When I grade student essays, I often feel pressured to penalize my students for being "unclear." Many of my colleagues prioritize clarity above all else. It's part of academic culture. The worst thing you can say about a student essay is that it's murky or nebulous.
But secretly, I sometimes find value in the vagueness of what my students write. I think vagueness can be honest and beautiful. I'm tempted to respond in the margins: "Well done! You're being beautifully vague. Keep it up."
Here's the thing: I believe that many of life's most important aspects are inherently vague. Love, wonder, playfulness, and beauty can be intuited but not easily expressed in clear-cut formulas or simple declarative sentences. They are best "discussed" by talking around them, telling stories, or writing poetry.
I would never admit this to my colleagues. Nor would I confess that, at times, I appreciate my students' confusion. The experience of being perplexed or confused, not just by a problem to solve but by life itself, is a truthful reflection of reality. Life is filled with aspects that are bewildering, and our most authentic intellectual response is to admit: "I haven't the foggiest notion what's going on." Clarity is overrated. Confusion can be a form of wisdom.
I don't admit my appreciation of confusion to my colleagues either. I know of no academic discipline that would parade itself on the tagline: "We value confusion."
But there are two individuals whose support I would seek to defend the view that vagueness and confusion have an important place in life: Job and Whitehead.
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In the story, Job faces immense suffering, losing his wealth, his children, and his health. Despite being a righteous and blameless man, Job finds himself in the midst of inexplicable hardship. Throughout his ordeal, Job wrestles with questions of justice, the nature of suffering, and the existence of divine providence. He receives advice and counsel from friends who attempt to rationalize his suffering, attributing it to his supposed sins. However, Job maintains his innocence and refuses to accept their explanations. In his anguish, Job engages in a dialogue with God, expressing his confusion, despair, and demand for answers. He questions the fairness of his suffering and ultimately receives a response from God, who speaks from a whirlwind. God's speech addresses the mysteries of creation and the limitations of human understanding. Job had (at least) two awakenings by means of God's whirlwind:
No Theological Algorithms. He realized that the algorithm he'd been using to understand God - where piety pays and perversity punishes - doesn't work. We can piously fulfill all that God asks of us and still suffer greatly. We are not rewarded for good deeds.
No Human Presumptuousness. He understood that God is not solely concerned with humankind but with the entirety of creation. While humans hold significance, they are minuscule when compared to the broader web of life.
In addition to these, he awakened, at least implicitly, to one more truth. He discovered that being perplexed about God, being unclear about God, can serve as openings for new revelation. There is value, and perhaps even wisdom, in perplexity. Whitehead adds another layer to this idea, suggesting that perplexity is a conduit for novelty. He puts it this way in "Modes of Thought:
"Transcending mere clarity and order are necessary for dealing with the unforeseen, for progress, for excitement. Life degenerates when enclosed within the shackles of mere conformation. A power of incorporating vague and disorderly elements of experience is essential for the advance of novelty."
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In reflecting on Job's awakenings and incorporating Whitehead's insights, we have, as it were, an homage to vagueness, to inner whirlwinds, to perplexity. Job's realizations about the limitations of human understanding in the face of divine mystery, coupled with the failure of simplistic algorithms and the acknowledgment of God's encompassing care for all creation, highlight the inadequacy of clear-cut notions in navigating the complexities of existence. Clarity is a fiction, and it gets in the way of wisdom.
Whitehead's perspective deepens an appreciation vagueness by honoring the role of vagueness in innovation and growth. Embracing the uncertain, the disorderly, and the unforeseen opens pathways to new revelations and possibilities, transforming vagueness from a challenge to be overcome into a source of vitality, progress, and excitement in life's journey.
This does not mean that vagueness can always be welcomed. Certain kinds of perplexity can be absolutely debilitating, as Job knew. They come to us unbidden, unasked for, and we must simply struggle through. Moreover, sometimes clarity is a good thing: in engineering, health care, mathematics, and honest communication. But sometimes clarity becomes a false god: an obstacle to a sense of mystery, to humility in the presence of God and creation, to healthy perplexity, to a sense of adventure, to the discovery of new ideas.
The bottom line is that we must make space for vagueness in an age obsessed with clarity. We best realize that much of what is most important in life is non-algorithmic, unclear, and beautiful: love, wonder, and an honest recognition that we are within, not outside of, a mystery, sometimes very confusing, beyond our ken.
- Jay McDaniel
Job's Awakening
From Divine Algorithm to Divine Mystery
excerpts from a sermon by Rev. Teri Daily on Job
In the end, Job’s faith was tried by fire. He could never go back to the simple view of God as one who uses a divine algorithm to dole out punishments and rewards, any more than most of us could go back to believing that swallowing gum will make our insides stick together or that if we go outside with wet hair we will get sick. Job had seen too much to go back. But I hope he was able to go forward, to believe in a God much vaster than one who hands out rewards and punishments, to contemplate first-hand his new knowledge of an unknowable God.
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We, like Job and maybe even Jesus on the cross, may at times feel betrayed when our understanding of who God is and how God works seems incompatible with the life we experience. We may feel as though the carpet has been pulled out from under us. Hopefully we come through such moments with a fuller, richer understanding of who God is—an understanding that brings new life, a resurrection of sorts. But even if transient, such moments are painful nonetheless.
* It’s not the first time God’s people have felt this sense of betrayal, this sense of abandonment. We see it in the words of the psalmist, the very same words Jesus would later recite as he hung on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And I suspect most of us have had similar thoughts at some point in our lives. These feelings of betrayal are OK. In fact, they may even be a necessary part of our spiritual journey. -- Rev. Teri Daily
Fecundity and Empathy
Living with Bewilderment
Teri Daily invites us to imagine that Job found "a new knowledge of the unknowable God." What was this new knowledge?
Fecundity and Empathy
For my part, I think Job became aware of God's Vagueness and that this vagueness is an interplay between two qualities of God: Fecundity and Empathy.
Fecundity is experienced in the incredible multiplicity, variety, and (to our eyes) strangeness of creatures on earth and in the heavens, the vast majority of which are entirely indifferent to our human presence and get along quite well without us. If God has anything to do with this, then God is, at the very least, a spirit of Eros in the universe: an Eros for differences and independent agents. This side of God is, by most human measures, amoral. It is indifferent to the particular needs of large sentient beings such as humans and other mammals. Empathy is experienced in moments of kindness among human beings and between human beings and other animals. In these moments, we rightly feel that we have touched something infinite and good, something deep and tender. We have touched a side of God which is different from the Fecundity but tremendously important to human life. We have touched love.
Of course, some people might say that love is in the Fecundity, too, and perhaps it is. But it is not the love of tenderness; it is the love of intensity and beauty. To repeat, it is Eros. Is there a tension in God between the Empathy and the Eros, between the desire for variety and the love of tenderness, between aesthetic delight and ethical preference? I suspect that there is. In Whitehead's philosophy, it is the tension between the primordial nature of God, with its longing for intense experience quite apart from the well-being of persons and the consequent nature of God which operates with a tender care that nothing be lost and finds its supreme expression in love. Traditionalists will want to say that these two impulses - Eros and Empathy -- are perfectly balanced in the ongoing life of God, but I'm not so sure. I can't help but wonder if God, too, doesn't struggle with the tension.
A Twofold Awakening
In any case, I am suggesting that two things happened in Job. He awakened to two things at the same time.
First, he awakened to the Fecundity of God and realized that his human-centered perspective missed something very important about God: namely that God is at least as galactic and cosmological as God is "ethical and human-centered" by anthropocentric standards. God is not entirely about human beings; God is about all the beings. Second, he realized that he has misunderstood the Empathy of God, wrongly thinking that it takes the form of reward and punishment when in fact it is far deeper than reward and punishment. God's tenderness, and God's desire that we ourselves walk in tenderness among ourselves and with other living beings, is not algorithmic. It cannot be reduced to the formula that Job had early in his life: piety pays and perversity punishes. To the contrary, God's love is freely given to all, without considerations of who deserves and who does not. Like the sun, it shines on the just and unjust alike.
Emotional Knowing
Job's awakening involved much more than intellectual apprehension. He did not entertain the idea "God is Vague" and then give intellectual assent to it; instead, he felt the vagueness, directly, through his questioning and also through God's direct presence as a primal fecundity discerned in the sea creatures, plants, animals, and whirlwinds; and perhaps also, at a still deeper level, a primal empathy which operates apart from reward-punishment algorithms, embracing all. This is God's Vagueness: Fecundity and Empathy. You can't place it in a mental frame and really know it, at least intimately.
Philosophers speak of three kinds of knowing: knowing about, knowing how, and knowing by direct acquaintance. You can know about God through concepts, you can know how to dwell with God by loving your neighbor as you love yourself; and you can know God by direct acquaintance, among other ways, through the pain of having your algorithms torn away and experiencing the Fecundity and Empathy directly. Both are powerful and vague.
Embracing the Vagueness
Something is vague if it is without clear boundaries and incapable of precise definition. Our lives begin in vagueness; our dreams, moods, and emotions are vague; the mystery of other people's hearts is vague; the reason why there are so many weird sea creatures is vague; and the presence of God in the world is vague. Indeed most of the important things in life -- love and trust and wonder -- are vague.
If this is true, then one sign of genuine wisdom is a tolerance of vagueness and, where possible, an embrace of vagueness. We must be willing to be bewildered; and from the bewilderment -- from the impossibility of rendering something into precise definition or easy resolution -- comes the wisdom.
Of course, there is also a place in life for clarity. When things must be measured precisely for the sake of survival and well-being, clarity and precision are rightly prized. We hope that our pilots, physicians, and plumbers have propensities for precision. Furthermore, there is a beauty in precision, as when you solve a really good crossword puzzle, or balance a checkbook, and things feel "right." Whitehead observes that there is an emotion that accompanies the satisfaction of precision, and he compares it to cleanliness. When things are clear, we feel clean. But life is really never that clean. And the fact is that an overriding preoccupation with clarity is the bane of immature minds. Job discovered the smallness of his own mind when God presented him with all the creatures. Initially, he felt betrayed by God; but gradually he came to realize that he was betrayed by an algorithmic understanding of God which said, in effect, "If I am good I will be rewarded and bad I will be punished." He was too attached to his image. Trapped by the false god of clarity, he was thrown into vagueness.
There's something difficult about vagueness, but also something exciting and adventurous. It takes faith to accept the Vague and the fruits of this faith are novelty.