On Spectrums and Communing
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about spectrums: how, to live, it seems, is to operate within a composite set of them, to choose to locate oneself somewhere on the spectrums between truth and peace, between justice and mercy, between quiet and loud, between joy and empathy. Every day presents us with a new set of these spectrums, and we are constantly called upon by life itself to decide where we land on each.
These are the choices that come together to create a life. We are feeling and thinking creatures, desiring and loving creatures; those emotions and thoughts and desires and loves inform our decision-making. They inform how we respond to the things that life hands us. More broadly, they inform the posture in which we live.
Forgive the abstractness. The point at which all of this becomes practical is when we begin to see it as a mode of understanding the concept of communing. Communion with God is one of those things that I know I ought to desire and pursue. But it severely lacks definition and dimension in the practical, know-how compartment of my consciousness. How do I “be” with God? How do I commune with my Maker? These questions remain largely unanswered, and though I know that time will yield a gradual answering of these questions, I have often crumbled from impatience for the process.
Thinking about spectrums, however, has softened that impatience. See if you can conjure up in your mind the image that I have in mine: the spectrum looks like a straight line, with its polar extremes on the left and the right. Put justice on the far left and mercy on the far right (or substitute those for any two polar extremes) and stretch a line between the two. The incredible thing is that God is like a circle, encapsulating and surrounding the entirety of that line! God encompasses every spectrum, perfectly embodying the fullness of both peace and truth, of both justice and mercy, of both quiet and loud, of both joy and empathy. And so, to commune with Him in and on these various spectrums is to follow His lead, to strive to align ourselves with Him who is perfectly encapsulating and hovering over all.
As I’ve continued to step deeper into communion and relationship with God, it’s become increasingly clear that we do not cling statically to these spectrums. To live is to be ever-moving, sometimes choosing truth at the expense of compromising peace, sometimes choosing mercy and delaying what we perceive is justice. There is a great subjectivity to it all.
This is a cue taken from Jesus Himself, the man who sometimes commissioned crowds of people to spread His good news but other times told the person He had just miraculously healed to not tell a single soul. We talk about discernment like it’s this practice we came up with in the 21st century American Church (around the same time that we supposedly invented the idea of vocation). Far from it, Jesus was modeling discernment for us perfectly while He was here on earth. He was in constant communion with His father, devoting time, reflection, and prayer to His every decision. He listened to His Father, living attuned to the will of God and adjusting His actions accordingly.
So, looking to Jesus’s example, discernment is essentially the practice of listening to God in our decision-making, communing with Him as we operate and locate ourselves on each and every spectrum. Discernment leads us all over, sometimes toward the poles and sometimes toward the moderate middle.
As an aside, I think we subscribe to binaries too often. Humans perpetuate this false narrative of either/or in practically every sphere of life. It infects all of these spectrums on which we live and operate. Either pride or insecurity. Either success or family. Either ambition or contentment. Whatever that binary might be for you, I’m learning that communion is also about replacing those narratives with the Truth of Jesus: the both/and. We trade in our myopic tendencies toward worldviews like “either peace or truth” for communion with the Creator of the universe, which increasingly enables us to strive for Kingdom-like worldviews like “both peace and truth.” Relationship and conversation with our Maker teaches us how to cultivate these.
As all these wandering thoughts subside, I am left with two lingering thoughts about the Christian life. The first is a mode of seeing, a perspective shift that allows us to see all of life’s choices as belonging to spectrums. Hopefully this worldview brings a bit of order to the chaos of question-asking and question-answering that can so easily enthrone itself in our daily lives.
The second is a mode of being: namely, of being with. In our efforts to tame the chaos and discern good answers for hard questions, we have a great Advocate and friend in the Holy Spirit, a relationship with the God who made us, which makes the whole process so much less daunting. He is not only for us but with us, expanding our souls and minds to see the world as He sees it, or rather, as He created it to be seen—the world through God’s eyes, where there is enough space for both justice and mercy, both joy and empathy, both truth and peace.
words by Delaney Young and photo by Marlow Amick