Fragments of Light

Monthly Archives: April 2014

Thoughts Beyond our Own

One difference between God’s work and man’s, is that while God’s work cannot mean more than he meant, man’s must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God’s things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own. —George MacDonald, The Fantastic Imagination

I take comfort in this idea that while I come again and again to the end of myself, God’s great world goes on turning, renewing, refreshing, replenishing my insufficiency, and that is a gift to treasure. Comments welcome.