consolation in the Confounding

 

Blessing That Undoes Us, by Jan Richardson

 

On the day you are wearing your certainty

like a cloak

and your sureness goes before you

like a shield or like a sword,

 

may the sound of God's name

spill from your lips

as you have never heard it before.

 

May your knowing be undone.

May your mystery confound your understanding.

 

May the Divine rain down

in strange syllables yet with

an ancient familiarity,

a knowing borne 

in the blood,

the ear,

the tongue,

bringing clarity that comes

not in stone

or in steel

but in fire, in flame.

 

May there come

one searing word--

enough to bare you to the bone,,

enough to set your heart ablaze,

enough to make you whole again. 

I confess that most of my life I was wedded to certainty. I sought and too often found false answers and sat in a stasis or fixity which was anything but consoling.

Pentecost has come…again…and that Holy Spirit which never leaves somehow swept in. This year it really did feel like a gentle breeze instead of a ferocious wind and yet no less powerful, no less consuming.

Perhaps the paucity of drama and presence of tenderness offered a new realization. No less powerful and in fact, penetrating.

“May your knowing be undone./May your mystery confound your understanding.” Yes.

These words, which I had previously avoided, beckoned instead and I turned. There was the consolation in the very breath of acceptance. 

Who asks for their understanding to be “confounded”? Who desires or accepts a wholesale “undoing”? 

Consolation in confounding is indeed a paradox and I am grateful that it is a life-giving one. It represents a letting go of the scar tissue which covers the disappointments of certainty and refreshes in the possibilities. It feels a bit like floating. It feels a bit like wonder.