Alyssa's Art Garden

“We sometimes tend to think we know all we need to know to answer these kinds of questions—but sometimes our humble hearts can help us more than our proud minds. We never really know enough until we recognize that God alone knows it all.”

1 Corinthians 8:1 MSG

I get overwhelmed by the amount of useless information there is floating around in the ether. At the moment it makes me feel like plugging my ears against the cacophony of voices, cocooning myself in a cave and fashioning a bubble of silence. It comes to us in many forms, but at the moment I am particularly thinking of the ‘wellness gurus’. This is a corner of the internet I come across regularly as person who is dealing with a largely misunderstood chronic illness. The information is delivered as ‘the answer’ by people who exude that smug confidence, bequeathing some cutting edge knowledge- and now you should follow their programme/diet/intervention to the letter. In fact, to achieve wellness you have a moral obligation to do so! The implied message is often one of blame for what you have or haven’t done. Taglines range from the overly dramatic “Biggest food lies…” to “10 steps to recovery…” and “Are you doing this right?”….ad nauseum.

Going down the rabbit hole of seeking answers has made me realise how little we know collectively of the world, our bodies and how our mind and soul works. This endless tirade of ‘knowledge’ is not limited to wellness. It comes into spirituality, politics and all manner of human rights topics, dividing humanity into arbitrary groups and labels.

Why are we so drawn towards black and white answers to everything? Author and psychologist Ian McGilchrist would argue that it’s the left hemisphere of our brains. Its function is much like a secretary. Organising, filing things, reducing complexities to simple forms, analysing and categorising…a useful road map, but one with a limited function. The right hemisphere in contrast, will take the world in holistically. It can hold two seemingly opposite phenomena at the same time. According to McGilchrist, the right hemisphere is intuitive, and as such connects with metaphor and story because it can hold a deeper truth than just a linear sequence of events. It seems the right hemisphere of our brains are more comfortable with dualities and unanswered questions. Our culture is dominated by the left-hemisphere values of absolutes, details and sequence, giving a utilitarian anti-human feel to the world (this is why art and beauty are so important but that’s a whole other topic!). Perhaps this is partly linked to the vague sense of purposelessness I feel from time to time. The world can feel one-dimensional and unsatisfying. Can you relate? It’s no wonder so many of us are plagued with various addictions – which at the root are linked with a lack of meaning and connection.

Getting back to the pursuit of endless knowledge, which is the cornerstone of this age of information. The idea of mystery seems to be diminished as lazy thinking, or at best, simple-minded naivety. To me, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Being realistic about what we can and can’t change requires wisdom and humility. We only have to look at the past, to see that not only does history repeat itself (war, dictatorships for instance); but at the same time we do not know how things will unfold in the future. There is a tension between being subject to the opposite forces of predictable cycles and random events. It’s clear that there is something much larger going on.

How freeing would it be to embrace the unknowing, the mystery with a sense of wonder and adventure. To me, we all get caught up in this vacuum of pursuing knowledge. But we are searching within the confines of our limitations. It’s like trying to fly by jumping off a roof and flapping our arms.

But how can I embrace the unknowing? I’m wired for judging and analysing things and my mind wants to put everything into small neat boxes. Yet there is the ‘Still Small Voice’ who invites me to find rest. She whispers: ‘There is a God and it’s not you’. Sometimes I can hear it, sometimes not. Whether I can hear it or not there is a deep communion between the Spirit that dwells within and God that will eventually bring me to freedom and wholeness, a wholeness that has nothing to do with figuring it all out. In fact, God works most efficiently in my messes and failures. In the brain fog and self sabotage. 

“My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness…when I am weak, then I am strong”
(2 Corinthians 12 9-10)
Our weaknesses are the very parts of us that are fertile ground for the Spirit to work in most profoundly. We find God in our shadow. According to Jung, our ‘shadow’ is the aspects of ourselves that we cannot see and cannot accept in our conscious mind. We have an innate tendency, as humans, to reject anything that is weak and needy, whether in ourselves or others. God is not the one who condemns and judges- it is our own selves. We all have that brutal inner critic. A call to accept ourselves as ‘Not-God’ is an invitation toward self-compassion. It is only in this context we can see ourselves as we are: hopelessly flawed and fragile yet deeply and unconditionally loved. Self-compassion embodies the heart of God for us, and inevitably overflows to those around us.

Dwelling amongst our shadowy subconscious is the True Light, the author of life, the All. Separate from us, but at the same time in complete divine union with us. God is ever inviting us into greater realms of freedom to ‘live, move and have our being’ in them. Hence, there is a deep knowing within us all that transcends the surface of our analytical brains. It’s such an amazing thought, that the ‘Light shines in the darkness, but the darkness could not comprehend it’ (John 1:4)

I pray for us all that we can experience and understand this wide open space of love that invites us to life, despite the mystery that surrounds us.