by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
Zacchaeus is so curious about Jesus that he climbs a tree to see him. What satisfies our curiosity? Where does our capacity to question take us?
Parents experience the human seeker in action in their children. By five kids ask questions. Who made the trees? Who is my mommy’s mommy? Who is my daddy’s daddy’s daddy? In the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas questions like this lead ultimately to the unmoved mover that is God.
Lutheran theologian Marcus Borg liked to ask his doubting students to tell him about the God they no longer believed in. Often their God is the all-knowing, all-powerful God who made the universe and has a plan for every person.
This concept of God falls apart when God is not powerful enough to answer our fervent prayers or prevent the Holocaust and seems apart and uncaring. How can I trust that this God has a plan for me?
Theologian Karl Rahner began his doctoral dissertation with a two word sentence: Man fragt, in German; one asks, in English. He stressed the quest in questioning, the human thirst for the infinite. Rahner wanted to make God bigger, unbounded, to revive the mystery God is.
Rahner suggests we will have to make our own quests for God if we are to be Christians in our time when our culture isn’t.
As a seeker myself, I spent months alone on the North Shore writing a book on Mark’s gospel. One of these times I was reading Beatrice Bruteau’s book God’s Ecstasy. A passage came alive to me that said, “God is nothing,” no-thing, beyond any words, ungraspable, unbounded. This is theological principle number one: If you think your words describe God, they don’t. This was a sacred moment, an uncluttering of all my notions of God, a spring cleaning, a shedding of images.
This experience created new space within. Paradoxically, I have felt a greater intimacy with God, an embrace in the mystery that is ever-present like air and sunlight.
- When have you climbed a tree to see more in your life?
- When have you experienced an anchoring God moment? How has the moment influenced your faith?