Читать книгу Our December Hearts - Anne McConney - Страница 14

Gaze too long into the abyss,” says Nietzsche, “and you will find that the abyss is also gazing into you.” The same might be said of the mystery of God, except that the mystery of God is not emptiness but a vast overflow of life, and what gazes back is a love too deep to comprehend.

There are moments, rare and brief, when we may see this, when the largest thing that can ever happen to us may, as British writer and theologian C. S. Lewis notes, find space for itself in less time than a heartbeat. I remember a hot summer afternoon when I had decided to walk to the grocery store for a few forgotten items. It was the sort of day that folks in the plains states call a “weatherbreeder,” and it lived up to its reputation; in the half-hour I spent in the store, the sun went under, the clouds came up, and a stiff wind caught me as I came out the door. By the time I was halfway home, the tornado-warning sirens were whooping and bellowing.

I was terrified, of course (one does well to fear a tornado, a tricksy, dangerous wind capable of bulldozing entire neighborhoods). I ran home—not far, but up a rather steep hill—and arrived on my back porch panting, heart thudding, shaking with alarm and exertion.

A scientist or psychologist might perhaps say that it was my own stressed and edgy state that triggered the great calm that came then and enfolded me in warmth and comfort. I was suddenly aware of the universe around me, largest star to smallest atom, moving in a joyous and noble dance. And the universe was a living thing, enclosed within a great love that held it in being. I had come all unexpectedly into a place of perfect safety. The tornado might or might not kill me, but I knew with utter certainty that it would never remove me from the sheltering of that enormous love.

Clearly the tornado did not kill me (nor anyone else that day) but the moment that was too short to measure marked me forever with the sigils of awe and knowledge. I have tried several times to seize that experience and bind it in words on paper, but I never succeeded—nor have I succeeded now.

If I were to put a name to that surrounding love, I think it would be Logos, the eternal Word begotten of the eternal Dreamer, the Son by whom all things were made and dressed in their beauty. This is the mystery into which we will gaze for all eternity and never be tired. This is the life of the Godhead into which we have been linked by the incarnation of Christ.

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel has written that we always tend to think of mystery as something “out there,” something we reach for but can't quite grasp. Perhaps, he says, the mystery is too close for us to see; we cannot understand it because we are standing in the middle of it. We speak, for example, about the mystery of love; we don't understand love, we can't explain it, we don't know why it happens, yet every one of us has experienced it.

So it is, I think, with God's love. We stand surrounded by mystery we cannot define or comprehend; it lies beyond us and within us; it whispers in our brains and sings in our blood. Perhaps the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us so that we might experience God's love in the same way we experience human love, so that the unimaginable might become for us real, solid and touchable.

It remains, of course, no less a mystery; if it were small enough to comprehend (as has been said many times), it would be too small to be God. Mystery is not meant to baffle us; it is meant to delight us, to remind us that there will always be new explorations and new wisdoms and new adventures of the mind and spirit.

We gaze into the mystery and the mystery gazes back with love.