An extended reading from Robert Rohr's book, Falling Upward:
"The tragic sense of life" was first popularized by the Spanish philosopher Niguel de Unamuno as he told his European world that they had distorted the meaning of faith by aligning it with the Western philosophy of "progress" rather than with what he saw as rather evident in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. Jesus and the Jewish prophets were fully at home with the tragic sense of life, and it made the shape and nature of reality very different for them, for Unamuno, and maybe still for us.
Truth is not always about pragmatic problem solving and making things "work," but about reconciling contradictions. Just because something might have some dire effects does mean it is not true or even good. Just because something pleases people does not make it true either. Life is inherently tragic and that is the truth that only faith, but not our seeming logic, can accept.
Unamuno equates the notion of faith with truth as an underlying the life force so strong that it even includes death! Faith also includes reason, but is a larger category than reason for him.
In our time, it is quantum physics that shows how true Unamuno's explanation might really be. Most of us were formed by Newtonian worldviews in which everything had a clear cause an equal effect, what might be called and "if then" worldview. All causality was clear and defined. The truth we are now beginning to respect is that the universe seems to proceed through a web of causes, just as human motivation does, producing ever-increasing diversity, multiplicity, dark holes, dark matter, death and rebirth, loss and renewal in different forms, and yes even violence, the continual breaking of the rules of "reason" that make wise people look for more all embracing rolls and a larger "logic".
Nature is much more disorder then order, more multiplicity than uniformity, with the greatest disorder being death itself! In the spiritual life, and now in science, we learn much more by honoring and learning from the exceptions then by just imposing our previous certain rules to make everything fit. You can see perhaps what Jesus and Paul both meant by telling us to honor "the least of the brothers and sisters" (Matthew 25:40) and to "clothe them with the greatest care." It is these creatures and those humans around the edge of what we have defined as normal, proper, or good who have the most to teach us. They tend to reveal the shadow and mysterious side of things. Such constant exceptions make us revisit the so-called rule and what we call normal -- and recalibrate! The exceptions keep us humble and searching and not rushing toward resolution of our anxiety.
Our daily experience of this world is almost nothing like Plato's world of universal and perfect forms and ideas; it is always filled with huge diversity, and variations on everything from neutrino light inside of darkness, to male seahorses that bear their young, to the most extraordinary flowers that open only at night for no one to see. Jesus had no trouble with the exceptions, whether they were prostitutes, drunkards, Samaritans, lepers Gentiles, tax collectors, or wayward sheep. He ate with outsiders regularly, to the chagrin of the church stalwarts, who always love their versions of order over any compassion toward the exceptions. Just the existence of a single mentally challenged her mentally ill person should make us change any of our theories about the necessity of some kind of correct thinking as the definition of "salvation." Yet we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not "think "right.
I remember the final words of my professor of church history, a very orthodox priest theologian, who said as he walked out of the classroom after four years of study with him, "Well, after all is said and done, remember that church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus." After our shock started to dissipate we realized that what he meant, of course, was that we invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question -- even when it's not entirely true -- over the mercy and grace of God. Jesus did not seem to teach that one-size-fits-all, but instead that his God adjusts to the vagaries and failures of the moment. This ability to adjust to human disorder and failure is named God's providence or compassion. Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules did not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us. Just the Biblical notion of absolute forgiveness, once experienced, should be enough to make us trust and seek and love God.
But we humans have a hard time with the concrete, the individual, the anecdotal story, which hardly ever fits the universal mold. So we pretend. Maybe that is why we like and need humor, which invariably reveals these inconsistencies. Our mind, it seems, is more pleased with universals: never broken, always-applicable rules and patterns that allow us to predict and control things. This is good for science, but lousy for religion. Jesus is never upset at sinners (check it out!); he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners!
The genius of the biblical revelation is that it refuses to deny the dark side of things, but forgives failure and integrates falling to achieve it's only promised wholeness.
-- Richard Rohr, Falling Upward
