The middle section of this chapter climaxes in a sense of fullness and inclusion, with the fourfold repetition of ‘all things’ matched by a fourth use of agapē in verse 8, where we learn that love never ends—literally, does not fall apart. This is contrasted to our own partial, transient human charismatic gifts and knowledge, which will not be needed in the eschatological future.

The practical centre of the chapter then modulates to the enigmatic and mysterious as it looks forward to a fuller understanding through love, which has an eternal value.

Nick Turpin’s photograph of a child looking through the blurred glass of the bus window embodies our present existential lack of knowledge. It is part of a sequence, ‘Through a glass darkly’, which plays on the pun possible in the King James translation of verse 12, between transparent windowpane and opaque-looking glass.

We glimpse the young girl through a medium of misted glass as if we were passengers on another passing vehicle, but intimately, catching her thinking. Holding a mobile telephone, she is distanced from us as she attends to another person and situation. Her gaze, however, is unfocused, as if she looked inward to regard a mirror of reflection.

The Greek for ‘in a mirror dimly’ is ‘in a riddle’ (ainigma). Like that mysterious child on the bus, we are all enigmas to ourselves and other people. Paradoxically it is the eyes of love which acknowledge the mysterious depths in the other; to realise that we are all children in our limited understanding of the world is the beginning of wisdom. To be aware of partial vision is to open that long vista of meaning that makes a clear halo round the girl’s head, as though gesturing to that loving circling of the divine persons, in which she, like us, is fully known.