麻豆约拍

Good morning.聽聽 From the two year old who is absolutely determined to dismantle the stair gate, to Captain Kirk exploring 鈥渟pace, the final frontier鈥�, we humans love to push against limits.聽 When the Concorde aircraft flew for the first time in 1969, noise of the engines completely drowned out the barrage of applause from the watching crowd.聽 The aim, of course, was to build a commercial aircraft which could break the sound barrier, and Concorde did achieve its first supersonic flight in October that same year聽

If there鈥檚 a barrier there, humans like to try to go beyond it but I wonder whether there are some barriers which we shouldn鈥檛 seek to cross?聽 In the fourth century CE, the Roman Emperor Constantine convened a council to try to assure peace in his territories. For once, the issue causing wide-scale dissent was not merely political, but rather philosophical 鈥� are there things that the human mind cannot grasp and define? Can we speak of God in the same language that we use to describe everything else; can we understand Him in the same way as we understand the created universe?聽

Constantine鈥檚 peer Ephrem believed that to attempt to analyse God and fit Him neatly into categories of thought and language was blasphemy. Thus, he wrote his theology as poetry, believing that it was through the symbolic language of poems that the paradoxical presence and absence of God in our lives could best be approached. A poem is not a logical argument leading inexorably to a single conclusion; instead, it allows us to hold multiple images in tension.

Father God, you have revealed yourself through your son Jesus Christ, and yet sometimes when we need you most, you seem to hide your face. We pray for all who seek you, who long for your healing and loving presence in their lives, for those to whom you seem very far away. May they experience a touch of your love and joy as they go about their lives this day. Amen.