On the Complexity of God and Coordinating Conjunctions

Allright. I know, it's been too long, but I've been readjusting to a life spent keeping balls in the air. I should be there soon, but in the meantime what I lack in frequency I will likely make up in volume.

Getting back to school has been glorious and hard. I have the honor to be in H. Jane's theory class, and that has been stretching. In fact, this semester is all-English all the time. As a result, something I've noticed happening last year is somehow stronger this semester: the sense of everything being connected. My classes inform each other in a way that can't be planned, since the profs are hardly in collusion with one another, and I feel like I'm not big enough to grasp the whole. I get that old sense of spiritual vertigo as I mentally "zoom out" when those connections happen and I feel like I get higher and see more every time. Yet I can't quite grasp it...

I hear Brennan Manning in my head saying, over and over, "God is always greater." I am so mindful of God-over-all in a way I can't remember experiencing before as He keeps busting through boxes. I'm not nearly (and will never be) a universalist, but I have less taste than ever for an exclusive, country-club, no-heathens-allowed kind of Christianity. My brain's a bit fried, so I'll quote an article by Gene Edward Veith, Jr. that we read in theory class:

It must dawn on anyone who seriously studies worldview, whether as reader or writer, that the Christian worldview is, in fact, bigger, broader, and more comprehensive than any of the humanly devised weltanschauungs. The non-Christian worldviews, to give them credit, are more than erroneous philosophies. They usually contain at least a grain of truth. The problem is that human philosophies tend to be partial, while the full truth as God reveals it is complex and comprehensive. It has been said that human reason works with "either/or." Christianity works with "both/and." Human reason would say that Jesus Christ must be either God or a man. Christian revelation says that He is both God and man. Human beings are both images of God and miserable sinners.

That starts to get there for me. I have the sense that God is all over the word "and." If I am truly seeking to see more of who He is, to be more like Him, then I need to be more about "and" than I am about "but" or "not."

Years ago, I heard a song by Waterdeep that has that word as its title. Something in me wept in identification every time I heard that song. It came back to me again at the end of communion today, when the cross connected the lyrics to my life once again. It's now officially joined the ranks of my personal theme songs.

I am haunted by my love for comparison,
a fascination with a single common theme
and I am hounded by the fear I might be losing it
slipping from reality into a dream.
And when my mind is muddled by the way it seems to work,
I start looking for just one connecting force
someone to assure me that we didn't lose the war today
and that the battle's General's still riding on His horse.

And in the mornings when I wake, I often come to You with dreams
little bits of plot that I can't comprehend
Sometimes I can keep my eyes unclosed for long enough
To see the blowing of a distant, steady wind
And the distance doesn't take too long for You to cover it
And when You reach me You just blow these things apart.
You clear the cloud that's gathered round the crisis of my soul
And whisper to my suffocating heart.

And is the juice in the joints of the motion of life.
And is the love that is between God and His beautiful wife
And has two hands and two feet and a long, ugly side
And rose three days after He was crucified.

So You're the force of gravity that I feel pulling at my feet
You're the pure light at the center of the sun.
It's Your Ghost that fills the atmosphere with what we need to breathe
Everything I've ever wondered, You're the One.
Well, both my hands are stained with blood, both my lips are stained with tears
from when I kissed the widow of the Man I killed.
You're asking me to swallow Your forgiveness here today
You say the bond required for my pardon's been fulfilled,

And is the juice in the joints of the motion of life.
And is the love that is between God and His beautiful wife
And has two hands and two feet and a long, ugly side
And rose three days after He was crucified.
And is the juice in the joints of the motion of life.
And is the love that is between God and His beautiful wife
And has two hands and two feet and a long, lovely side
And rose three days after He was crucified.

Hallelujah. Deo Gratias. Amen.