I paused for a moment and then offered, "I think when we are grown up, He helps us if we ask. Then we decide what to do."
Hers displays a wonderful, first-half-of-life position.
Mine, hopefully, is a step into the second-half-of-life, described in our journey through Falling Upward.
If ours was a robot universe, her view would be our entire lifespan. But what kind of companions to God would we be? If He didn't want us to bring something to the table, why would He have created us in all our complexity and talent and ability to synthesize and produce?
In Chapter 9, Rohr describes this second half of life as a new simplicity. Whereas our first half has a beautiful first simplicity, rule-bound, somewhat predictable with a measure of safety and security, our second half, arrived at through necessary suffering, becomes a huge field that has expanded--transcended--to include mystery and the unknown--and others' efforts to embrace this even when it looks very different than ours.
Rohr writes:
I have never figured out why unknowing becomes another kind of knowing, but it surely seems to be.The "unknowing" in the second half of our spiritual journey is to see that God operates...the way God decides to operate, without our understanding, without our pat rules we trusted as a child, embracing others that don't look like us or approach faith like us. What are we to do with that?
In 1995, Azim Khamisa lost his only son, Tariq, age 20, in a brutal murder. His offense? Delivering pizzas to earn extra money in college. Tony, age 14, thought it sport to fatally punish Tariq for not handing over the pizza.
The startling end to the story is that Khamisa forgave Tony, embraced Tony's distraught grandfather, Ples Felix, and to this day presents with Felix a program designed to teach nonviolence to students.
It is striking to me that Khamisa's meditation, learned from a Sufi friend in Africa, does not have the predictable pattern and language of the faith often professed in Protestant circles. It appears that Khamisa does not technically call on the name of Jesus as he walks toward God. I am faced with this question:
Is it a shorter, more pleasing route to God to implement true Forgiveness--the synonym for Christ's redemption--even before one knows the name of Jesus, or to hold at arm's length those who haven't said his name because they haven't done it our way?Like Eden, we get stuck in our four-year-old faith and reject those who don't act like they are listening to the God that tells us what to do. Until we wade through the necessary suffering of having our first-half-of-life parameters wrestled from our tight-fisted grasp, we can't see how God can teach us through such a not-like-ours worldview.
I want to err on the side of embrace. I want to know by not knowing. I want to understand by giving God room that I was uncomfortable with in the beginning, but now see with eyes of excitement, and ever-expanding love and curiosity.
God can lead each of us down trails we have never seen before, trails that we previously held in contempt.
Eden will find God's second Eden, the profound simplicity of letting God be His ever-larger Self. My job will be to watch her patiently and tenderly, as God leads her--and me--ever forward.
