Thursday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time
The Christian does not serve just any god, or any king, or any lord, but rather the God of gods (Deuteronomy 10:17), the King of kings (1 Timothy 6:15) and the Lord of lords (Revelation 19:16). The greatness of our God towers high above everything that we can imagine. It’s true that the imagination is a crucial element of Ignatian spirituality, but always with the caveat that our images cannot but fall short of encompassing what, by virtue of its infinity, can never be encompassed. Everything that we have encountered in our finite experience is closer to pure nothingness than to God himself.
Think of it this way: if you start out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, after taking your first step, you have moved in the right direction, but you remain so far from Jerusalem that it’s as if you haven’t moved at all. Mutatis mutandis, we can take steps in the right direction towards God (thanks to divine revelation and thanks to human reasoning), but we always remain closer to our humble origin in purest nothingness than to the superabundant plenitude of the divine essence. Everything we see and behold is as nothing, compared to God’s greatness. In that sense, it would be better not even to dignify the visible world by raising it up to the level of “nothing.” Rather, it’s the nothingness of nothingness and the emptiness of emptiness. “Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth,” and he is correct: “vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!” (Ecclesiastes 1:2), especially in comparison to the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.