Leap before you look
Can you believe in the invisible without demanding to understand it?
If you were buying a particular house, you would be smart about it. You would consider its condition, its cost, the neighborhood, and whether you could afford it.
Faith is not smart. Faith is foolish, and jumps in with both feet. It does not wait to understand what it is getting into, because what it is getting into is beyond understanding.
The Irish holy man St. Columbanus, out of a lifetime of practice, wrote:
God is everywhere. . . immeasurably vast and yet everywhere close at hand. Who will take pride in knowing the infinite God. . . whom no one has seen as he is?
Do not demand to know more of God.
[Instead], seek the highest knowledge not by words and arguments but by perfect and right action. Not with the tongue, . . . but by faith, which proceeds from purity and simplicity of heart. If you seek the ineffable by means of argument, it will be further from you than it was before; if you seek it by faith, wisdom will be in her proper place at the gateway to knowledge, and you will see her there, at least in part. Wisdom is in a certain sense attained when you believe in the invisible without first demanding to understand it. God must be believed in as he is, that is, as being invisible; even though he can be partly seen by a pure heart.
He says, “stop thinking about it, and do it.” This is what the Rule is for. Never mind if you don’t understand what you are doing, or why. We are all as children before the Holy. Children are taught to do the right thing, and only later come to understand why. If we waited for them to understand first, imagine the terrors they would grow up to be!
Wisdom is at the gateway to knowledge; she is not inside somewhere, waiting for you to develop some sort of understanding. Faith leads to wisdom, and wisdom to knowledge, which turns out to be totally unnecessary.
Understanding is only useful as one tool to keep one’s eyes on the Light. Jump from one understanding to another, like a frog on the lily pads, forsaking the old understanding when it is no longer useful, because—who cares? That was then, this is now.
Jump! Jump while you have the light of life!
Pablo Picasso