"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment."
-Rumi
In every religion, no matter what it is, the vast majority of its practitioners and especially its leaders want you in some sense to foreclose your accounts with God. That God is X,Y, and Z and not some other way. This is because a book or some other authority tells you that it is. They may be well meaning in this, to give you commonly accepted bounds for your life. What they are not doing, however, is bringing you closer to God.
To desire absolute security in your knowledge of God, is to obstruct God's will in creating in you what He wills to create. I do not say you should abandon security in knowing that He is, that is altogether different. Depending on your beliefs about God is not the same as depending on God. Security in knowing exactly how or what He thinks is neither possible nor beneficial. Limiting what God chooses to do in you is not wisdom but foolishness
It is possible to talk to converse with God, to interact with God, but it is never possible to know God completely. God is unknowable. A God that was not beyond you, would not be God. It is possible to encounter God, to see His effect on your life, even to be swept up by Him, but not to know Him absolutely. Abandon logical thought where God is concerned, it is beneath Him.
A conversation requires that you neither stop listening nor stop talking altogether. Only the very wise can stop talking and just listen. If you stop listening however, it is no longer a conversation. In a sense, this is the story of our lives, the story of our conversation or non-conversation with God. And God may have a plot twist planned in this story that you know nothing of, and that you will miss, if you stop listening. If you stop being open to whatever it is that God wills to work in your life now. Maybe something wonderful, maybe something beyond wonderful, even if it is something you never thought of or planned or desired or willed.
"Knock, And He'll open the door
Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything."
Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything."
-Rumi
Reason is fundamentally tied to self-will. We want reasons for God and we want God to be rational, because in so doing we take something wildly out of our control and think to put it under our own control. We have not thereby controlled God at all of course, we have deflected our primordial desire for God into a safe useful neutered container so that we can be rid of it. We have been sidetracked, if our desire was for God at all. The way to God is not control, it is surrender. Surrender, that He may recreate you. Surrender yourself, your will, your reason. God is not doing comfy, God is not doing secure and stable, God is not doing conformity, God is doing BLOW YOUR MIND. God is doing bliss. God is doing beyond your understanding.
This is the powderkeg that it is every organized religion's job to contain, because the people in them aren't prepared for it and maybe don't want it. God is a danger that must be contained in safe, comfy and cozy forms. Remember this quote from Jesus?
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.“Woe to you, blind guides!
-Matthew 23:13-16
We can pretty much make a general rule, that whenever Jesus is talking about the Pharisees, he's not just talking about them. He's talking about religious leaders generally, whatever their religion happens to be. It pissed the Pharisees off so much, they had him killed.
It is not however fair to blame them. Just like in the economic marketplace, when nobody buys a product, it goes off the market. When people buy a lot of a product, it stays. People complain about the malaise in the Church these days and the decline of membership, but spiritual sterility is not accidental. As computer geeks like to say, it is not a bug: it's a feature.
Knowing God is not about having something to hang onto. It's about letting go. Letting go and listening.
