TO BE WARMED

I wish my dad had helped me master fire building. He started me on the journey, and we built many fires together when I was young. But when I was fourteen, a rock climbing accident claimed his life, so he wasn’t able to help me take those final steps into the craft. For that, I have the pleasure of thanking my friends Sam Lopane, Davey Schaupp, Kyle White, and Rob McAdams, great men who I watched, and, through participation, learned from, over and over how to start, build, and keep fires that are warm.

    Since then, I’ve built a lot of fires. Some to be warm. Some to cook. Some to be romantic. Some for all three. But what I’ve learned in my brief experience is that there is not much to know in order to be blessed by the gift of a fire’s warmth. You need to know how to get a spark, how to build kindling, how to structure the wood in a conducive way, and then how to feed it and stoke the coals to keep it going. And that’s pretty much the whole recipe. Other little tricks come with experience and shared knowledge, but to be candid, it’s really as simple as that. There’s no need to dive into thermodynamics and molecular structures, though you can if you want, and should if it sounds fun. But the warmth of a fire is accessible to those who are willing to invest a small amount of learning into the subject. Knowing less than everything about fire doesn’t make it less warm. 

    Our’s is an answers-obsessed culture. You can thank whoever you want for that. It could be the Enlightenment, Wikipedia, or maybe The Bottom of Snapple Lids. But I think sometimes we get so caught up in trying to find answers and get to the bottom of things we forget to live an experiential reality. We equate “being right” with “living well,” as though the life we all ache for is just a certain number of new objective answers away. We’re so caught up trying to answer a lot of “why’s” that we neglect to embrace the things in front of us. Relationships. Environments. God. They’re all endless pools of knowledge and exploration, and yet they’re all places that require very little knowledge to be blessed by their depths. Beyond language, beyond knowledge, these things have a richness available for anyone. Whether or not a mother understands how oxytocin works in the brain will not prohibit or produce the life-altering experience of meeting her child for the first time. And I would trade a lifetime of studying sugar science for just one bite into a ripe strawberry.

    In fact, I’d be willing to bet that our worship of information gets in our way sometimes. I know in my own experience, I will think my way around God, how I think he works and what people say about him, and that will get in the way of my actual experience of him. Growing up in a culture that made it sound like my prime directive was to learn how to argue with atheists, I spent my time thinking about how God would act, how all of his contradictions add up, and how to defend my thoughts about him. There were truths I was trying to comprehend that got in the way of the Truth of my experience and reality for a long long time. But yet the early writers of Christianity talk about things like “the Peace that surpasses understanding,” and before them, a Jewish Psalmist wrote this (fittingly brief) poem:

   Yahweh, my heart is not proud, nor my eyes arrogant;

   Nor do I involve myself in great matters, 

   Or in things too difficult for me.

   I have certainly soothed and quieted my soul;

   Like a weaned child resting against his mother,

   My soul within me is like a weaned child. 

   Israel, wait for Yahweh

   From this time on and forever.

Some of the questions we try to argue and answer about the Divine and relationships are the same as trying to objectively answer the question, “What’s the color of suffering?” or “How does it sound to fall in love?” It’s not that these aren’t worth our meditation. They are. But they’re impossible to answer with absolution. Or as the anonymous author of the 1500-year-old book, The Cloud of Unknowing wrote, “I have forsaken all that I know for a God who cannot be known. Though he cannot be known, he can be loved. Through love we can grasp, touch, embrace, never through thought.”

    So what happens between what we know about something and all that there is to know? What exists in the gap between our reach and our grasp? Do we have a word to define that phenomenon? We do. We call it wonder. And for a long time, I innately believed that the more wonder I could eliminate about God or about how relationships work, or about who I am and how I “operate,” the better off I’d be. But that’s not necessarily the case. A healthy amount of wonder is not the enemy of truth, it’s part of it. 

    There’s a story I love from the Jewish Talmud that helps me think about how I live my life and order my heart. In summary, a Rabbi named Hillel is approached by a skeptic who asks if he could teach the whole Law standing on one leg. Hillel lifts one leg off the ground, and says, “Love God and love people. The rest is commentary – go study.” And with that, he puts his leg back down.

    This isn’t an argument trying to convince you to praise ignorance, or not to explore the depths of knowledge about God, people, or yourself. Do it, please. Like Rabbi Hillel said: go study. Study theology from a host of traditions and religions if you want. Read up on attachment theory (or whatever’s popular when you read this). Go to therapy. You can be blessed by those journeys; I know I have been. But remember that the highest experience of a fire is to be warmed by its flames in your soul, not to master its mysteries in your mind. Don’t ever let yourself believe that your lack of knowledge about all of a fire’s intricacies and chemistry are barriers to your experience of it. Engage some wonder as you watch it burn and feel the heat on your palms. 

You only need to know a little bit about fire to be blessed by the truth of its warmth.