From Beginning to Beginning

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Eternity begins here and now, in our ability to do away with objectification, to see that in Christ the door of clever ignorance which is shut between me and my neighbour is for ever broken down. In eternity our neighbour is no longer an impersonal object 'that one' - classified, catalogued, forgotten, but comes to life as profoundly secret, unfathomable as God himself or as I am to myself. Then I am set on a destined path as if entering a land of childhood, knowing very well that, in the words of St Gregory, it will take me all eternity to go 'from beginning to beginning, by way of beginnings without end' (Commentary on the Song of Songs, PG,XLIV,941 A). Eternity is a first time, continually renewed.

The miracle of the first time: the first time you realized that this person would be your friend, the first time, in childhood, that you heard that heartrending music, the first time that your child smiled at you, the first time. Then you become used to it. But eternity means becoming unused to it. The more I know God, and my neighbour in the light of God, the more God is revealed, and my neighbour also, as blessedly unknown.

Olivier Clément, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000)

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