Encounter

"Art does not draw from itself alone what it gives to things; it spreads over them a secret which it has first seized by suprise in them, in their invisible substance or in their endless exchanges and correspondences...a world more real than the real offered to the sense"-Jacques Maritain

This is a quote used as the introduction to Markus Bockmuehl's, Seeing the Word, a work offering insights as to how faith-centered academia can re-focus New Testament studies. Bockmuehl's initial metaphor views the Gospel authors as artists paining a scene, and the quote serves to make this comparison all the more powerful: The Gospel accounts are very much like artistic representations of encountering Yeshua. Because of this they are not necessarily meant to answer all of our questions or give us all of the information, rather they are meant to give over to us the deepest truth of the encounter, its majesty, its power.

This is what Maritain's quote would look like if we inserted the "Gospels" in place of the more generic, "art":

The Gospels do not draw from themselves alone what they give to things; the Gospels spread over things a secret which their authors had first seized by suprise in them, in their invisible substance or in their endless exchanges and correspondences...a world more real than the real offered to the sense

As we continue our own journeys with Yeshua, let us not forget to allow ourselves to be arrested by the encounter, to know that there are certain experiences that cannot be explicitly expressed by anything less than the holy imagination those experiences engender.