blip : Beyond Lost Intellectual Ponderings :

At my church we share all the tasks that need to happen in order for us to have a worship service. I’ve been on the preaching roatation for a couple years now (I usually post my sermons here). Recently I joined the group of folks who take turns planning the Sunday service. Well, as I was planning yesterday’s service, I found this wonderful prayer in the Mennonite Hymnal (#676):

O God, you withdraw from our sight that you may be known by our love. Help us to enter the cloud where you are hidden and surrender all our certainty to the darkness of faith in Jesus Christ.

Dionysius (sixth-century monk) conceived of the Christian journey as a wandering into the darkness of God. It’s a wandering because, like the prayer above says, we enter into a cloud where all our spiritual techniques are disoriented—it’s like the needle on our spirituality compass starts shooting all directions at once. And this is the darkness of faith where we surrender all our certainty. We are brought to the moment of apophasis, as Dionysius put it. This is the point where we recognize that we lack the navagation devices necessary to get to God. For God constantly exceeds the grasp of our knowledge. As Dionysius says, our approach to God finds it’s end in a “hidden silence” and “brilliant darkness” surrounding God’s self—or, better said, we come into the brilliant darkness that emanates from the ecstatic love of the triune life of God. (For a taste of negative theology/spirituality, see J. Alexander Sider’s short essay in Vital Christianity)

For Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa (fourth-century Cappadocian father) looms in the background. Gregory writes, “The divine nature in and of itself…is unapproachable and inaccessible to human conjectures… He who by nature is above every nature…, who is both beyond the senses and beyond the mind, is seen and grasped by some other method” (Gregory of Nyssa, 93). And this “other method” is the life of discipleship. God relates to the world in love, and through our experience of God’s loving embrace we come to know the intimacy of the divine life. Rowan Williams puts it best at then end of his section on Gregory: “’To have God within oneself’, to ‘imitate the divine nature’. to be restored in the image of God, is consistently to follow the pattern of God’s life as revealed in Jesus. On the last day, we shall be judged according to our compassion, not our knowledge or any other achievement” (The Wound of Knowledge, p.71). We come to know God as we follow the way of love revealed in Jesus. And we discover this way as we join in God’s love already poured out for the world—the love of God that holds all things together and will redeem all things through Christ. We come to know this love through our compassion, through the love for another that reveals our love for God. That’s what I hear in the line from the prayer: that you may be known by our love.