There is an old joke that I fear shall play on me in its fullest literality. When I was fifteen I knew everything and was amazed at the confusion and perplexity about me. When I went to university I found there were gaps in my knowledge but confidently considered that they would fill. When I was thirty I learned there was no possible system to subsume all knowledge, and by the time I was fifty I knew only that knowing is impossible.

So what of that greater question: Can we know God?

Much has been written of the Sea of Faith since Arnold mourned its withdrawal as his wife and he heard it roar away in the Dover night. For me, my faith in Christ is a great exploration where remarkable discoveries, and even strange new creatures, beset every prospect. Balboa knew he beheld a new sea, and Newton combed his beach beside an ocean he knew he could not navigate, but it lies to us to contemplate a great expanse of inscrutability, refulgent and sublime, eternal yet of no time, serene and strewn with the wreckage of libraries.

There is no art of man; scientific, doctrinal or philosophical which can define reality, for all systems consummate in contradiction and incompleteness. All we can do is live, love, trust, believe and strive to know Our Savior personally, you may say subjectively, so that at the end we may say, not I know this or I found that: But "I have been there, done that, got the tee-shirt".

It is important to remember that The Cross is about the transcendence of suffering and that we are suffering together. I try to remember to pray not only for my human family and friends but also for the waterfowl, rats, squirrels and other small creatures I see about. For they suffer and yet are innocent of evil, so if indeed there is The Resurrection of the Flesh then assuredly these last shall be first.

I hope that you enjoy this selection of my religious writings and the pictures that accompany them, and I hope they stimulate you further to contribute your own theories and experiences to this limitless, and most perilous, of all reconnaissances. But most of all I hope they inspire you to fly closer to The Feet of Salvation, whether by a picometer or a parsec.