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While I was still in the hospital, I thought a lot about the fact that our life is a gift. My life was a gift before this all happened, but my sense of the dramatic wonder of that fact has deepened considerably. The Creed that we regularly recite refers to the Holy Spirit as the Lord and Giver of life. It’s all too easy to recite that phrase as a matter of cold theological description. We can affirm such things with a kind of clinical detachment, rather like the medical report of my condition read by the doctors and nurses caring for me last month. But theology should always issue in doxology, and since my experience of the near loss of life, the vocabulary of “gift” and “gratitude” has been enriched.

So has my appreciation for the way our loving prayers are a participation in God’s own life. For some time I have been intrigued by the ancient idea of “perichoresis,” the term first used by Gregory of Nazianzus to describe the mutual indwelling of the members of the Trinity. In John 17, Jesus prays that just as he is in the Father and the Father is in him, so believers will be in the Triune God and one with one another: “I in them and you in me.” The Trinity is a dynamic dance of the giving and receiving of love, and by grace we enter into that dynamism through the work of Christ.

Having been given back my life—as the prayers of hundreds of believers engaged in the life of the Triune God—I think that I have a better apprehension of what this means, which is not to say that I can describe it any better. It is finally a mystery, providentially underscored in my life in the season in which mysteries (and gifts and gratitude) abound.

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