Friday, November 16, 2012

That is why we are

The personality of the God of the universe? Oh, please! How can we have anything at all to say about Him, except the words that He gives us to describe Himself, in our terms, our languages, our thoughts, at our scale? No less than He reveals Himself to all sentient creatures according to their scale and capacity, He reveals Himself to us. But as to the personality, what He is—for even ‘who’ is too inadequate to grasp Him—that is as far beyond our nature, let alone our thought, as the distance between eternal self-existence and sequenced creatures. Yet, for us He ‘came down from heaven and was made man,’ if we will have it, knowing that this is neither spatial nor directional, this ‘coming down,’ nor is it knowable, what it means to be God and man at the same time. What mode of consciousness rides the back of Eternal and temporal cohabiting the same spirit, soul and body?

Let scientists probe the infinite recesses of His shadow, they will never come at the sight of Him. Let theologians struggle in the desert and the darkness with His angel, they can never capture any part of Him, save His blessing. Yet we make laws in His name, lecture ourselves on His divine energies, and play and dance before Him in worship, who is not in fact tangible to us as we are to each other. When we say He is jealous, or that He is judge, we do not know what we are saying. We have no images, again, but those we have made, blind artists yearning to paint the rainbow, never having experienced its colors. But for us He ‘came down,’ and, turning the whole universe inside out, balanced His infinite against our finite, exchanging with us What He is for what we are, never mind who. The God of the universe has only One personality, like us, and only One will, and that is love. And that is why we are.

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