Beyond the Narrow Gate

No matter how much tolerance is shown, no matter how inclusive love is, until tolerance and love are pressed through the narrow gate, their expression is threadbare and misguided.  Christians are often accused of being exclusive or narrow-minded, and some, no doubt, are so in the wrong way, but there is a right way, a way that is, indeed, VERY narrow.  BUT on the other side of that narrow gate is a table-land of understanding, a place of abundant nourishment: of wide, rich, and expansive pastures in which to graze and freely roam about.

The paradoxical truth is that that which is most refined, that definition which is most resolute in its stubborn refusal to deviate a whit from its exact meaning, and is the most populated with pixels (resulting in the best resolution—the best and brightest depiction of truth in pictorial form) is the clearest and most expansive knowledge.  All definition narrows to a point and thereby sharpens the understanding which in turn broadens the perspective.  Though it is true that to focus too hard and too long on one tree fades the forest from view, seeing many trees in the proper bounds of their sharp and true relief populates the forest.

      

When Jesus Christ is defined as the narrow and only way, the only gate by which one might legally enter the presence of God, and when He is described as the complete embodiment of all wisdom and knowledge and understanding, He too is paradoxically representing both stricture and boundlessness.  Another way this paradox is expressed is in those who choose the wide road to destruction.  Whereas the narrow and dark path of sorrow on earth leads to the wide and full effulgent plain of joy in heaven, the broad and riotously and raucously expansively gay spirit way on earth leads to the narrow, dark, and confining prison cell of hell.