Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the skies. (Psalm 36:5)
It’s so easy for me to define the world around me into some binary oppositions (black and white, with unexplained gray zones) or (post) structuralist paradigm. It certainly makes for understanding my world much more easier.
When I was a student I was absorbed in discovering new models by which to plug and understand my world around me. There was me and the “other”. Working on the premise that our mind view the world in binary oppositions, Levi Strauss devised the Structuralist way of viewing the world around us. Myths and belief systems were basically bundled up into his thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad.
My university years saw in me a love of examining cultural social theories, and seeking to understand and plug everything around me into neat models. My age of reason lead me on a journey of exploring personal myths, ethnicity and (my)story against a backdrop of “ism”.
I was an avid researcher, and often joked how all the ideas floating in my mind would intertwine and fuse, as ideas and theories intersect and weaved to create a whole, but one night I had a different experience.
I had an epitome.
It was really simple.
I had this revelation that there are things I will never understand, and that no matter how I much I tried…there are some things that were beyond the capacity of my human brain to understand. It was a simple affirmation that there was something greater than me, and this was God.
This revelation had me on bend knees crying and praying. I was humbled. I remember telling my husband. He thought I was having a nervous breakdown. I can see it in my minds eye now…and as my mind replay it…I see myself sitting behind my desk…the image is hazy now, but I remember also calling my father in Toronto and telling him how much I loved him. I apologized for my haughtiness at 16 when I told him I would no longer go to Church, that I needed to go into the world to discovered the meaning of truth and life – “The Age of Reason”. My dad at the time had told me, “I love you unconditionally.” When I called him to ask for forgiveness for being a “Prodigal Daughter”, he again reminded me “I have always loved you unconditionally”.
I cannot explain the humbleness I felt, that my father mirrored to me the love of God. His love for me is unbound and limitless, and is not wrapped up in “ism” nor can it be understood in terms of a theoretical model or structure. It is simply unconditional love.
❤
Be Inspired! 