Does God exist outside of us?  That would depend on the definition of probably every word in that question.  Without doing that, let me rephrase the question…”Where do we experience God?”  Or maybe even more to the point, “How do we experience God?”  Is it a ‘place’ wherein this happens?  Perhaps we may say it is church on Sunday or in our room at night before we drift off to sleep.  Maybe it’s the smile of the wondrous child that you observe, or the bird that sings hidden in the branches of a tree in your front yard.  Do you experience God in the fragrance and beauty of a flower or maybe it’s the tiredness that your body feels after what you may consider a good day’s work?

What about those things that we may not consider so attractive or appealing?  Do we experience God there?  What about the worry that we have when our children do not listen to our advice?  Do we experience God in the disappointment of not being chosen for a job that we wanted?  Is God somehow in the experience of being embarrassed or humiliated?  What about when others think poorly of us and even perhaps ridicule or exclude us?  Is God here?  When we are angry or upset or bored or violent, is God somewhere in this experience?

Is Jesus in today’s Gospel from Matthew (Mt 11:16-19) perhaps posing these very same questions:

Jesus said to the crowds:
“To what shall I compare this generation?
It is like children who sit in marketplaces and call to one another,
‘We played the flute for you, but you did not dance,
we sang a dirge but you did not mourn.’
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said,
‘He is possessed by a demon.’
The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they said,
‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard,
a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’
But wisdom is vindicated by her works.”

It seems that we often easily ‘find’ God in those moments of presence in our lives when something we deem as good or joyous occurs.  Conversely, we often are at a loss of being able to ‘see’ God in those parts of life that we consider ‘dark’ or bad.  I wonder if we sometimes give more weight to our own preferences and judgments about people and situations than our conceptions or ideas about God.  We hasten to say or feel that God has nothing to do with this or that.  Perhaps our morality sometimes flows more from the judgments of our minds than the depths of our hearts.  I am not talking hear about relativizing what we may consider as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ but more trying to point out how the judgments we make about each other and life situations inadvertently exclude God.

And that is an impossibility, isn’t it?  Can God really be left out?  Or is it more that we have blinded ourselves to the possibility of seeing God in ourselves, each other, in this world, the universe, in everything?   Isn’t God bigger than that?  And what about the mystery that our theologies accord to God?  Do OUR judgments about people and things take precedence over how God may see them?  Are we unwilling to surrender ourselves to the possible reality that we really don’t know?  Would this mean that we may have to reconsider what faith and trust really mean in terms of the heart?

By now, I am sure that you are quite overdone with all these questions.  I don’t have answers I confess.  As I grow older, I am learning to lean more into trust, which has that indescribable quality about it that resembles something more akin to humility and even compassion than a ‘belief’ in something.  Trust is a relational term I believe, and it carries with it an unction or anointing that somehow casts an overarching space that seems to somehow include more than exclude.  It’s kind of like a space that is a place without boundaries, and its guidance is not as detailed as much as resonant.  This may sound rather ‘far-out’ or even a bit ‘rosy,’ but my experience is that, on the contrary, it is quite sobering and demanding!

Jesus tells us that we considered John, who presented the face of austerity and renunciation with such extremeness, a crazy person, and even a ‘demon,’ and that we thought of Jesus Himself, the Son of Man, as a glutton and drunkard who hung out with all the dregs of society.  Which is worse?  Which is better?  The closing line of the Scripture passage may hold the key, but I would not suggest a quick interpretation of even this.  Sorry, there may be more questions to come…

“But wisdom is vindicated by her works.”

Quickly, we may interpret this to mean that, “ah, that’s it…despite the outward appearance, it’s the ‘works’ that tell the real story!”  When we think of ‘works,’ we often think of exterior actions.  External actions are very important.  We could not get along without them.  However, I wonder if wisdom’s works are not more subtle than that sometimes…perhaps more interior and deep.  What if trust itself is the depth of wisdom and is intended to be the true source of all of our lives, interior and exterior?  What if there is not such a big gap between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of us and our world?  Could Jesus be pointing to the flow of life – our lives and life of the world – coming from and even included within the very life of the Divine?

If Wisdom is Trust, and trust is not in something, but in Someone, we are dealing with a relational model of Wisdom that includes everything, which may be a bit frightening-sounding.  Be careful not to confuse inclusivity with condoning behavior.  Rather, inclusion is the very realm in which we consider those people, things, and events in life that seem oppositional to us.  This ‘place’ of inclusion is a stage set of awakening that allows more than judges, includes more than rejects.  It’s not that the differences disappear, but rather they are seen within a broader vision or sight that does not take immediate offense but questions and yearns for more rather than less.

Here we can look at the differences as opportunity for dialogue, interaction, transformation, and true understanding.  The ‘war plan’ becomes a ‘playing field’ where win and lose sit on the sidelines.  It’s a ‘place’ that happens.  It’s the way that God ‘happens’ – which is to say that there is no ‘place’ where God is but rather God’s place happens and our mission is to see and cooperate with this happening.  This is another way of trusting.  This is wisdom as trusting.

We don’t look at it this way perhaps, but this type of trusting could have something to do with Incarnation.    Would it be so radical to think of God becoming human, engaging with creation in its inner depths as an act of Trust?  Incarnation can be seen as the Divine movement of Trust – becoming Someone within our history, and by that very action becoming everyone – CHRIST!  And when our movements become aligned with this movement of Trust, isn’t this the Wisdom of God?   In this it can seem that God suddenly appears, even though it is that God was already here and we just couldn’t see.

I think it is a fair assessment to say that Jesus trusted all those he encountered.  In a way, that was His Wisdom (note that Wisdom is a ‘she’ in the Scriptures here).  This trust was not in the idea that those he encountered would do as he wanted them to do, but that they (we) would engage honestly and authentically with our lives – the persons and events – to such an extent that the habits of our judgments may loosen their hold upon us.  The movement of God calls for us to move in and as God!  This simple trust as Incarnation is one movement of God -the ‘place’ of God – and shines forth in the diverse manifestations of how we align ourselves in that movement – our ‘places.’  Our capacity to see and participate in this is proportionate to the awareness and appropriation of all the austerity, intoxication and madness of our exclusive judgements – both John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth.

John of the Cross, whose feast day we celebrate today, puts it this way:

“That which I understand therefore as to how God effects this awakening and view of the soul…is that He removes some of the many veils and curtains hanging in front of it so that it might see Him as He is…Hence it seems to the soul that, in being itself moved and awakened, it was God Who moved and awakened.”[i]

[i] Living Flame of Love (Stanza 4, 7) in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, et al (ICS Publications, 1979), p. 645.

Peace,

Thomas