A few months ago we started using a blessing at the end of our worship taken from A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, simply called “The Franciscan Blessing.” And in there is a line that says, “And may God bless you with enough discomfort at easy answers …”
The day we first used it I spoke it with hands outstretched and saw eyes widen as I spoke the words. A high schooler pulled out his phone and took a picture. People started taking their bulletins home to reference it later on in the week.
I, too, find the words striking, but I wonder what resonated most with them in those first moments of hearing it.
If I had to make a guess, I think I’d probably guess that they finally had permission not to swallow the easy answers. The church has been a place where swallowing easy answers has been encouraged. We’re coming up on a seminal Sunday, Holy Trinity Sunday, where from pulpits across the country you’ll hear the Trinity reduced to a shamrock or a biological system of water evaporation or heat transference or any number of object lessons that are meant to make the pill of the Holy Trinity go down easy.
But what if it’s not meant to go down easy? What if it’s meant to get lodged in your throat and cause you to cough and gag and question and wonder what it is you’re taking? What if that’s part of the beauty of the whole thing, the wrestling with it, the wondering about it, the sitting there looking at it questioning if you can really take this?
Mystery and desolation and true awe are also part of the Christian story, not just doctrines and dogma. Think of angel visitations and wilderness wandering and God being found in the silence after the storms. Think of awe like the moments after a sea storm where everything is battered but everything is quiet and you think to yourself, “This is beautiful,” even though destruction has dragged its finger across the water. Mystery, like a love that doesn’t make sense yet tantalizes the senses. Desolation, like when you’re tired of the rat race and you run to the forest or the desert or that hiking trail you know in order to get away from people so that you can find yourself again and reconnect to the God who made you.
That, too, is part of our story. And, I would say, a more ancient and authentic part of the story than the object lesson answers we’re used to eating.
So may God, indeed, bless us with discomfort at easy answers, even the easy answers coming from our pulpits and spiritual podcasts and daily devotionals. May God bless us with disturbing awe at things we can’t wrap our minds around, reckless courage to hold mysteries instead of attempting to solve them, the stubborn will to not flee from desolation moments but to stay there until we have learned to hear our God-given heartbeats again.
