Mining Unusual Places

Years ago, I stepped off a plane in England, journeyed  to the rent-a-car counter, hopped on a shuttle to the rental lot, unloaded my bags from the bus in front of the car assigned me.  Opened the trunk, loaded my bags again and opened what I thought to be the drivers side of the car only to realize it was the passenger’s seat.  That was only the beginning of a brief harrowing experience of driving throughout England, France, Belgium, Austria, and Germany.  Cognitive dissonance had set in.  The study of psychology had told me previously that cognitive dissonance is the internal tension that results when experience doesn't match beliefs and values.  I quickly and fully understood through the sense of unease when I encountered something that contradicted what I have held to be true.  Over the years I have experienced this tension in the course of being with the terminally ill and dying person and family. Just listening, seeing, holding brought an immense amount of inquisitiveness about new ideas. But perhaps my dissonance has been felt most acutely when it occurs in the realm of faith commitments. When listening to struggling spouse who was left by the partner of forty or more years.  How could such a thing happen if marriage is God's ideal?  How is it that my prayers go unanswered if I have been so faithful to pray?  How do I reconcile my personal or the global experience of suffering with a view of a good and loving God?

Yes, there have been those who, I think, have never experienced (or noticed) cognitive dissonance as a reality in their own lives, have been quick to offer all kinds of explanations over the years to me and those like me, who don't find it quite as easy to reconcile the gaps between beliefs and experience saying:  We have drifted away from our moral center.  We have not studied the Scripture enough, or prayed enough.  We have not understood right doctrine.  And surely, in my case, there are times when all of these explanations may have been true.

But I am often unsettled from my own tendency to explain dissonance away, when I look at the doubts of John the Baptist.  The gospels portray John with all the intensity and moral outrage of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or Malachi—zealous prophets from the days of ancient Israel prone to weeping and crying out with zeal and tenacity.  The courageous cousin of Jesus preached repentance resolutely.  In preparation for Jesus's earthly ministry, he baptized Jesus in the Jordan River.  He stood against the immorality and hypocrisy of those who were religious and political leaders.  John was resolute in his ministry as the forerunner to the Messiah.  Even as his own disciples came undone and complained that the crowds who once clamored to see him were now flocking to Jesus, John stood clear in his calling: "You yourselves bear me witness, that I have said, 'I am not the Messiah,' but 'I have been sent before him'" John 3:26-28. 

Yet all of this background creates a dramatic contrast once John was imprisoned.  His resolve was shaken.  Both Matthew and Luke's gospels record his dissonance: "Now when John in prison heard of the works of Jesus, he sent word by his disciples, and said to him, 'Are you the expected one, or shall we look for someone else?'" Matthew 11:3; Luke 7:20  Here was John experiencing a gap between what he believed about Jesus and his own life's reality.  If Jesus is the Messiah, John must have wondered, why am I sitting in this jail?  The Messiah John proclaimed would "thoroughly clear his threshing floor" and "burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire" Matthew 3:12.  The Messiah was coming to rid Israel—and indeed the world—of evil.  Yet in John's day to day existence in his cold prison cell, evil had won the day.  "Are you the expected one, or shall we look for someone else?"

Well, I think John's dissonance is not unlike my own gaps between what I believe and what I experience.  Yet Scott Cairns in The End of Suffering suggests that the “suffering that results from  gaps can become illuminating moments in which we see our lives in the context of a terrifying, abysmal emptiness, moments when all of our comfortable assumptions are shown to be false, or misleading, or at least incomplete." The gap between what I, like John, believe about the nature and ministry of the Messiah and the reality of a Jesus who is free from my comfortable assumptions often creates unbearable dissonance. 

Jesus acknowledged that his ministry would be disruptive, and even be misunderstood.  In responding to John's doubts, Jesus said, "Blessed is the one who keeps from stumbling over me" Matthew 11:6. 

 

Father, I thank You for exposing the fact that gaps between what I believe and what I experience often cause my stumbling and falling. And then again, thank You for drawing my attention of mining those gaps also illuminate new paths of discovery from Jesus's own life and ministry.  Thank You for leading me in discovering that the gaps I experience often hold the treasure of new insight and the beauty of a more faithful devotion when I am willing to let go of my "comfortable assumptions" and dig deep, where what is precious and most valuable is often found in the deepest places of dissonance.  Amen