Eyes Open
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3)
Saul thought he knew stuff. In fact Saul thought he was an expert in all things theological, religious and political. His ego was well massaged too by the finest education at the feet of the great teacher Gamalial, high honours in both Jewish and Gentile culture and, as and if all that was never enough, he thought pretty highly of himself too.
But that all changed on the dusty wilderness road to Damascus. Because somehow, even through Saul’s mighty ego, truth broke in. Christ got inside his head and shot like Love right into the heart of the super-Pharisee. Saul became Paul and everything changed. Paul started blind and needed the church to help him see. But when his eyes were opened by the Damascan Christan, Ananias, he could already begin to perceive “the breadth and length and height and depth” of truth. But no longer did they constitute lines defining his notions and concepts about God. Now, as the shell of Paul’s first half of life false-self crumbled into the dust, he was beginning to understand that God surpasses any sense of knowing.
The love of Christ dances through every molecule in creation. It is the cosmic life force. But these too are words. And they can never be enough. No word, no symbol, no myth, no science will ever come close to naming or claiming the Divine Mystery.
By Grace
and by Faith
we may walk in God’s Light
and so
step gently
to love and learn to love.
Tonnau Duw ('God's waves') Fr Tim Ardouin 