledge gained every second. From certainty one minute and confusion the next. We know what we know until we don’t know it any longer. We defend our assurances until we realize little is assured. Tension gathers in our psyches and our souls, in the communities that once welcomed us in our surety but disregard us in our doubt.
Brennan Manning referred to spiritual struggles, unmoving cycles as “long Januaries.”1 Abraham Heschel called faith an “endless pilgrimage.”2 Modern evangelicals focus on the knowing and the proving and debating of belief.
But belief is a fragile, immeasurable thing. It bends with time and age and information. It’s challenged and warped. It swells and collapses.
Humans are prone towards unifying around the same beliefs, beliefs that remain steadfast, sure, and unchallenged, and oblige members to maintain those beliefs to remain safe within the fold. And when people drift, when storm clouds gather overhead, the environment darkens with tension. Because no foundation was ever enacted to make room for the inevitable changes or questions or doubts that time brings.
There’s a limit. An invisible line. A caution against an unforeseen brink that many think will launch us sojourners too far from one end of belief to an “irredeemable” end of deconstruction. They say, “just don’t stay away from church for too long” or “don’t deconstruct too much,” as if our beliefs are the things that keep us safe.
And goodness, if that’s the case, we’re all in danger. Because our minds and subconscious selves are more complex than we’ll ever know, swirling with thoughts, feelings, emotions, and beliefs, changing more rapidly than we can keep up with based on new information that’s constantly being received as we live and learn and grow.
Our language is limited in our communication of belief. We’ve been conditioned to assume this idea that belief is part of our identity, even though our identities “contain multitudes.” And so do our beliefs. In The Universal Christ, Richard Rohr quotes G.K. Chesterton who said, “your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of.”
In other words, there are multitudes of possibility existing within this great expanse we happen to exist in. We can spend our entire lives seeking, and never run out of questions.
There’s a Buddhist teaching that exhorts believers to kill the Buddha after encountering the Buddha in order to release all presumptions. The idea is that anyone who thinks they have certain faith needs to question their certainty. So much more exists beyond our inherited and adopted beliefs. If you think you’ve found God, smash whatever sense of God you’ve erected. The voyage to truth or enlightenment or faith is nowhere near over.
We’ve only just begun.
Recommendations
Gods Amongst Us: an Atmos essay on the wonder of whales. I’m forever awestruck by the magnificence of these creatures. As terrified as I am of deep water, whales offer a bit of beauty and hope in the darkest depths.
Bewilderment by Richard Powers, a brilliant, gut-wrenching, stunningly written novel about an astrobiologist father searching for answers within the cosmos to help his son.
Quote from Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel (affiliate link)
Quote from Abraham Heschel’s God in Search of Man (affiliate link)
Sarah, your words speak to me always. Due to a long history of brain fog, I no longer have the ability to write or find my words. So I hope this conveys my thoughts. You are a quality writer and I look forward to a book very soon.