Perhaps we all strive to find Love.. and is it easy? Arthur Benjamin never found it so. As a boy he searched for it in his friends and teachers. Throughout early adulthood he rummaged for love in the undergarments of female peers. Once he became engaged for marriage but the couple never made it to the altar.
When he found love, it was in a Christian God, and his journey to finding that love and that God gave him a certain attitude to life.
'We live in darkness, are ourselves the inhabitants of a world unknown. When light is cast into our darkness and we see, humility must temper the secret revealed to us, for we are all too fallible to claim certainty.
'I look at the moon on a black night, or watch the sun rise to make dawn from darkness. These are daily miracles made ordinary by the regularity of their rhythm. While their presence is taken for granted, their absence would scare and confuse. And though the scientist might plot and plan from planetary motion, let us hope the scientist does not get lost in certainty beyond human scope. For certainty obscures the mystery it seeks to solve. And mystery inspires exploration and discovery.
'If all were known, how could we seek and for what? Would it not be a sad day if our ordered and protected understanding was declared complete, for how could we aspire to learn when illuminated by the full glare of Knowledge? Our understanding is twilight.'
The reverend Arthur Benjamin paused to listen to the words of his sermon echo in the granite skin of the church.
'When I turn to the Holy Bible for clarification I find metaphor pregnant with a myriad of meaning begging interpretation : "An eye for an eye." - does that permit me to take your sight for clouding mine? We all believe our truth to be purer, our cause more noble than the next. Even with but one God we squabble amongst ourselves for God's kingdom in the afterlife.
'One God, many battles - disputes over what we fail to understand; disagreement over what we see by our preferred light. In the tension between knowledge and uncertainty we seek metaphor to communicate the inexplicable, fogetting that all is uncertain and that every contribution is worthy.
'Our Christian faith is founded on the Three in One - a paradox - mystery accepted and acknowledged.
'In darkness we must blindly trust.
'We are dazzled or blinded by too bright a light. And in mistaking for certainty the penumbra of human knowledge, we become fossilised in dogma.
'In the daily business of our lives we find the limits of our individual capacity to bear the unknown. We learn what and whom can be trusted.
'It is not this necessary rock of subjective surety I refer to today. I ask you to consider the inspirational value of mystery, the communicative power of the metaphor with all its risk of misunderstanding, and the role implied by frank acceptance of the inexplicable as presented by paradox.'
'Go in peace amongst the world and yourselves. May God be with you.'
His indigo sleeves fluttered in a light breeze as he stepped down from the pulpit.