Holy Week thoughts

Salvador Dali, Corpus Hypercubus

"...that you may have power, together with all the Lord's people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." (Ephesians 3:18,19)

Always a puzzle for mathematicians, this one.   Didn't Paul realize that there are only three spatial dimensions, not four? Is this just a case of his words getting ahead of him (which certainly seems to happen elsewhere in this letter)?

I was thinking about this passage today and I started focusing not on "love", with its dangers of becoming an abstraction, but on Christ's concrete body (in John's gospel, to "eat My flesh" is equivalent to receiving the love of Christ).  And I remembered that we live in a four-dimensional continuum if you include time also.  Thinking about this during Holy Week leads to a prayer...


your arms were stretched out wide for me;
your heart endured so long for me;
your body lifted high for me;
at last was buried deep for me.

this emptying, it had to be
so fulness could burst out for me.