Hail to the Bringer of Form
O Lover,
To us humans from myriad faith traditions You are The One beyond all depiction, whether via reason, language, image, imagining or the affective. You are sans form, transcendent of finite expression. In this respect all of us are agnostics, those bereft of “knowledge” of You in any conventional use of that term. More specifically, some mystics, and many of us camp followers of them, are apophatics retaining but a few self-immolating depictions at best.
At the same time, the aura of the texts and traditions of our faith story centering on Jesus the Christ points to You as engaging, encountering, ongoingly bringing into being and interacting with the creation. Indeed, at the core of this story is the Incarnátio: You beyond all form counter-intuitively Self-imbedding in the sphere of form. Albeit formless, You are experienced as intrinsically self-disclosing and expressive via the taking on of form. The Johannine gospel tellingly speaks of Your Self-manifestation with the term Lógos (“Word”; 1:1-5). While to some the notion of the formless taking on form is both oxymoronic and sisyphean, to others it is the very narthex issuing into Sláva (“Glory”). So stark, indeed so decisive, the paradox, the scandal, of Bethlehem!
So You, infinite Creator, are in every “now” bringing into concrete materiality Your ineffable Divine Life. What is also remarkable is that we creatures of Your unfolding are created to do the same, to bring to concrete form cues, inklings and intimations of You who are formless. You are extending to us both form and the capacity to form responses to You. Thus intrinsic human capacity includes co-creatorship with You, yet another expression of our being in the imágo Dei (Gen 1:26-27), of being Your very “offspring” (Acts 17:28). Not totally unlike You we are wonderfully saddled with the longing to bring the ineffable to form. This powerful potentiality can be exercised via words, logic, beauty, images or relationships, among others. Thus T. S. Eliot can write of “raids on the inarticulate,” Christian Wiman of “inarticulate affinities.” We are indeed graced with moments (kaíroi) of elevated consciousness of You, O Numinous, and then find ourselves unable not to attempt formed responses. Look at us humans: bearers of the potential to be form-seeking artisans in collaboration with You!
Part of the impetus giving rise to this post is my indebtedness to the poet/mystic Christian Wiman and his tenacious commitment to seeking form for “fugitive gleams of joy” unreachable by sense, thought, or language. He speaks of his impulsion to versify as nothing less than a matter of death and life, this crafting the means to his very survival. His self-understanding feels like familiar ground to me as evidenced by the thirteen years of this blog. In hundreds of posts across that interval there have been surfacing within me an attentiveness and responsiveness to varied experiences of awe which sooner or later, one way or another, are indisputably and inseparably You.
What am I to make of this passion to reciprocate Your penchant for form? How can a task so futile also be so central to who I am becoming? Although I can weary of most everything and everyone else, myself not excepted, these years have shown me that I surprisingly weary not of You, O Lover. And although I am an aspirant to the apophatic impulse, most interesting is that within an amalgam of it with kataphatic thoughts and words, linearity and imagination, I continue to attempt to give form and expression to You. While solving You, in the words of C. S. Lewis, “is not allowed,” and my sidekicks occasionally are reduced to distraction or lamentation, the thirst for You and Your co-formational conspiracy is unabated. That amid an environment of obsolescence-at-the-speed-of-light my core’s direction is being thus established is nothing less than astonishing. I have a suspicion that at the moment of my passing into a lesser dimness (a la I Cor 13:12) it will be with my last post to You half-formed in my spirit.
Hail to You, O Lover: Bringer of Form!
