“‘Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will proclaim His way to us, and we shall walk in it.’”
–Isaiah 2
The “prolegomena,” the first things
In the first preaching of Christ we are told outrightly to “repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” this salvific exhortation is the beginning, and presents to us the disposition by which we avail ourselves to “the Way,” the Way itself not being the process of working out our salvation–repentance is the process–but Christ Himself is the Way, as He guides us quite directly in stating “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life…” If repentance is the starting point and the process both, then there is also a precondition for the human person that he may even receive the exhortation: “repent.” The precondition is faith, the same faith as that held by the artificer of the altar “To the Unknown God” that St. Paul encountered in the Areopagus. The precursor to the beginning of our salvation is the acknowledgment of the limitation of our own knowledge, and such a humble awareness of it that it causes us to express the necessity of acknowledgment of what is beyond knowledge, of what cannot be fully known. This is a powerful precondition requiring a certain humility and awareness of need, a realization of the dependency that characterizes all of creation.
If we want to evangelize we may need to pray: “Prepare their hearts with such a precondition, O Lord!” We also must seek to become attuned to identifying such a condition in others, a fertile soil upon which the grain of wheat (Christ) may land and die, that it may rise therefrom to bear more fruit–the fruit of the resurrection.
It is easier to acknowledge-without-knowing, to have no mental bound in place regarding the Unknown, but this ease is insufficient, it can lean to a self-governed style of mysticism, an escapism from having to be attached to any concept aside from the limitlessness of unknowability, and ultimately diverts one from having a personal encounter with Love, that is, with the God Who made heaven and earth and all that is in it. So St. Paul addresses some “partial believers,” revealing to them the “Unknown” which has been so easily acknowledged, and he proclaims to them that the “Unknown” is “God, who made the world and everything in it…He is not far from each of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17).
In this “precondition” is the willingness of the person to entrust himself to the Life-Giver, and then the belief that knowledge can only be borne from trust. Trust is the laying up of oneself upon another–’I did not create myself and I do not uphold myself, but, rather, I am upheld’–that is, upon the One Who sourced the personhood of he who longs for true knowledge, the kind that is not possessed by the person and cannot be quantified.
Let us avidly pray for realization of the longing for true knowledge, first for ourselves, and then for all others. “Repent,” Christ calls out, and all who have ears to hear do respond, not judging of themselves any quality of worthiness to be among some group of those “chosen,” but responding so as to purely fix their eyes upon Christ, looking to Him with no need even to glance to the left or to the right. We begin with repentance, this “turning toward,” by which we come to fix our eyes upon the Savior, and find salvation not by progressing beyond this starting point but by abiding there, and also finding of ourselves the ever-present need to return in this way, to return to the “prolegomena,” that is, to the beginning.
