The Quintessential Conundrum of Divinity
Who (or what) is God?
“God works in mysterious ways.” My mom used to hate this cliché and, to be honest, it does have a feeling of que sera sera to it. As if everything is already decided and we are simply following a linear story with only the illusion of free will. But doesn’t it really just mean that God is a mystery?
And then there are those (usually white cisgender men) who talk like they know exactly what God thinks and is. My dad rails against that kind of thinking. He was a pastor as a young man, and — though he is a white cisgender man — he knows that the human mind cannot comprehend God. He once told me a story to illustrate:
A child drew two stick figures on a piece of paper with wax crayon: one with red crayon, and one with blue crayon. One stick figure said to the other, “Is the child who drew us red or blue?”
We humans are the crayon stick figures, trying to fit God into “red or blue?”
Another time, my dad said that a human trying to understand God is like a dog trying to understand mathematics by “putting it to the sniff test.” In other words, a dog who found a piece of paper with mathematical formulae written on it could not read it, but only sniff it. This would tell the dog nothing about the mathematics, but only what type of paper it is and where it had been, and maybe what the person who had held it had eaten for lunch.
God is a mystery. God is outside of time. God is immortal. God is omniscient and omnipotent. These are things our human minds cannot truly comprehend.
“What I really need to know
Is if You who live in eternity
Hear the prayers of those of us who live in time…
You’ve been here all along, I guess
It’s just Your ways and You are just plain hard to get”
–Rich Mullins, “Hard to Get”
In this publication, I want to explore this mystery, this conundrum. I want to ask the unanswerable question(s) because I believe that it is important to remember that we don’t and can’t have all the answers. Meditating on questions we can’t answer is good for us.
And white cis men don’t know who God really is.
