It rained over Cup Match. I know. You were there. Or you were here on the Island, and you know that it rained and rained and rained. Now, that was a mixed blessing, because after so many dry days, many people's tanks had gone empty, and they were having to purchase truck loads of water. Still, rain soaked Cup Match was not as fun as it could have been.

We have a guest visiting the Island, and she came when the rain began, and she will be leaving as it comes to an end. So, we did not do many things that we could have done but for the rain and the thunder and so forth, but we did other things instead.

Mixed blessings, events that contain a bit of frustration, a blocking of what one might have done otherwise, and simultaneously events that contain a bit of joy, are like oxymorons. If you say, for instance, that today I had a joyous frustration, or you say I had a frustrating joy, what do those words mean? What are those ideas? They are mixed. They express the complexity of life in a wonderfully poetic fashion.

And life is complex. That is one reason I don't have much time for formulaic approaches to life. Inspirational speakers are known for their ability to pump people up with formulaic messages. Formulaic messages are those in which someone says, "Here are three steps to owning your own home," or "Six ways to have a happy marriage", or "Ten ways to lead by God's principles".

Don't get me wrong, I believe God has a design and that if one senses the design and gets into step with it, or to be more precise, if one senses the Holy Spirit at work and gets into step with Him, then things tend to go better, but life is simply too complex and we are too finite to be able to figure it all out so that we never encounter frustration, loss, heartache, and so forth-to say nothing of the role of discipline in which God often brings hardship and allows failure in order to train us and improve our character.

So, I don't have room in my life for the reductionistic. That goes for my professional life as a psychologist, my life as an intimate partner in marriage, and it goes for my faith walk as a Christian.

When a researcher conducts a study, he or she deals with estimates of human error, measures of probability, and even with the best of outcomes always indicates what was lacking in the study being reported on and what should still be followed up on in subsequent studies. Why? It is because nothing constitutes the final word on a matter. There is always another way to look at it, another facet of it to investigate, and another application of a principle to see more clearly what that principle actually is by exploring how it operates under somewhat different circumstances. You see? Complexity.

There are no easy steps to a happy marriage. A committed, intimate relationship is a constant work in progress. David Schnarch, a recognised marriage and sex therapist, describes marriage as a crucible in which people are heated up to a melting point. If the commitment holds, the people have to change. So, marriage is not a simple matter. It challenges to the breaking point. There is no long-lasting marriage in which the two people have not found themselves in deep water, out of their depth, where the easy steps and solutions don't work, and where they have to sink or swim. That's when they navigate the complexity of life that uniquely faces them.

When I attended seminary, I learned that Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was the father of liberal theology, and we were taught all the reasons why he was wrong and was to be rejected. When Dietrich Bonhoeffer studied theology in pre-WWII Germany, he studied with the dean of liberal theology at the time, who was very much in the tradition of Schleiermacher, and he ultimately parted company with him to follow Karl Barth in what became known as the Neo-orthodox movement in theology. When I was in seminary we studied neo-orthodoxy as well, and for various reasons my professors blasted both Schleiermacher and neo-orthodoxy.

Well, in this complex world it turns out that Schleiermacher's devotion to religious feeling, better understood in today's vernacular as spiritual experience, and Barth and Bonhoeffer's devotion to the Bible as the Word of God (and to Christ as the authority of the church), both stand out in a secular world drifting on one wave of humanism after another. Barth and Bonhoeffer opposed the Nazi drive to usurp the church in Hitler's Germany; I have been using Schleiermacher to oppose an atheistic bent in gestalt therapy, showing the theistic roots in the development of contemporary gestalt therapy.

How did a good Baptist seminary student like myself come to embrace Schleiermacher? I just read about his influence, in a complex world, on people who came after him: Soren Kierkegaard, Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Kierkegaard hammered out his existentialism against people like Schleiermacher, but Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer further developed Schleiermacher's ideas of interpretation. So, in a complex world, I can use the father of liberal theology (which in its more contemporary forms considers the possibility of a real divine Being to be irrelevant) to demonstrate the relevance of the influence of an actually existing divine Being.

That is not the world of 1-2-3 psychology. That is not the world of 1-2-3 intimate relationships. That is not the world of 1-2-3 Christianity. It is the world of mixed blessings – a frustrating joyfulness for some, but a joyous frustration for others.