Prizing Holy Ignorance over Religious Certainty


I've finished Barbara Brown Taylor's Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, and I've found it to be a moving and wonderfully written book. Very much worth reading, so if you've not gotten it then click on the title and Amazon will welcome your order! I'm planning to include a review of the book in the upcoming issue of Sharing the Practice (of which I'm the new editor).


But back to the book and it's portrayal of life and death, faith and certainty. I came across the paragraph that will follow. It's worth considering (and of course reading in its full context). It is found in a description of her dealings with her father's death. In that time of waiting she writes: "I discovered that faith did not have the least thing to do with certainty. In so far as I had any faith at all, that faith consisted of trusting God in the face of my vastly painful ignorance, to gather up all the life in that room and to do with it what God alone knew how to do."


And here is the paragraph:



Since then, I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place. We are a motley crew, distinguished not only by our inability to explain ourselves to those who are more certain of their beliefs than we are but in many cases by our distance from the centers of our faith communities as well. Like campers who have bonded over cook fires far from home, we remain grateful for the provisions that we have brought with us from those cupboards, but we also find them more delicious when we share them with one another under the stars.


Remember this describes her experience after leaving the church's active pastoral ministry. She is now a pilgrim whose life is rooted in the church but not contained by it. I'd be interested in your responses to this paragraph.

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