Fantasize – to create, to imagine, to have daydreams, to indulge in fantasy (imagination or fancy, especially wild, visionary fancy), unnatural or bizarre mental image, more-or-less connected series of mental images usually involving some unfulfilled desire…
The last definition, that’s the one I think best describes what my mind used to do—indulge in a more-or-less connected series of mental images usually involving some unfulfilled desire.
So, yesterday afternoon as I pulled dead grass, weeds and wild berry vines out of my “flower” beds, I spent the whole time thinking.
Think – to form or have in mind, to conceive, to hold in one’s opinion, to judge, consider, surmise, determine, resolve, work out by reasoning, to purpose or intend, to form an idea, to recall and consider, to have the mind moved steadily toward, to reflect and remember, to discover, invent, or conceive, to work out, solve, or plan.
For the better part of my first 40 years, I spent most of my “down” time fantasizing the “what if’s” of my life, imagining often how it should have been or could have been, you know, if only…
But this last 20 years has been spent, for the most part, thinking. And there is a difference, a huge difference.
Perhaps a thinker fantasizes when she’s convinced there’s nothing “more” for her. Perhaps a thinker’s fantasies begin when her curiosity is truncated and her questions answered with, “Because I said so”, or “That’s just the way it is”, or even, “Because the Bible says so.” Those answers to questions tend to close the book. There’s nothing left to do but fantasize.
So, why am I going here? Why am I writing all this down? Why do I even want to think about this and write my thoughts down?
“Idol thoughts are the devil’s workshop.” Wow, where did that come from? That was not a statement heard in my house when I was growing up. But thoughts outside the norm or questions (especially regarding God and/or faith) weren’t especially well received, and the answers I received most often were the ones given above. And I have heard that old quote before.
As for women? Ever since Eve, we’ve been pretty much been identified with the devil’s workshop, and our thirst for knowledge was what started this abomination of sin anyway. Unfortunately, not much in our Scripture encourages a woman to think. Especially Paul, bless his heart. A woman’s head was to be covered, and her mouth was to be closed. Her husband was her “answer man”, and only in the privacy of her home. And what about Paul? Well, Paul was our hero when I was growing up.
When I entered the Catholic Church at the ripe old age of 52, several people there asked me a question that really got my attention. “Why is it that Protestants and Evangelicals quote Paul all the time or preach from Paul’s letters? The sermons are rarely from the Gospels, and no one quotes Jesus.” You know, they have a point.
Paul didn’t seem to particularly highly regard the opinions of women. And what Paul wrote mattered, a lot. His thoughts, opinions, and revelations filtered into my culture: a woman’s place is in the home, and her God-ordained “job” is to care for her husband and children, submitting to him in all things, of course. You know, “the little woman standing behind her man” thing.
If you’ve listened to me much over the last few years, you probably already know this is one of my sticking points. I don’t believe Paul’s opinions were always “revelation from God”. Dammit, I think a good many of them were just his opinion, patriarchal opinions at that. The God I’ve come to know and love gave me a brain, a mind. My God encourages me to expand my mind, to gather knowledge, to think, grow, and fully experience life. My God blesses a woman’s questions and her thinking mind. And the God I know doesn’t demand we check our thinking minds at the door and “just believe by faith”.
So, off my rant, and back to yesterday. What got me started on the joys of thinking until my thoughts ran their course? What got me to asking questions until there were no more answers?
Maybe it’s Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God. Maybe it’s Karen Armstrong herself. She’s just a smart woman. She’s intelligent. She’s an intellect.
You know, when I was growing up in East Texas, the word “intellect” was almost as bad as the “n” word. When a person was called an “intellect”, it wasn’t a compliment—it was rather spit out through clenched teeth and implied “uppity know-it-all”. And to mention “intellect” in the same breath as Christian? Well, there was no doubt which one was the obscenity. Today, I kind of look at that in wonder. What were we so afraid of? Why was it so much better to “have believing faith” than to be a thinking “intellect”?
Something shifted in my psyche a number of years ago when I learned a little something about the word “heresy”. That word comes from an old French word, “haeresis”, which indicated a school of thought, and an old German word, “hairein”, to take. Somewhere along the line, if a person began to think for themselves and to think outside the box, they became a heretic. What’s wrong with that picture?
So far, I think my favorite parts in Armstrong’s book have been her discussion of Socrates (wow, I really like that man!), and her chapter on Silence. I’ve learned something in my own “thinking” experience. It’s one thing to think and be challenged until your thinker zzzzztttt’s out and you come to silence, and it’s a whole ‘nother thing to “be silenced”. Socrates challenged his pupil’s until they came to silence, to “unknowing”. To sit with Socrates, to ask him questions, to come and sit at his feet was to know you were going to be undone. And “undone” is good. Jesus has done that to me quite a number of times. Paul just makes me mad, but Jesus challenges me, over and over again, until I’m “undone”.
Sit with Socrates long enough, and you wind up being pushed to silence. Sit with Jesus long enough—silence. Moses discovered that visiting often with God invited him to silence. So did Job. Armstrong points out that the burning bush was Moses’ initiation into God, but he eventually wound up in a “cloud of unknowing” at the top of a mountain, in utter darkness, completely speechless before God.
Have you ever been there? Speechless, completely undone? I have. I called it a “loss of faith”. For nearly three years, sitting in darkness, scared to death that I had sold my life out for nothing. Where was God? What was I supposed to do with this man called Jesus?
Either my eyes have become accustomed to the dark, or dawn seems to be coming. Haven’t gotten a lot of answers to my questions I’ve asked over the last 20 years, but I am getting more comfortable living without answers. And, if I come to an easy answer, I let the questions fly, and my thoughts dig until my mind zzzztttttts out again, knowing that no knowledge of God ever gives me pat, easy answers. Nothing in Scripture or in my own imagination ties God down to being what we think God’s supposed to be, or doing what we think God’s supposed to do. My knowledge of God never lets me get away with being angry at my brother or ostrizing “sinners”—you know, loving them, but hating their sin. In fact, the God I know doesn’t let me get away with “us” and “them”. When I sit with God and my thinker, I usually find it all coming back to me…my opinion of others, my anger, my resentment, my culturally-acceptable norms. The only one that sends another to hell is me, and I find that the only plank that needs to be removed from an eye is usually the one in my own eye. Jesus never lets me sit very long and accuse the other. Instead, he reminds me to search my own heart. Like Socrates, Jesus reminds me often that the unexamined life isn’t worth living.
Over the last 20 years, I’ve met up with those who would remind me where I come from, and with love in their hearts and great concern, they would try to lead me back to the “truth” I’ve strayed from. They usually quote a lot of Scripture to me. I don’t mind. I’ve been there, and I’ve done the same thing. But I won’t go there anymore. Armstrong says it well in one of her discussions of Augustine, Scripture and science:
“…It would be absurd to interpret [certain] text literally. God had simply accommodated the truths of revelation to the science of the day so that the people of Israel could understand it; today a text like this must be interpreted differently. Whenever the literal meaning of scripture clashed with reliable scientific information, Augustine insisted, the interpreter must respect the integrity of science or he would put scripture into disrepute. And there must be no unseemly quarreling about the Bible. People who engaged in acrimonious discussion of religious truth were simply in love with their own opinions and had forgotten the cardinal teaching of the Bible, which was the love of God and neighbor. The exegete must not leave a text until he could make it “establish the reign of charity,” and if a literal understanding of any biblical passage seemed to teach hatred, the text must be interpreted allegorically and forced to preach love.”
And it’s kind of hard for me to go back to a literal interpretation of the Bible, when I’ve come to love and respect story, mythos, allegory. O my how much bigger Scripture has become when I’ve let it be what it is—a growing revelation of God to a people, a story told orally for many centuries before every being set to pen, truth, not fact. So I don’t feel compelled to argue my case from Scripture anymore. I’d always “lose” anyway. I’d rather just let it be what it is--another chance to sit with Jesus for a while and ask him questions. Let him reveal my heart, my fears and my demands, then let him challenge me until my mind goes zzzzttttt…and my heart softens, and I come away in silence again.
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