Un-Knowing: The Paradox of Knowing and Not Knowing

It seems that the moment we think we have figured something out we often find that it is not the way. I am not talking about basic issues of theology or the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith.  But I am trying to discuss the manner in which at times we take on some new way of thinking or discover some new principle of the Christian life that seems to “work” and becomes the “ticket” for answered prayer or some other Christian spiritual experience.  We then settle in, sort of bunker down, thinking this “way” will always “work”; books and manuals are written on it; lectures and sermons are preached on it only to discover with out our notice (or, perhaps our refusal to notice), that just when we think we figured things out, things have been turned up side down.  Then we have to start all over again, lose our way and we don’t know.  

I have also learned this ‘un- knowing’ in fly fishing. I might have a great day of fishing using a certain fly in a certain section of river with a certain technique. I conclude that I cracked the code. I go back the next day in the same spot, at the same time, with the same fly, the same technique only to discover that this way does not work and I just don’t know.  

Perhaps we have a tendency to make premature conclusions about the spiritual life and about fly fishing only to discover we don’t really know as much as we thought. We tend to organize formulas about these things. Perhaps the moment we say, “This is how we experience God”, that way disappears. Perhaps the moment we say, “This is how we catch these fish”, the fish move. Such an arrangement keeps us humble as both God and fish can become mysteriously hidden.

Kipling wrote a poem titled, “The Way Through the Woods”. In the first stanza Kipling states the same line twice; “There was once a road through the woods”.  In the second stanza he writes how if you take this road you will see trout feeding in pools,

“If you enter the woods

Of a summer evening late,

When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools” . . .

But then he concludes the poem with this final contradictory line,

“But there is no road through the woods”.

What?! So. where is  the road through the woods to the trout-ringed pools?  . There is no road through the woods? Is it hidden?

As soon as I try to guide another person into finding what might be divine about fly fishing my words seem to vaporize as I speak them. I might suggest while fly fishing that the person needs to think or look at nature a certain way. Perhaps I might suggest looking or thinking deeper about what is “behind” or “under” the river or, to “Consider the Lily of the field”. I might speak of fly fishing being rhythmic and a form of mediation and that can make it spiritual. Or maybe I might suggest the other extreme of not thinking or trying at all and to simply fish.  Regardless, of what I might suggest or not suggest sometimes I only discover that rather than God being present, he is somewhere else, seemingly absent or hidden by all accounts of my senses and beyond my experience.

And then I know there is no road through the woods. Or at least the road I thought I knew.

And even this way of not knowing is not the way.