When I was a child, I
spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I
became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know
fully, even as I have been fully known.
If you have a sense of humour, you might be curious to
wonder what Paul was like as a child. Precocious…? It’s speculation. Paul’s point is that it is necessary eventually
to grow up. A lot of people never
complete that task. Some are too timid
to attempt it. A middle-aged woman walks
out on her husband and family, goes to live with a boyfriend from schooldays –
and her justification…? I decided it was now ME-Time. Very trendy… a reversion to childhood. The ego reassuming control. There are types of church that encourage inhibited
growth, although they would be most put out to hear that accusation. But members confuse faith with fear and
superstition… hectic activism, black-and-white moralism…
An important task of growing up is discovering that it is
not all about me, and discovering also the liberation that entails. Another task is what Paul identifies here in his
lovely statement about knowing things, a sentence which has bothered centuries
of translators because it says the opposite of what they think Paul ought to
say… While they are writing creeds and catechisms, and policing error in the
church, building walls and boundaries, Paul is way out there making peace with
mystery and wonder. …now we see in a mirror, dimly, he writes. “Dimly”…
well, the Greek word is enigma.[1] Maturity, growing up, means developing
humility and then wonder about the many unanswered questions, about life, death,
God and the universe. Growing up means getting
wise about unfairness, injustice, unresolved issues… imperfections,
hypocrisies… as my very Kiwi brother-in-law recently put it succinctly: It’s
just not a fair go. Life, he
meant. Perhaps it should be, but it’s
not – and that has been, after all, a major theme of the Hebrew Psalms of the
Jews, and of the Book of Job, and of much else down to the writings in our day of
Elie Wiesel and Etty Hillesum, Simone Weil and a host of others.
But, Paul is saying, there is a pathway through all this. It is the pathway of agapē/love. That is the light we are given. Then we
will know, writes Paul, even as we
are known… his sublime vision. Fr
Laurence Freeman wrote recently, of the death of one of his friends: He leapt into the light… we will know, even
as we are known. Agapē (he writes elsewhere) is not the love that we are trying to gain (by
trying to improve ourselves), but the
love that is constantly with us.
Growing up in faith, our eyes are opened, through meditation it may be, to see how much this power of love is
present in the midst of all our imbalance, all our own waywardness, all our own
distractedness. Even in the
distractedness of our meditation, we learn to love ourselves, to love others
and to love God. It is the one agapē/love
from God who is love.
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