Transformed
“I remember what I felt during the moments immediately after he spoke to me. There was a final look from him, and then he disappeared. How can I record what I felt at that moment? How can the light of paradise be translated through the groping script of man? To say that it was both blessing and wound, loss and gain, emptiness and fullness, is an approximation that misleads. I remember it perfectly, but I cannot retell it in such a way that another would experience it as his own. In this library are more books than I care to count, containing the thoughts of intelligent minds published in several languages of man, and they too lack words for it. The eternal will not permit itself to be seized and rolled tightly into scrolls and stored away as artifact. We may ponder it and inscribe our thoughts about it, and learn from it, but we will never master it. The book of man’s life unrolls as he lives it, and we read it to the best of our limited ability. The book of eternal life unrolls with it, but is read by God alone.
On that day I was inebriated with joy, yet I felt sorrow too. In the radiance of the unexpected light, I saw exposed my secret despair, my lack of hope, my adoration of beauty, my hatred of men of power, my contempt for the morally fallen, and beneath it all, my subtle and most dangerously disguised pride—which is like a field of the dead. Then did I understand that throughout my life, my sins had been the only real waste. Yet everything had played its part in leading me to this moment, and even my evil choices might be transformed in the cleansing waters of repentance. Whatever was good in my past also would be transformed by this encounter and in time become like a tree of life planted beside a river, bearing fruit that others would eat. Moreover, I saw a multitude of rivers flowing along beside me as one great river, pouring into the ocean of God’s mercy. And from that ocean a cloud of witnesses would arise and pour forth its sweet rain.
All this I saw in an instant. Then I knelt and turned toward the cross and no longer feared it.”
~Michael O’Brien (from the novel Theophilos)
On that day I was inebriated with joy, yet I felt sorrow too. In the radiance of the unexpected light, I saw exposed my secret despair, my lack of hope, my adoration of beauty, my hatred of men of power, my contempt for the morally fallen, and beneath it all, my subtle and most dangerously disguised pride—which is like a field of the dead. Then did I understand that throughout my life, my sins had been the only real waste. Yet everything had played its part in leading me to this moment, and even my evil choices might be transformed in the cleansing waters of repentance. Whatever was good in my past also would be transformed by this encounter and in time become like a tree of life planted beside a river, bearing fruit that others would eat. Moreover, I saw a multitude of rivers flowing along beside me as one great river, pouring into the ocean of God’s mercy. And from that ocean a cloud of witnesses would arise and pour forth its sweet rain.
All this I saw in an instant. Then I knelt and turned toward the cross and no longer feared it.”
~Michael O’Brien (from the novel Theophilos)
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