remember…
Last night at our ‘house church’ we ended our gathering going around the room and reciting the following mantra, and then everyone repeated it together; but as each of us had our turn, we would add our own word to the space where the underlined word is. This is the mantra with my own choice of word added:
Remember…
we are in the mysterious presence of God!
I often am pondering this awesome God that we worship and serve, and I am astounded and amazed at the mystery that surrounds everything about Him. I know He has made himself known, but at the same time, He is unknown. When using terms like that, they may seem to contradict. On the contrary, they amplify the greatness of our God. So instead of using both terms, it seems best to use the phrasing like this: God is un/known. He encompasses both allowing us to know Him, yet keeping us from ever knowing Him. That is why He is God. He keeps us always pondering, searching and seeking. It is in this seeking, that we find Him…in the knowledge of our lack of knowledge that he is known as God. His depth is so deep, eternity will not even grasp a piece of who He is, yet we know enough of Him to fall on our face in absolute devotion to Father, Son, Holy Spirit, three-in-one God. (yet another great mystery). I was talking to someone just last night about something I wrote on another blog. As I was pondering the words of Jesus, I wrote this statement and it hit it on the head for me: “The more I read Jesus, the more I don’t understand Him, but the more I get Him, and the more I fall in love with Him”.
I leave with this quote from Peter Rollins’ ‘How (Not) To Speak of God’:
“There is a third way that something can be made manifest, and it is this third way that represents the highest mode of revelation. Here something appears in such a way that it saturates us and short-circuits our understanding. This third way is a type of super-abundant revelation that renders the thing in question hypernonymous. Hypernonymity refers to a type of revelation that cannot be reduced to pure presence precisely because there is too much to grasp: there is an absolute excess of information. In this understanding, God’s revelation is understood not as that which makes God present to understanding or experience, but rather as that which overcomes understanding or experience through God’s super-abundant presence. Here the hyper-presence of God is experienced by the religious participant as a type of absence, for our minds are unable to make the God who is there intelligible to us. This third level of revelation acknowledges that while God participates with the world, God is never present to the world in the way that everyday objects are. In this mode of revelation, God’s absence is seen to be a part of the experience of God’s presence: not because God is truly absent, but rather because God is hyper-present.”
parke