The Larger Picture

GOD ENTERS THE DARKNESS

Berdyaev offers a remarkable way ofthinking about this.

Human beings don't merely commit bad acts.

We construct forms of hell.

We choose hatred until hatred beginschoosing us.

We choose domination until we cannotimagine relationships without power.

Freedom becomesstrangely unfree.

And Christ doesn't stand outside thisdarkness shouting instructions.

He enters it.

For Berdyaev, salvation means Christ entering precisely the darkness humanity cannot escape through moral effort alone. Hell is something humanity creates within itself;

Christ descends into it in order to liberate.

Suddenly the cross isn't simply:

God needs someone punished.

It becomes: God refuses to leave humanity alone insidethe consequences of its own alienation.

There is a story most of us think we know.

Even if you haven't been inside a churchfor years, you'll probably recognise the pieces.

A garden. A serpent.

An apple — although, rather inconveniently for several centuries of paintings, Genesis never actually says it was anapple.

A man and a woman disobey God.

Humanity falls. Sin enters the world.

Then, much later, Jesus arrives.

He dies on a cross so our sins can beforgiven.

And, provided everything goes according toplan, when we die we go to heaven rather than hell.

There we are.

Christianity in about thirty seconds.

Except... I'm not entirely sure that's the story.

Not because those pieces are necessarilywrong. The problem is that they are pieces.

And something rather peculiar happens whenyou inherit all the pieces of a story but forget how they fit together.

You can remember almost everything...

and somehow lose the story itself.

So over these three episodes of The LargerPicture, I'd like to try something.

Let's put the pieces back together.

One day you simply realise that THIS personhas somehow become part of your life.

And perhaps because friendship arrives so quietly, we underestimate it.

We talk endlessly about romantic love.

We write songs about it.

Films revolve around it.

People cross oceans for it.

There are dating apps designed entirelyaround finding it.

Friendship gets rather less ceremony.

Nobody proposes friendship on one knee.

There are no friendship weddings.

No friendship anniversaries that you're inserious trouble for forgetting.

And yet some friendships survive romances.

Some survive marriages.

Countries.

Wars.

Decades.

Sometimes a friend knows parts of us thatalmost nobody else does.

So today I'd like to ask a deceptively simple question.

What is a friend?

And perhaps behind it lies an even largerone. Is friendship itself a form of love?

Perhaps the great battle between good and evil is not always fought somewhere beyond us.

Perhaps it takes place in the almost invisible space between an impulse…and a decision.

Between what has happened to me…and what I choose to do with it.

Between the person I have been…and the person I am becoming. And perhaps that is why freedom is so frightening.

Because in the end, the question of good and evil cannot remain merely:

What kind of world is this?

Eventually it becomes:

What kind of person am I becoming within it?

We spend enormous amounts of time exploringthe world outside us.

We've photographed distant galaxies.

Split atoms. Sent machines to other planets.

And yet there is a place much closer than Marswhich remains astonishingly mysterious.

The world inside us.

Lewis reminds us that the deepest desires ofthis world may point beyond it.

Merton reminds us that we can spend an entirelifetime becoming somebody who isn't actually us.

Frankl reminds us that even where ourcircumstances cannot be chosen, our response can still contain meaning.

And Berdyaev brings us back to creativity.

To freedom.

To eternity.

“Knowledge takes place in being and is an event within being.”

Now, that's a rather philosophical sentence.

But the idea behind it is actually quite extraordinary.

We normally imagine knowledge as though the world were over there — andwe were standing over here, looking at it. And gradually we acquire knowledge about it.

That works remarkably well for science.

But philosophy begins to ask something slightly different.

Welcome to the Larger Picture!