Blue Like Monday Mornings

Blue Like Jazz Chapter 17 – Worship: The Mystical Wonder

I read a book a long time ago about Mother Teresa. Somebody in the book asked her how she summoned the strength to love so many people. She said she loved people because they are Jesus, each one of them is Jesus, and this is true because it says so in the Bible. And it is also true that this idea contradicts the facts of reality: Everybody can’t be Jesus. There are many ideas within Christian spirituality that contradict the facts of reality as I understand them. A statement like this offends some Christians because they believe if aspects of their faith do not obey the facts of reality, they are not true. But I think there are all sorts of things our hearts believe that don’t make any sense to our heads.

Aw, loving people because they are Jesus—that works for me; just whatever it takes to encourage people to love one another. If that is taking it to the likings of Jesus, then that works.

Maybe we all can’t be Jesus, but could we all just be Jesus-like in one aspect or another? I would be willing to bet just about everyone has some similarity to the goodness and kindness of the Jesus character. Now, if you are trying to say you have the perfection characteristic, you might be stretching it, but otherwise, I think we all have some Jesus-like trait based on the description given in the Bible of the type of man he was; love the individual for those traits!

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It comforts me to think that if we are created beings, the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater.

I never can quite agree with that type of a statement. You know, those ones like that, or the ones like, “Look at the amazing human body. How can you not believe there is a more powerful being that created us?!” or “Look at the beauty in nature. It is nature that reminds me that there is a great and powerful God.”

Those just don’t do it for me. I just do not see how any of those trigger reason for existence. Just because we are believed to be “created beings,” what in that makes us believe that the creator would have to be so much “greater than us?” Why is a creator automatically believed to be “greater?”

Man creates things all the time, and his creations do not make him any more super human than you or me. The individual who discovers a cure to a disease has no more special powers than the person his cure will heal. The creator has the same likelihood of catching a disease as does just about anyone else.

How does it “comfort” one to come to the belief that he/she is a “created being?”

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You cannot be a Christian without being a mystic.

So I used good ole’ dictionary.com to check on the actual definition of a “mystic” and here is the definition: “(n) : someone who believes in the existence of realities beyond human comprehension.”

With that being the case, then maybe the truth of Christians having to be a mystic explains more of my situation. Maybe my issue is that I always want to comprehend anything that interests me. I have a hard time settling for the “it is just a mystery and beyond my comprehension” explanation.

Any topic that gets my interest, I want to understand it and comprehend it. I need to come to a level of comprehension, leaving “mysticism” out of my options.

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Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.

I’m pretty sure my heart is always deprived of wonder. My wonder all goes on in my mind. Whether that is a good thing or not, I don’t know…

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There are things you cannot understand, and you must learn to live with this. Not only must you learn to live with this, you must learn to enjoy this.

That can be difficult for me, as referenced earlier with the whole “mystic” thing; however, as I noted, that is when considering things that intrigue me. When I am interested in something, I want to understand it. It is hard for me to tell myself that it is quite possibly incomprehensible.

Still, I am fine in some cases with the idea of saying “who cares? Why must we ‘understand’ that?” My example is the whole idea of how we got here. Why must man have an answer to that? Why must man either believe in creation or evolution? For me, I don’t necessarily believe in either one, but I am perfectly content with not claiming a “how” story for “how we got here.” The way I look at it is that we are here, aren’t we? Isn’t being here good enough? Why must we explain HOW we got here?

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I want to end with this. I just finished eating my dinner of Chinese food before I began writing this blog entry and the last thing I ate of it before starting was of course a fortune cookie…HA! I found my fortune rather ironic. It said this…

“Love is around the corner.”

Now for most, that would lead them to the belief that “Mr. Right” or “Ms. Right” is soon to appear, but for me, nope, I know EXACTLY what it meant. It was perfectly correct in it’s prediction, in that next week’s Blue Like Monday Mornings blog is the start of my two favorite chapters in the whole book—the chapters on love! Yep, “love” IS right “around the corner.”

[Note: All the above text in smaller italic print has been quoted directly from Donald Miller’s “Blue Like Jazz”]