Sophia House (Children of the Last Days) by Michael O'Brien

Author:Michael O'Brien [O'Brien, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2009-04-02T06:00:00+00:00

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In the ensuing weeks, as he continued to work on the play, his anguish steadily diminished and he was able to focus on the questions posed by the characters and the central theme. The problem of fear and love was unresolved, yet it cycled in his mind less obsessively. He could see that it was working itself into the play almost of its own volition. It came to him gradually that a God who permitted himself to be humiliated and brutally executed was demonstrating something about the nature of his love in a way so radical it could not be misconstrued. Pawel saw the immensity of the universe and his own insignificance within it. Yet God had suffered for him—Pawel—a small man, a mote of dust. Why did he do that? What, precisely, was going on in this very strange universe?

Rouault's painting of Christ in agony surfaced in his imagination. He appropriated the memory and adapted it, so that in the play it became Rublëv's iconographic Christ, which was at one and the same time an image of the revealed face of God and a window that opened to the unseen face of God. Why this convergence of hiddenness and revelation? Was it intended that man love the revealed but tremble before the hidden?

Perhaps fear of God was entirely different from the paralyzing terrors that were the demons' playground. Was there a holy fear, one compatible with confidence in God? If God were indeed pure love, then the Old Testament meaning of the word fear did not mean the dread that people felt when threatened by natural calamities and attacks by enemies. Fear of the Gestapo must be entirely different from the supernatural fear that Moses felt when he saw the burning bush. And surely it was not the same as the reverent awe that the apostles felt on the mountain of the Transfiguration. Nor was it the fearsome attraction—containing both longing and unworthiness and dread of loss—that he had felt for Kahlia when she played Bach at Warsaw University. That had been a rapture in the presence of inaccessible glory. Glory in a human form, revealing, yet withholding. She had been for him an icon of the radiance of perfect being. Glory as... love.

Love?

What was love? Every question led inexorably back to that.

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