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A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with the Very Revd Dr Sarah Rowland Jones

The poet laureate Simon Armitage once said that ‘all forms of study only lead to more unanswered and unanswerable questions.’ The more we know, the more we know we don't know.

This conundrum finds an echo in the epistle to the Ephesians, with its prayer that we might ‘know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge’. There's a mystery at the heart of faith which sets a deep conviction of knowing alongside the simultaneous recognition that we are engaging with something far beyond our capacity to comprehend.

In pondering this, I am helped by recalling some languages, including French and Welsh, have different verbs for cognitive knowing - knowing something - and for relational knowing - knowing someone.

So we are not like Donald Rumsfeld, wrestling with ‘known unknowns’. The love of Christ is not a ‘thing’. Considering God, and Christianity, and Christianity’s impact on culture, as objects to be studied, even appreciated, from a distance is not what the life of faith is about.

Instead, we are called into the risky business of encounter and experience, making ourselves open and vulnerable to that transcendent Presence who is both beyond our grasp and simultaneously felt as utterly intimate, not least in his knowledge of us.

This can be more than disconcerting. As the epistle to the Hebrews puts it, ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.’

Holy God, give us grace to surrender ourselves ever more fully into your ineffable arms of love. Amen