Love at the Centre

The love of the new life is in the centre; to it all parts of the circumference, all times, all experiences, have this equal relation.

- Charles Williams

Like the journey in Dante's Divine Comedy, love is a paradox. In order to go up, you must go down. At the centre is God and His love, and all things should encircle the centre, meaning all parts of our experiences should be the same distance from the centre that is God. While we stray, we grow apart from the new life we had embraced. To get back to the centre we must get back to God. 

At the foot of the cross we stand, then kneel, like the crowd did in the Good Friday service at St. Mary's University Church. We look up but cannot even stand to look too long, for it pains us to look onto that which wooden structure where our Saviour died. We pray- Lord forgive us. And see the image of His death so tall and piercing the air.

While a glimpse of that image can obnubilate our hearts and cast sorrowful shadows on us, the shadow is just leading us a light greater than we could even imagine.

Soon the image of darkness will be flattened, for death has been crushed. We have Easter, and it lives on inside of us, well after the Sunday of pastel coloured eggs and Alleluia songs. Every new day is a reminder that we live in a time that Easter occurred. We live in the New Creation.

(Photos taken in Merton College Chapel, Oxford)