Vigils Reading – St John

ALONE IN THE ABYSS OF GOD

From the writing of Dom Augustin Guillerand

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The Prologue of St. John’s Gospel is undoubtedly the most profound page

of history that has ever been written. The greatest minds have striven to

penetrate it, and have remained only at the brink of the abyss which St. John

contemplated. And he himself, the beloved disciple with the glance of an eagle,

who spent his life before that abyss — can one say that he saw further than its

edge?

In the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel the most contemplative — because

the most beloved — of the sacred writers has summarized in a few initial lines

the story of the One who was for him “Light and Life.” These lines are only a

human cloak, and too short a cloak…of those realities which are all and always

beyond us. When they are deeply meditated with the whole heart for a lifetime,

then the vistas unfold stretching further and further away; in a light that

continues to increase — and so fresh and youth-giving — these vistas reveal a

world that goes beyond anything that can be seen or described.

This is the joy — sometimes exultant, always pleasing and beyond

compare — of such meditations: that which it gives is nothing compared to what

it promises: “Those who eat me will hunger for more, and those who drink me

will thirst for more”. This is profoundly true. God, his truth, his life, his beauty,

all the fulness of his name which words strive in vain to translate, this is a

nourishment which increases without satiety.

St. John, in beginning to write his Gospel, immediately sets us above

these heights in the presence of the Word, of him who was when everything else

began, by whom all things began. He had good reason: Jesus is before all this.

He cannot be seen properly except in this light, “the true light that enlightens

everyone was coming into the world”. It was to contemplation that he invited

the beloved disciple who was with Andrew at their first meeting. “Rabbi, where

are you staying?” asked the two disciples of John the Baptist; for when pointing

Jesus out to them the Forerunner had said, “Behold the Lamb of God.” Jesus

had answered simply, “Come and see.”

He brought them to his home. What was that home of his? The Evangelist

does not tell us. The true answer is in the first sentence of his Gospel. The

dwelling-place of Jesus is the Word. It was there that John was taken on that

first day. He stayed there. And it is there that he in turn takes us. Let us follow

him and stay there with him.

4 From Au seuil de l=abime de Dieu, Benedettine di Priscilla, Rome 1961, pp. 5-6; reprinted in “Lectures chrétiennes pour

notre temps” (N 3): 1971, Abbaye, d’Orval, Belgium.9