Summer reading
Heading off on holiday I looked for a diverting novel and landed upon Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth, a best seller of 20 years ago, which was appealingly reviewed as ‘chick lit with A levels’!
That proved an apt description as the pacy plot also taught me a considerable amount about religion in 13th Century France when the Cathars were being denounced as heretics and cruelly persecuted.
Once again I was filled with horror at what Christians have done to one another, through the centuries, as different denominations and sects have demanded categorically that all others accept their view of who God is and how God should be worshipped. It reminded me of a quote I came across recently by a 4th Century Turkish Saint, Gregory of Nyssa. He wrote “every concept that comes from some comprehensible image, by an approximate understanding and by guessing at the Divine nature, constitutes an idol of God and does not proclaim God.” Gregory emphasised how utterly unable we are to comprehend God fully and was one of the first theologians to argue that God is infinite and so essentially incomprehensible to our limited minds. He proposed that God should be defined in terms of what we know He is not rather than what we might speculate Him to be.
All of us are perhaps too ready to set up idols, which we then demand everyone else worship – and here I don’t just mean Christians; we see it with attitudes towards certain political figures, or world-views, from free-market capitalism to gender identity; we despise those who choose alternative ‘heroes’ or ways of viewing the world. Gregory said: ‘Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.’
I think I glimpsed what he meant on my holiday. My head full of Catholics and Cathars, we took some tiny kayaks out (on very gentle seas) to explore part of the Pembrokeshire cliffs and caves. We found ourselves gazing up at these ancient folds of rock, towering above us as the waves ran up against them incessantly. I was left with a distinct feeling of both awe, a fresh awareness of my own tininess in terms of space and time and comprehension, and the impossibility of my being able to capture or contain a God capable of this immensity. The kayak rather impeded me from falling to my knees, but I recommend the wonder.
Revd Kate McFarlane