The Measures of the Mind

Last updated on: September 29, 2016 at 5:56 pm by Marilyn McEntyre

The Measures of the Mind 2016-09-29T17:56:51-07:00 Marilyn McEntyre

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“For the love of God is broader / Than the measures of the mind . . . 19th-Century Hymn

I was surprised when a friend who is a pastor and person of great faith asked in some anguish when her husband died suddenly, “Why would God do this?” I shouldn’t have been surprised. It’s a perfectly natural question. But in her years of parish work she had seen many others through similar losses, offered comfort, preached sermons, knew the relevant scriptures. She knew how “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away” and still blessed his name. Yet when the loss was hers, it was, for a time, very hard to hold onto the truths she believed and proclaimed—not because she suddenly lost her faith, but because death didn’t make sense. Her husband had been youthful, full of hopes and laughter, playful with small grandchildren and much beloved. He had not dwindled into death; he was simply, suddenly taken right in the midst of an ordinary afternoon, not long before dinner. Birthdays and dates with friends were still scrawled on the calendar in his clear, bold handwriting. How could he be gone? It’s a question grief brings up, again and again. Part of grief is astonishment. Then outrage.

Because we can’t really make sense of death. We can’t domesticate it. Most of us who have lost someone we love know in our King Lear cries over his dead Cordelia, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?” How can this be—that someone so full of life is suddenly . . . nothing? Not there? All the spaces she inhabited seem like gaping holes. His favorite chair is glaringly vacant. And the silence where her voice used to be when she called from the kitchen is deafening.

Those of us who believe with “sure and certain hope” that death is not the end of the story can and do take refuge in that faith. As the Book of Common Prayer reminds us, “We remember his death, we proclaim his resurrection, we await his coming in glory.” And we expect that resurrection for ourselves and our fellow travelers on this journey that takes us through a number of shadowed valleys if we live long enough. But affirming those things sometimes doesn’t assuage the visceral grief that rises like a roar from the belly when death tears away someone whose love has been a lifeline, and whose companionship has given shape and color to our days. The emotional reality of loss doesn’t always submit to the salutary truths of faith statements, at least not for a time.

Which is why I take such comfort in this one line from a nineteenth-century hymn: “For the love of God is broader than the measures of the mind.” We can’t resolve the painful paradoxes of faith by reason alone. We can’t think our way to comfort or trust or peace or faith, though story and study and sound theology help prepare us for times when the mind fails to mend a broken heart. The focus of the hymn is on the “wideness in God’s mercy.” When I sing it, I am grateful for that mercy; I am also grateful for the unfathomable complexity of a love that is stronger than death, simple as sunlight, complex as subatomic physics, forceful as the Big Bang, greater than galaxies, wider than light-years and more subtle than the sound of one hand clapping.

I was encouraged by parents who valued education to use my mind, and by teachers I still revere to delight in the life of the mind. I love reading writers who have taught me what shared pleasure there can be in the play of the mind. But the “measures of the mind” are limited. God is not. Ultimately we kneel at the threshold of mystery. When we get there, “I don’t know” is a simple and important truth statement, and the only appropriate answer at times to the anguished question, “Why?” Not knowing is where we step into the stream of faith and learn, as Denise Levertov put it, to “float into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,” where we may weep until, strangely and inexplicably, we find ourselves comforted.

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