Nielsen’s Nook

In my pilgrimage presently the Lord has my heart grieving over the fracturedness of the Church of Christ and the splinteredness of the fracturedness.  When Dante enters the intellectual Heaven of the Sun, where the great doctors of the Church have discourse, he then concludes that their perspectives of the truth, their partial truths have resolved into the One Truth. ¹ In light of this I wonder, just how much of the division and canibalism in Christ’s Church is not due to some Jack and Jill sort of arrogance that we can see all sides of even small things.  If all things are created to tell us something of the Creator then might we not do well to include more mystery in our thinking and contemplation.  Allowing for the ineffable is at least a component of spiritual health.

For low among the dunces is his place
    Who hastens to accept or to reject
    With no distinction made ‘twixt case and case;

Thence come rash judgments, mostly incorrect
    And prejudiced, and stubborn all the more
    That self-conceit shackles the intellect.

Worse than in vain does any quit the shore
    To fish for truth, the fisher’s art unknowing -
    He’ll not return the man he was before;

…

No one should ever be too self-assured
    In judgement, like a farmer reckoning
    His gains before the corn-crop is matured,

For I have seen the briar a prickly thing
    And tough the winter throug, and on its tip
    Bearing the very rose at close of spring;

And once I saw, her whole long ocean-trip
    Safe done, a vessel wrecked upon the bar,
    And down she went, that swift and stately ship.

Let Jack and Jill not think they see so far
    That, seeing this man pious, that a thief,
    They see them such as in God’s sight they are,

For one may rise, the other come to grief.²

__________

¹ Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy III: Paradise. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds. (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 21.

² _____., Canto XIII, 115-123, 130-142.