"I first met physician Raymond Barfield in 2009 in Tunisia, where doctors and other health professionals had gathered to talk about how to improve care for people with cancer and hiv/aids. I heard Barfield speak eloquently of the need to bridge the worlds of medicine and the spirit. On the trip home to the U.S., during a layover in the Paris airport, I spotted Barfield hunched over a notebook and writing in longhand. He told me he was working on a novel and that he also wrote poetry and played guitar. I remember thinking, Isn’t healing the sick enough for one lifetime? Honestly I may have just felt jealous."
Raymond Barfield:
"...Over the course of a year my faith in God began to return, but in a different form. I’m still an atheist in regard to the God I stopped believing in. That image of God had turned into an idol that had become too small, that could not be balanced against the reality of one kid dying of cancer or thousands dying in war.I no longer think that we are made for permanent harbors or final, blissful, static perfection, but we can change and move toward goodness as we grow in our ability to recognize it.
For Aquinas everything that is good, beautiful, and true finds its ground in this unfathomable God, and every exploration of goodness, beauty, or truth is an exploration into God that helps you comprehend more. But you never stop growing in comprehension, which is why God is incomprehensible. Aquinas said that in this life the deepest thing we can know about God is that we don’t know what God is.
I’m excited that I don’t know what God is. Now I want to pray, because who knows what might happen? Now I want to meditate, because who knows what might show up? God is and always will be untamed by my imagination. I can pray wildly now."
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