Last week my brother and sister-in-law, who live in Orange Park, flew to Gainesville and picked me up for a trip to Panama City to visit an uncle who is very ill. Although I have flown many times in small aircraft — before I entered the Cenacle, my brother gave me a few flying lessons — this trip made a strong impression on me.
Perhaps it was because I was in the back of the four-seater, which along with the engine noise and my earplugs made conversation difficult. Perhaps it was because we flew higher than I am accustomed to in a little airplane. Whatever the reason, I became very conscious of our smallness and our fragility in the vast expanse of the sky.
We were supported only by air. Anything solid was 7500 feet below us, but even the Florida coastline seemed to be more marshland than firm earth. Before long the clouds thickened and nothing of earth was visible. I was not frightened, but awed by our weakness combined with our audacity to venture into the sky in this little fabric-covered Maule aircraft.
So it is with our spiritual journey, which can be much more spine-tingling than flight. A humble audacity is required, as it is when taking off in a single-engine plane. While all may seem clear at first when we are feeling our feet solidly planted on what we think we know, there comes a time when we have to trust God entirely even though we can see nothing and perhaps feel nothing.
Here is what Saint Gregory of Nyssa says in his Life of Moses:
Leaving behind everything that is observed, not only what sense comprehends but also what the intelligence thinks it sees, it keeps on penetrating deeper until . . . it gains access to the invisible and incomprehensible, and there it sees God. This is the true knowledge of what is sought; this is the seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness [163].
Dwelling in Mystery beyond our comprehension, we have no choice but to rely on God-with-us — Emmanuel — who is more present to us than the air and a support infinitely more firm. Upheld by what we cannot see, God is teaching us to see by not seeing and to know “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Eph 3:19).
I will lead the blind
by a road they do not know,
by paths they have not known I will guide them.
I will turn the darkness before them into light,
the rough places into level ground.
These are the things I will do,
and I will not forsake them.Isaiah 42:16