Our lives are filled with boundary violations. “You need to lose weight.” “You are not parenting correctly.” “You don’t work hard enough.” “Why don’t you study harder?” “Get over your depression!” “When will you ever get your life together?”
We humans mistake intimacy for closeness. We long for loving, close relationships, and assume we will get there by being more intimate. We want to know everything about each other, and we assume we know enough about each other to tell each other what to do. Hence, the nearly endless boundary violations.
A therapist of mine, years ago, said to me very quietly, as I was trying to understand my relationship with my older brother: “Brian, everyone does what they do for a reason. The problem is: we may never know what that reason is, and that person themselves may not know. So much of our lives is unconscious.”
For example, we can focus forever on what we feel our parents did wrong by us, or we can accept the fact that we may never know why they parented the way they did, and they may not have known why they were doing what they were doing. And, guess what? We don’t need to know. We can choose to live in grace, accepting that they did the best they could, and we are doing the best we can. This does not mean we don’t try to grow in wisdom and loving actions. It means that we are wise to accept that there are limits to our ability to know and understand and that our lives and relationships will always have a large degree of mystery about them.
Boundary violations also work against our relationship to God. We assume that we know more about God than we do, and that we have the right to tell God what to do. This ranges from asking God to provide victory in a football game, to telling God to give me a certain job or make my child behave in a certain way, to thinking if I pray hard enough I will be healed of a serious illness. The Scriptures invite us to bring all of our concerns, worries and hopes to God, but that is not the same as telling God what has to be done.
Whether we are in a desert experience of desperation or a mountaintop experience of insight, the cloud reminds us that we will never see clearly in this life, and that much of life will ever remain a mystery.
As stated in the introduction to this series on Nature Spirituality, Lane explains that the Christian apophatic tradition, in the via negativa, “rejects all analogies of God as ultimately inadequate,” [p. 4] whether from language or nature. Yet, paradoxically, this tradition uses the three spare and lean images of desert, mountain and cloud to bring us to the most profound and ultimately indescribable human experiences of joy and pain, and of who God is in reference to these experiences.
While there is obviously value in metaphorical images of God (and the Bible uses many of them), yet there is danger as well. We may use those images to try to control God, and assume we know God better than we do. The strength of the apophatic way is that it keeps us constantly aware of the limits of language, including metaphor, to adequately describe everything about God. For all that we may know and believe, there is so much more we do not know.
Pseudo-Dionysius (a Syrian monk in the 6th century) attempts to explain this distinction by referring to Moses assent up Mount Sinai. On the mountain,”beyond the summit of every holy ascent,” Moses was plunged into “a truly mysterious darkness.” He was not allowed to see the total splendor of God’s being and majesty, but only to see the place where God dwells (See Exodus 33:21) By doing this Pseudo-Dionysius is making a crucial distinction between the essence of God (unknowable to humans) and what God does reveal to us about God’s self [See Lane, pp. 64-65].
Lane writes, “Apophatic tradition, despite its distrust of all images of God, makes an exception in using the imagery of threatening places as a way of challenging the ego and leaving one at a loss for words. If we cannot know God’s essence, we can stand in God’s place—on the high mountain, in the lonely desert, at the point where terror gives way to wonder. Only there do we enter the abandonment, the agnosia, that is finally necessary for meeting God. [bid.]
It is only when we give up our need to control God, including how God is defined and imaged, that we become open to revelations of who God really is, and what God wants for us and for the world. This is one more aspect of grace, in which we learn how to respect boundaries and accept that there is so much of life that ever remains mystery.
With this comes the “peace that passes all understanding" (in the phrase of St. Paul) as we turn ourselves over to this God who remains beyond our comprehensions and give up the desire to control the ways of God and how others choose to live their lives.
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