The Soul of Knowledge – Br. Keith Nelson

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Fall Preaching Series 2015
Monastery Chapel of St. Mary & St. John, Cambridge

Wisdom 7:15-22
Psalm 139:1-9
1 Corinthians 13:8-12
Luke 10: 17-23

“If you died tomorrow, do you know where you’re going?”

I should have seen this question coming. I was in a second interview for a position at a small, faith-based, non-profit organization. I was inspired by the work the organization was doing, offering non-religious educational and social services to new immigrants. It was the height of the economic recession, I was a recent graduate from Harvard Divinity School, and I was hungry for a job doing work I could believe in.  Though some of the fine points of my own faith differed from theirs, I was hopeful that, with some skillful, interpersonal ecumenism, I could stand on common ground with these fellow followers of Jesus.

Having grown up in the Bible Belt, I had been asked this question before. There is a “correct” answer. It’s: “Yes. I know that I’m going to heaven because I’ve been saved by Jesus Christ.” I could have said yes. But I knew that for me to say yes in that moment would be to shrink the untamable God I had come to love after years of seeking down to the contours of a theological shoe-box.

I took a deep breath, and heard myself say, “I don’t know.”

I continued, “I don’t believe that I can know the mind of God in that way. But I do know that I love Jesus Christ with all my heart, and I trust that nothing can separate me from that love.”

To my surprise, I was offered the position, and spent several gratifying years working there.

Tonight’s topic in our preaching series is “The Soul of Knowledge.” These days, there are two common assumptions about knowledge and religion that you have probably encountered. The first assumption often finds a home in places like Harvard Square, where the pursuit of knowledge is an obvious priority, and there are many, very smart people. This is the assumption that if you dare to enter a building such as this chapel, those inside might see your hard-earned knowledge as a suspicious liability and expect you to adopt an unquestioning faith as its antidote. The second assumption is typified by the question I was asked in my job interview. It presumes that a Christian who is right with God will walk through life from start to finish clad in dogmatic certainty, itself a form of irrefutable data. The good news that you probably already know is that these two are not the only options. But you may have noticed that following Jesus on the path between these extremes has its unique challenges. For your consideration, I’d like to delineate some features of a Christian posture toward knowledge informed by the early Church and the monastic tradition that can help us navigate the journey of faith in a land of extremisms.

Ancient and medieval monastic communities, like the early Christians before them, understood knowledge to be a personal, experiential familiarity with God and God’s works rather than theoretical speculation about them. Grounded in that basic premise, they more or less took the following for granted:

Knowledge of creation – including the study of all the human arts and sciences using God’s gift of our curiosity, our physical sense perception, reason, imagination, intellect, and our most subtle intuitions – can bring us closer to God. We need only keep our eyes, minds, and hearts open to God in the midst of these pursuits. In the words of an ancient prayer, “God is everywhere present, filling all things.” God awaits, eagerly, to be discovered in and through the endless complexity and wonder of creation. We might pause to reflect on our own areas of deepest knowledge, the tools that help us embody that knowledge, and the workspaces where that knowledge comes to life. The monastic novice is told, “Your cell will teach you all things.” How often do you seek and find God in your cubicle or classroom, your laboratory or study carrel, your laptop or your oven?

Our knowledge of creation, of ourselves, and of God exists in dynamic tension with revelation – those facets of God and God’s ways in the world that the Church perceives most clearly in the story and person of Jesus Christ. Christ is for us the loving self-disclosure of God’s mysterious heart, the key and cornerstone of all knowledge, the eternal Teacher. As our passage from Luke suggests, it is by trust in the self-disclosure of God the Son that we participate in his eternal, relational knowledge of the Father. How might revealed facets of our faith give your roving or wrestling mind a place to stand still? What facets of God’s revelation of self in Jesus do you find hard to receive? Have you tried asking Jesus to teach you more?

Acknowledging what we do not and cannot know by the use of our human faculties of knowledge is a sign of wisdom. This surrender in faith to the reality that we are not God and that God is pure and ultimate Mystery is at the heart of the Christian journey. All of our knowledge is provisional, incomplete, and partial, the sacred knowledge as much as the secular.

At the same time, the knowledge of God and the things of God that we do have is at least as real as our knowledge of the world perceived with the senses and intellect, and we can await its consummation with hope. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, Paul writes, but then we will see face to face. But on this side of eternity, is there a way to polish the mirror, to see just a bit more clearly? On this topic, a number of contemporary spiritual writers and even some neuroscientists contend that we possess two ways of knowing reality: a discursive, self-conscious, linear cognition and a mysterious, non-discursive, intuitive counterpart which opens within us when we are least self-conscious and gently centered within a larger picture.[i] Much monastic literature on prayer stretches our usual language and mental categories by abandoning the word “knowledge” altogether for the paradoxical imagery of blindness and unknowing. This second way of knowing God can only be realized through our voluntary and loving consent to be known by God, a consent to a reality already holding us in Being. This is not reducible to a technique, but cultivating practices of unknowing can open the heart to it. Sitting in silence or reading a poem, knitting a scarf or memorizing a Psalm or climbing a mountain with this gentle intention framing the activity can bring us to the threshold of this way of knowing, which surfaces less often the more we succumb to the urge to text or tweet each moment rather than let the mind surrender its boredom into God’s embrace.

In the end, knowledge is not enough. Knowledge – like technology – is like a very good, very capable servant. Love is its true master. Without love, our knowledge is lifeless. In the service of love, it finds its place and purpose. Our founder Richard Benson wrote, “It is the heart which must teach the intellect to know God by loving Him, not philosophy which can teach the heart to love God by knowing Him… It is the child-like voice of the loving heart which will cause the porter to open the door, that simple souls may come in and know what the princes of this world could not understand.”[ii] In other words, when we say “I don’t know” with a heart full of love for God, then “blessed are the eyes that see what we see.”

[i] See especially Maggie Ross’s Silence: A User’s Guide, pgs. 10-22.

[ii] Letters of Father Benson, pgs. 251-253.