by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
Two spiritual heroes whom scripture remembers for their faith and prophetic actions walk with doubt and despair in Sunday’s readings. Both the apostle Peter and the prophet Elijah live and lead in unsettled times and experience questions we are asking today. Where is God in this mess? Where is Jesus in this cross wind?
Professor Chet Raymo grew up Catholic but became what he calls a “scientific agnostic,” learning to think for himself as he studied for a doctorate in physics at Notre Dame. An agnostic doesn’t deny the possibility of God but receives our traditions about God with skepticism. Raymo is wary of a God made too much in our own image.
In his book When God Is Gone Everything Is Holy, Raymo writes that learning should bring us to ignorance, to recognize what we don’t know—to what another writer calls the “mystery and manure” of life.
Catholic mystics call this the negative way, recognizing God is beyond all knowing. Raymo keeps science and religious experience in dialogue.
“A hundred years ago, who could have imagined the dervish dance of the DNA or the ripples in the energy of the big bang that gave rise to galaxies. Who today can imagine what we will know a hundred years from now?” Raymo asks. Drawing on the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “God’s Grandeur,” he continues, “The world is shot through with a grandeur that now and again flames out ‘like shining from shook foil.’ …I wait. Alert. Always. For the shining” (21).
Peter and Elijah like Raymo call us to pay attention to mystery in our lives. We may find God when we are in over our heads or getting no answers.
- With what questions about God or about Jesus do you live?