"God is mystery - the nameless One I cannot grasp or comprehend. Sometimes that mystery seems never-ending, and no matter how I try to penetrate it, I am left simply in a kind of dark unknowing. This may be so, even though I find myself still drawn to long for God, to desire what is totally beyond me, and say ‘you’ in the face of the ever-greater mystery. That chasm, that abyss, between me and the One to whom I am drawn, is perhaps expressed best in the words the prophet heard, ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways not your ways – it is the Lord who speaks.Yes, the heavens are as high above earth as my ways are above your ways, my thoughts above your thoughts’ (Isaiah 55:8-9).
And yet, despite that great distancing, there is, most wonderfully, the greatest nearness – God close to me, approaching me in the person of Jesus, and entering into the house of my heart. For what is ungraspable and utter mystery is also coming close in Christ, speaking my name, whispering wordless words of truth and love into my being. I have said ‘you’ into the darkness, because already I have been approached and addressed myself as ‘you’. Within the deepest mystery, there is a meeting, an encounter, a conversation, a prayer. As Saint Augustine wrote, ‘God is nearer to me than I am to myself, more intimate to me than my inmost being’.
"Lord Jesus, the darkness I experience is not darkness at all, but the light of your coming close to me. Let me therefore, in my prayer, realise how you never leave me, but are with me, in faithful love."
Beautiful. Mystery. Via negativa a la Gregory of Nyssa. God is holy and so beyond our every perimeter, yet knows each of us better than we know ourselves and chooses to live within and transform us into his image. It's beyond frightening and beyond comforting. God's "withness" is overwhelming. He doesn't promise us happiness but His presence. I'm studying Psalms and Ecclesiastes right now, and God's sovereignty and his intimacy make me cry. He loves each one of us so much with such an efficacious loving kindness. Our minds would implode/explode as would our hearts if we could understand it. It doesn't eliminate pain and suffering; it supersedes it. God is always the bigger, eternal reality. And, he has won, is winning and will win. We still live in a broken, sick, fragmented, evil world, but Emmanuel has come. God gives us worship and prayer as little glimpses into the ultimate reality that we're a part of but do not see fully. I forget all of this so easily.
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