Love’s Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life

by Scott Cairns

We are but dim reflections of a love so true, a light so pure, a life so alive. Created in the image of God, we still carry the haunting beauty of his touch despite our falling and failing. Reading Scott Cairns’ new volume of poetry, “Love’s Immensity,” I am reminded of the hope of restored glory that shines from our “gleaming Liberator Jesus Christ.”

Drawing from the writings of early Church Fathers, desert monastics and Medieval mystics, Cairns weaves a wondrous cord of images and words that capture the beauty of our creation and restoration through God’s transforming presence. Translating always offers challenges for the reader and the writer. Are we reading the translator or the original writer? How does a translator capture ideas that are not translatable?

Cairns addresses some of this complexing challenge by addressing the challenge of translating “nous,” a word common in early church and Eastern Orthodox writings. This multi-layered idea is not easily translated. When we interpret “nous” as mind or heart, we tend to rob the word of nuanced implications by reducing the meaning to our deficient and disconnected understanding of mind and body.

So Cairns writes, “There is one word .. that I have decided for the most part not to translate at all, hoping that we might acquire a renewed sense of the word itself, and hoping that we might dodge the diminishments of its uniformly unsatisfactory translation.” Since “nous” and “noetic prayer” are fundamental ideas in many ancient writings, it worthwhile to try and penetrate some of what the New Testament and early church writers meant when they used this word.

Cairns attempts to open the richness of the word by explaining it as follows:

It is the center of the human person, where mind and and matter meet most profoundly, and where the human person is mystically united to others and God. I have written elsewhere that an “individual does not a person make.” Personhood–if the Image of God is relevant here–is revealed in relationship, and the nous is the faculty that enables and performs just such a relationship. (xiv)

That succinct explanation conveys the richness and the beauty of this word. It is a hint of the beauty that is to come as Cairns begins to unfold the prayers and teachings of our forebears. Again and again I am drawn to his phrasing that brings alive the beauty of these writers that has often been hidden in the dusty translations of scholarship. Capturing the provocative spirit of Athanasius, he uses words like “dim occasions,” “slow senses” and “beloved numbskulls” to address the slow and struggling people of God.

In spite of our blindness, God makes a way for us to see. So we hear Athanasius proclaim, “As we had turned from cosmos–the beauty above, light-laden–and sought Him in the muck among created things, the God in His great love took to Himself an earthen body.” God comes to meet in the midst of slow and dim senses. He comes to restore the true icons of God, “our faces.”

Reading Cairns’ new book is not a rush to the finish. Rather it is a stroll in the garden of heavenly delights. For in these short prayers and poems and sermons, we encounter presence: the presence of these great saints who went before us, the presence of Scott Cairns in his lovely words of translation and another Presence. This book could help some to slow down, listen, wait and behold God’s love.

I think this little treasure is a helpful prayer book that might give us words to express the longings of our heart. Words like this prayer from St. Basil, “Pierce our souls with love, so that–attending to You always, being lighted by You, and glimpsing You, O unapproachable, everlasting Light–we may offer confession and speak our joyful thanks to You.”

Popularity: 7% [?]