Lectio
“If I should take my stand on the shore of Your Endlessness and shout into the trackless reaches of Your Being all the words I have ever learned in the poor prison of my little existence, what should I have said? I should never have spoken the last word about You.”
— Karl Rahner, Encounters With Silence, The God of My Life
Meditatio
Try as we might, we will never comprehend the fullness of God within the finitude of our understanding. Try as we might, we will never be able to contain the fullness of God with the finitude of our words. Try as we might, we will never experience the fullness of God within the finitude of our flesh.
And yet, God is perpetually and eternally revealing God’s infinite Self to us through and as the very finitude of our existence. Everything we think, say, or feel would not be were it not for God making it possible by giving God’s very life to us as every aspect of our own lives. This does not mean that everything is God, but rather that nothing exists outside of God — that existence itself — from the abstractness of thought to the concreteness of reality — was and is thought into being by God’s own consciousness.
The moment God ceases thinking of us, we cease to exist. We can think nothing, say nothing, and do nothing outside of the life that God is willing into being in and as this very moment — in and as our very lives. And yet, in spite of this fundamental fact of our existence and of existence itself, in our finitude we fail or refuse to see the infinite generosity of God in and as who we are, and what we think, say, and feel, believing or insisting that we, ourselves, are the Alpha and Omega of our own existence. We resist the truth that our own finitude is, in fact, an extension of God’s infinite love expressing itself as our own finite natures and limitations.
But every once in a while, betwixt and between our denials and delusions, God awakens us from our slumber, even if only for a moment, and gives us a glimpse of His eternality — of the infinite love and goodness that is God’s very Self pouring itself out in and as the finitude of His creation. And in these moments, His grace invites us to choose Him over our selves and our surroundings — to give up our possessiveness over creation and to follow Him into eternity.
He does this not because creation is bad, for He, Himself, said that it is good, but because it is not All. It is not the beginning of us, nor is it the end. And so, every once in a while, He calls us out of that which has beginning and that which will someday end, and invites us to stand, with Him, on the shore of His Endlessness, if we will have it.
Oratio
Draw Me Out
at the shore
of Your Endlessness
I stand afraid
to turn back
to what I know
grievingly
to step out
into Your Abyss
faithfully
even this
I cannot choose
without You
reach for me
draw me out
into Yourself
I am willing
I want to be willing
I am afraid that I am unwilling
Contemplatio
Can you sit, even for a moment, inside the truth that you are both willing and unwilling — not to resolve it, but to hold the joy and sorrow within it?
Related Scripture
“Draw me after you, let us make haste. The king has brought me into his chambers.”
— Song of Solomon 1:4 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Grace Receiving Grace: John of the Cross and the Gift of Contemplation, which traces the same truth that what we most need cannot be seized by effort, only received.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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