Stay in the darkness and emptiness. Do not flee from the nothingness or try to fill up that hollow place with your own attempts to create new finite pillars on which to build your life... God is to be found in the darkness, not away from it.
Sandra Cronk, Dark Night Journey (with thanks to Inward/Outward)
Even the attempt to describe to oneself in thought what is going on in that darkness can be deceptive: a temptation, almost, in the sense of Jesus' temptations in the desert - a temptation to do magic with names. Lent is for me a time of unknowing, silence, emptiness. How shall I be able to hear, when it comes, the cry of, "He is risen!" if I am all full of words till then?
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.(from: TS Eliot: 'Ash Wednesday')
2 comments:
Beautiful, just beautiful.
Thanks, Mike. So glad you also subscribe to "Inward/Outward." I haven't been blogging much this past week and probably won't for the next two weeks, because I'm going to be in Maryland at a Shalem training and contemplative event.
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