7 Takes to Integrating Life and Knowledge

It seems strange to have a new month begin on a Friday. Also, I think its been September in my mind for many days already. So it’s nice to have the calendar finally catch up. And a happy birthday to my own Father. May everyone be nice to him today.

One
We have almost two weeks of gently easing into school tucked away into the annals of history. I can’t recommend starting this way enough. The first day you do nothing but go into the school room and just try to be there without screaming and losing your mind. The second day you read something aloud. The third day you add in a spelling test. The fourth day you add another chapter to your reading. The fifth day you suggest cleaning up the crayons off the floor. By the end of the second week you have basically reestablished the whole morning routine. After that it’s the full measure of school, pressed down, shaken together, overflowing, but hopefully not choking you with its abundance.
Two
This is kind of how life in the Atrium (Sunday School) should unfold. The first Sunday, or whenever you’re doing it, you don’t do anything at all but just be there and try to remember what it’s like–how to walk and how to stand and how to sit and how to speak. After that you add one or two elements a time, slowly, so that the whole body of the little person, but also you, have time to remember what being there is like.
Three
I really think there are two kinds of ways of being in church, and of being yourself. One way, the way preferred by so many (but not me), is to get your head straight. Figure out what you know with your mind, and then it will trickle down into some kind of action of your body. Line up all the various correct propositions about God, the right intellectual knowledge, and then you will be able to live properly, you know, without sinning and stuff. The other way is to accept the reality of your frail self, and adopt a way of being, a habit of life, that allows the knowledge you wish you could know to gradual sift in through all the component members of yourself. You take the little that you have, and you go very cautiously and slowly along towards the part that you want to possess.
Four
I really wish I had been allowed to learn like this a child, to be able to go slowly and haltingly along towards a few realms of knowledge, particularly when God came into the picture, rather than trying to keep with with the vast oceans of math and spelling that always threatened to drown me…Not that I’m saying anything at all about any teacher I ever had. They were all completely lovely. But I didn’t really feel like I was swimming and enjoying myself until late high school and college. But maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Five
The trouble is when you come into the church. No one, no matter what they say, has all the kinds of knowledge perfectly aligned. You may know and agree with every point of doctrine and theology, but way down there, in the back of yourself, there lurks some wrong thought, some corrupt assumption about the character and nature of God that causes you to distrust, to hide in the darkness and refuse to come all the way into the light. Finding and correcting that wrong thing isn’t something that happens in an orderly, clearly defined way. Most often because you yourself, let alone some other person, don’t know that it’s there. It takes God himself, who sees into every corner, to bring it out and make you look at it. And even then you probably won’t know how to fix, or correct whatever it is. It takes God again to lay the way of restoration. This isn’t a tidy, linear process. It’s circular. It’s rambling. It’s very often frustrating. It means revisiting again and again the old territory of well worn thoughts and feelings.
Six
And patience. With yourself and other people. It’s a little bit easier to be patient with children, especially if they look clean and are cute and nicely dressed. But every time you think someone else should be integrating their knowledge with their way of life more effectively, you could stop and visualize yourself as either a small child, or as a person who has no knowledge at all, and then try to remember how you would go about getting any truth to be first known and second lived. You might find that you can’t remember how it happened. The whole process was mysterious, veiled, meandering.
Seven
It’s why the Bible is the way it is–fat, strange, full of peculiarities and difficulties. If you want a rule book, a manual, a set of instructions, you will always be disappointed. Instead you have to go along reading about the lives of people who died a long time ago, and listen to God talking in poetry, and search out the history of long lost people and their motivations and ways of being. And somehow, in the arduous and tedious business of trying to understand, God himself goes in and transforms your mind so much so that your manner of life is turned upside down as well. But the turning upside down is so slow, so hidden, so unknown even by you that very few people walking by would even know that a mountain was that moment being thrown into the sea.

Have a lovely weekend! Go check out more Takes!