Thought for the Week: Sacred agnosticism
Harvey Gillman considers uncertainty, vulnerability, trust and faith
As I grow older, I realise that I know less and less. Perhaps it’s a sign of age that you understand that the world will not change overnight, that glimmers of light may be the grace you are given – not the great illumination which will put everything into context. You also realise that you have less time before you, and that this sense of your own mortality sharpens an awareness of the small things of life.
I have always loved debating ideas. I have been seduced by words, by manifestos, and by theologies, while at the same time remaining slightly apart, as if all these were games that help the mind pass the time, rather than sources of some absolute truth. The search for perfect knowledge gives way to the cherishing of the everyday, the ‘quiet processes and small circles’ that Rufus Jones wrote about.
In some quarters the word ‘agnostic’ is a polite substitute for atheist, as though agnosticism were a rejection of anything beyond the claim of the rational mind, as if reason were the only criterion for trusting the claims of existence. I prefer to use the word in its semantic sense of ‘not knowing’, even of ‘the inability of the human mind to encompass reality’. The limitations of reason become the ground for faith itself.
This agnosticism is sacred, as, far from excluding whole ranges of nonrational behaviour, it offers the possibility of discovery. I do not have to be certain, I can trust, I can reach out to the world in its exuberance, its irritating inconsistencies – the world and its inhabitants. Sacredness is characterised by feelings of awe, respect and veneration. Friends tend not to be too hot on the concept of incarnation, and yet for me the ‘godness’ of things is embodied in matter, the Christ within all humans, the Spirit in all life. And how vulnerable is that God within! How it calls on us to cherish its fragility! How it calls on us to witness to it the details of our everyday encounters!
We are living in very dark times. The horribly unimaginable becomes more and more real in every news broadcast. I cannot be the only Friend who, in spite of being encouraged to seek the light in all things, is tempted to give up on a world of political deception, daily massacres and human greed. If reason or logic were the only bases for action, then I may well have succumbed. But the glimmers, the sacred details of everyday life, the life of the imagination, the partial, limited, tentative, intermittent awareness of the God within and in the world around, call for more.
In my lack of certainty, which is also a giving up of being in control, if knowledge is power then the inability to be certain must lead to a sort of vulnerability. I am called to be faithful, full of faith in what I do not, cannot, fully understand. This is faith not as irrational, but as a trusting – transcending the intellect. The partial, the uncertain, the glimmer, the vulnerable have to be the bases of my theology. Faith is taking the greatest risk.
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