“The Plunge of Lead into Fathomless Depths.”

Now and again a moment and a place coincide. A photograph is a way of capturing the intersection of what we are thinking, and what we are seeing. 

Walking through campus on my way to a public lecture, I was still thinking of what I'd spent the last hour reading. Slow reading. The kind of reading that is a conversation with occasional interruptions, and the occasional significant silence.

I was reading an essay by my friend, and Doktorvater, Professor David Fergusson, "Kenosis and the Humility of God." Reading theology has become both lifelong discipline, and a way of loving the God of whom we think, to whom we pray, and whom we seek to serve. So reading theology is a form of prayer, the mind kneeling, the heart attuned to hear what James Denney called "the plunge of lead into fathomless depths."

Here's the two or three sentences I was mulling over as I walked:

"Can divine love be stripped of divine power without weakening its capacity? Paul's insight is that divine power is manifested in the foolishness of the cross, not that it is abandoned or lost in this event. If the fullness of God is here to be revealed, then kenosis, whatever else it is, cannot be construed as a divestment of divine identity in the incarnation. If Christ reigns from the tree, then he reigns." (Kenosis. The Self-Emptying of Christ in Scripture & Theology, eds. Paul T Nimmo, Keith L Johnson, Eerdmans, 2022, page 195)

"If Christ reigns from the tree, then he reigns." That was my thought as I walked down the brae and looked at the King's College Crown and Cross through the trees. Thinking and seeing coincided in a moment, not so much of intellectual clarity, as of spiritual acknowledgement.

Oh the thinking must go on, as must the praying. And the reminders, first, that worship is expressed in the form and content of our thought, and second, our best thinking is done on our knees if not always physically, then certainly intellectually. 

I've said it often now, my camera often becomes and enables reflection on the "sacrament of the present moment."