How Large Is My “Yes”?
O Lover,
One of the formative issues in my faith journey is captured by the title of J. B. Phillips’ Your God Is Too Small (1953) which I first read in college. Insofar as I presume the referent of his “Your” to be myself, the query of this post is my personalized interrogative version of the title of that book. This prayer post identifies several areas where the scale of my “yes” to You is presently in play.
First, there is the matter of Your unconditional Love (Agápe), this so vast, counter-intuitive, and lavish that it has not “so much as entered into human imaginings” (I Cor 2:9). Amid a torn and bleeding planet, is indeed every impulse of Your divine life engaged in healing, transforming, and uniting the cosmos into Your “all in All” (I Cor 15:20-28)? Are You thus incapable of any sentiment, characteristic or action intimating conditionality—to say nothing of condemnation—of any kind? Am I able to incarnate a yet further “yes” to the notion that with You nothing therefore is lost, all encompassed and transformingly embraced? Am I, a lifer hunter of loves, able to receive and reciprocate the off-the-charts embrace of You who are Love Itself, this sans qualifiers or asterisks? Am I able to enlarge my “yes” to Your Love which is simply too good to be true?
Second, within my core over the decades I have found my fear of You incrementally displaced by a relentless thirst for Your presence. But why has that thirst frequently been unrequited, desiccation and aridity my intermittent squatters, You seemingly absconded? Did I not earlier dub Your perceived absence as void, emptiness, and abandonment, this even after I had reluctantly acknowledged doubt as a bona fide participant within my interior life? More recently, have not the mystics been nudging me toward viewing perceived “absence” as “silence” with all of the rich contemplative treasure-trove of that tradition? If Your first and favorite language is silence, why do I become rattled when you employ it for long periods? Am I able to enlarge my “yes” to Your silent presence formerly mis-perceived as absence?
Finally, and perhaps most urgently of late, there is the matter of how the query of this post integrates with the critique mounted against dualistic spirituality. Is not the very questioning of the relationship between us creatures and You as Creator inherently dualistic and thus in service to the subject/object structure and egoic perspective? Does not relationality, You as Agapaic Love in particular, imply a certain “betweenness” or “separation” and thus distinctiónis? To whom am I directing my post’s question if my/our relationship with You is circumincéssive (“interpenetration” & “all in All”-ness)? Or is it mere lore that nondualism and You perceived as personal, relational and Agapaic (“Love Itself”) are finally oxymoronic? Am I able to enlarge my “yes” to You not merely as an entity among others, but as the boundless “Totality” (a la Hadewijch of Brabant) within whom all of us having being live and move?
O Lover, in each of the above paragraphs I am groping to bear witness to You who are ineffable Mystérium. In each case, but especially the third, my pivot from the literal and linear of my subject/object toolkit only deposits me in the throes of contradiction and paradox. Such is the present conundrum of us finites beset by You, the Infinite, a delicious dilemma which I am repeatedly choosing to embrace. I want to embody my largest possible “yes” to anything You bring to my awareness, for I am being persuaded that such affirmations are the path into You where “I [need] fear no evil” (Ps 23:4).
