Book of Unknowing

Dave Brisbin 11.16.25 Have you noticed that people fight? Silly wabbit. Of course. Ever stopped to wonder why? Fear. Always fear. Even if it doesn’t feel like afraid-ness, unconscious, overriding concern for personal survival drives us fearward in a zero-sum world where there’s only so much oil in the ground, where the resources absolutely necessary for survival are finite. It’s basic envy and jealousy: fear of not getting what someone else has, fear of not keeping what we already do. Fights are made of this. No fear, no fight. Then why do religious people fight? Spirituality by definition is infinite, yes? Unlimited resource, enough for all. So when Christians fight, debate, defend, excommunicate, and they certainly do, they are saying they don’t really believe in infinite spiritual resources, or at least that the spiritual does not override the finite where we really live. Fighting Christians don’t trust that the perfect love Jesus lived and died to make real for us is enough. There must still be something we need to acquire or perform to gain the acceptance that is our eternal survival. More revealing: how do Christians fight? With scripture. Always with scripture. Any fight among Christians is a fight over the book. We’re the people of the book. Even before the early church had the book, it fought over what should be in the book, and once it had the book, fought to defend and enforce it. Five hundred years ago, Western Reformers went even further, saying the book was the only source of revelation from God, that to literally understand the text was to understand God—or at least the terms of eternal survival. Reducing faith to rational belief has put Westerners on a collision course with an Eastern text that is made of entirely different stuff. The ancients who wrote our book were not even trying to answer literal questions to satisfy our craving for certainty. The bible is the map of a journey to the experience of infinite resource, unlimited love. When we stop defending it, asking it questions it won’t answer, let it ask us who is asking…it can begin pointing us to trust what we can never understand—only experience.