Getting to the “Yes” Beyond “Yes” and “No”
[“This is how we shall know that we are in the truth, and before God be assured in our heart even when that very heart condemns us: God is greater than our heart and knows all things” (I Jn 3:19-20).]
O Lover,
The second reading for the fifth Sunday of Easter was I John 3:18-24. Within this passage are the above two verses which for me have long risen up from the page, sometimes almost thoracically. This post is yet the latest step in that journey.
Part of the richness with which You have graced us humans is a capacity for assessment as to how in both our behaviors and dispositions we are living out all who we are in You. In our text that capacity is thrice referred to as the “heart” (kardía), in modern lingua perhaps “conscience.” This discerning faculty is of enormous help throughout our life span in nurturing virtue, fostering continuity, and shaping community.
However, both history and experience reveal that this faculty of conscience is neither inerrant nor ultimate, and it needs to be held in tension in particular with the powerful Pauline theme of freedom as embodied in Your Christ (e.g., Gal 5:1). Such a dynamic is alluded to in our Johannine text where the conscience’s episodic self-condemnation needs to be held within the infinite expansiveness of You and Your wisdom. This tension finds expression in many questions: When does ardor for being right hobble us to the wild wide-openness of Your divine life? How might such zeal inadvertently throttle how Your graciousness is allowed to flower in and around us? When does sensitivity to Your nudging segue into scrupulosity, a fixation on moralism, authority, or rectitude struggled with by some of the saints? How do we discern whether what our consciences presume to be right reflects the iconoclastic Jesus rather than provincial morays and/or privilege? In the face of who You are as Lover, are we able to surrender to You even the very faculty of our own sense of rectitude? Or to employ different imagery: must not we, oft ossified “earthen vessels,” defer to You who are oceanic “Treasure” (II Cor 4:7)? Have You not Self-disclosed in the Christ Your divine “Yes” which is beyond any “yes” and/or “no” (II Cor 1:19) to which we have become attached?
O Lover, I experience modernity as shot through with contingency and uncertainty. As an octogenarian I claim an unprecedentedly modest level of certitude. At the same time, I have numerous positions, inclinations, suspicions, and hypotheses, most informed in varying degrees by my finite conscience (kardía). A contrarian of sorts, I find numerous such expressions of conscience in conflict with conventional politics, morality, and, especially, religion. On some such issues my fallible conscience may accuse, even condemn, me. As such, being alive in the year 2024 can be a chaotic experience when compared to the the perceived placidity of my earlier decades, a shift which has profound spiritual dimensions.
The Johannine writer tells me that You, O Sophía (“Wisdom”), are greater than my kardía with its vulnerability to fixations, foibles, ignorance, and provincialities. Even more importantly, greater than my kardía’s self-accusations. Our text invites me to exercise as gift my finite and foibled human faculty even while ever surrendering primacy to You and Your oceanic grace. My kardía is never more than penultimate, You never other than Ultima. (It is an unburdening just to have written that sentence!)
This is not an argument for the jettisoning of the flawed faculty of kardía. Au contraire, it is a prayer to be opened more widely to You, O Lover, who are “greater than our heart and knows all things.” Rather than either sloughing off kardía or opting for safety in the status quo, I long to be repeatedly opened to the feral rúah (“wind”) of Your Ubiquity. I thirst to be drawn into the Abyss of Your Yes.
