God and Dualisms

At the leaders' weekend earlier in the year, we heard quite a lot about how dualistic thinking works in our lives. We tend to divide the world into binary pairs, like right and wrong, dark and light, truth and error, and so on. And part of the reason for this is that this often helps us to understand things, and act confidently.

What the teaching at the weekend tried to show was that very often these dualisms can become ways of trying to control our relationship to the world around us, or ways of judging ourselves and other people. This can be psychologically imprisoning, because we can end up assessing everything according to one set of criteria which seem to help us make sense of things, but don’t help us pay real attention to what is actually going on.

To some people it may have seemed slightly confusing or even a bit worrying, but I have a feeling that it is very important to consider this thought. Some of our most important experiences seem to be beyond simply categories like “right and wrong”, “safe and dangerous”, or “useful and useless”.

When we experience beauty, something that makes us gasp, we experience something that can’t be expressed in an either/or format, or as part of a series of opposites. We don’t need to see a derelict concrete car park to see that there is something very special about autumn leaves lit up in the evening sun. The autumn leaves are beautiful on their own, they don’t need any help from the contrast with the derelict carpark. Beautiful things just sort of say “look at me!”, and we look, and understand. It’s about uniqueness, the way that certain things get our attention simply by being what they are.

Simple categories also break down when we love another person. It’s like we tune in to a particular person’s “thisness”, a radiance that comes only from them. We don’t primarily think about what they’re not, or how their characteristics are on the right side of a good/bad, beautiful/ugly set of pairs. When we love someone, it’s more like what they are is already more than we expected. It’s like they just are, and that itself is surprising and wonderful.

Of course, we don’t tend to spend long periods of time in this state of mind, sadly. But the thought or experience of God is much more similar to these kinds of experience than to the experience of neatly and confidently dividing things up to categories. As far as I can see, one of the main insights of the Jewish/Christiain tradition seems to be this: there is no opposite to God. This is very difficult to express in words, but here are a few sentences that might get us somewhere:

• God simply is, and this is good.
• “God is good” does not mean “God is not bad”. It just means “God is good.”
• God is God from the inside.
• If there was nothing else, God would still be, and would still be good.
• God simply is, and this is always more than we can grasp.

Now, that may all be a bit prententious and abstract for some people’s taste, and I have to confess I don’t really know what I mean by all of those words. But as I see it, the Christian claim has always been that when we say the name “God” we are a long way out of our depth, we are trying to speak of the reason that we speak at all, One who “hems us in, behind and before”. We all have within us deeply ingrained dualisms: right and wrong, clean and unclean, inside and outside, deserving and undeserving. These dualisms powerfully effect how we think and relate to others, and when they are destabilised or challenged, we may feel out of our depth. But “out of our depth” is exactly where we need to be if we want to begin to understand God. 

Posted by: Stu Jesson on Wednesday Dec 2nd, 2009

Comments

Tom Dean writes:

Really well put stu :)

...left on Thursday Dec 3rd, 2009

Michelle Barnett writes:

That's a great way of putting it, and something really interesting to think about

...left on Saturday Dec 12th, 2009

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