iii.Relationship between the explicit and the implicit

In many, in fact in most, of the conversations one has around the University the language of God and the things of God remain implicit – not absent of course, but unnamed and unspoken. Why is this? Often for good and appropriate reasons: out of sensitivity to context; through an intuitive awareness of what is appropriate to the perspective from which some of our members come; in order to open up, not close down on conversation; because ‘actions speak louder than words’. And, occasionally, we keep our words in check for bad reasons: because ‘we lack the courage of our convictions’; because we do not wish to appear different or odd; because we wish to receive public approval. But in worship we suspend the implicit for the explicit; we try on the bold and unambiguous language of God and of his kingdom and thereby refresh both ourselves and our congregations by inhabiting again the well-spring of our faith.

It is as if the liturgy enables us to paint the presence of God with bold colours and confident strokes, to practice and learn the presence of God in a context of heartening obviousness. So that, this lesson being learnt again and again, we shall not miss the more subtle and pastel shades of God’s presence elsewhere.

Yet this tension between the explicit and implicit is inhabited not as a static dialectic, but for the sake of an ultimate resolution, as a vector directing our attention to a final eschatological fulfilment, and, along the way, to those glorious moments of vivid anticipation. Perhaps an analogy might be helpful.

What does home signify? It is a place of warmth and shelter, a place of welcome and love, a place where I do not need to prove myself; a place of acceptance. Home is where the re-integration of the self fractured by the tenses of time can happen: a place where memory (past) and expectation (future) can be reconciled together in rest and contentment (present). It is not then surprising that home can be used as a cipher for what salvation promises (for example Isa 11:6-9 offers a vision of the whole of creation as home to its inhabitants). And yet home is not yet a place of permanent satisfaction. Too long spent here, as the housebound will testify, is stifling and claustrophobic. For, is it not the case that even as one has one’s feet up at home, one is reading of travel or watching an adventure movie? Home means precisely what it does when it can be the place from which journeys begin and where they end. Is there not an inescapable relationship between journey and home that gives meaning to both? This too is commonly the logic of music: a migration from and a return to the home key.

I am suggesting, therefore, that something similar is at play in the relationship between times spent in chapel worship (home as it were) and time spent in forays throughout the university (journey). The chapel is meaningful as an anticipation of what the world (university) will become, but ahead of the final dawning of the Kingdom of God, chapel without the university (world) fails to make complete sense; it remains a fragment of a promised whole.

There is, therefore, a hermeneutic spiral connecting the explicit and implicit. Experiences within the implicit realm of the university need to be read against those in the explicit space of chapel and vice versa. Without this process of mutual reading God’s presence will be missed.