All shall be well...

I've been spending a good deal of time these last few days trying to think through some of the things I raised in my last post, Ivy. I know very well that the call to a contemplative way of prayer can at times seem worryingly antisocial - you need only think of some people's perception of enclosed contemplative communities - and I have been looking at my own motives, and my own emotional state, to try to understand something of how I am being led so strongly in this direction.

I can honestly say that I have never been more sure of my love for Christ, nor of his for me. It is very hard for me to find words for this, or for the paths I find myself being led down just now. It would be far easier, if not very helpful, to get all apophatic about it, and list the things it is not. I don't know that that would be much use, really.

This is quite a desert place, I think. I don't want to go on too much about that, either; it would be all too easy to engage with romantic notions of the desert, with some kind of TE Lawrence figure standing on the ridge of a dune, squinting towards endless horizons, and it's not like that at all. There's far too much dust in your teeth, and camel dung, for one thing...

Seriously though, it's all very ordinary really. It just that never has Colossians 3.3, "for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God", been more clear to me. I don't think till this Easter I had understood what this could come to mean for me, though I have loved the verse, and its resonances, for the longest time.

All this, disorienting though it is in some ways, and conscious as I continually am of not wanting to give the impression that it's anything special really, is just blessing from start to finish. Underneath everything, and undimmed by the sometimes painful vulnerability - skinlessness - I seem to be caught up in, is this deep contentment, this awareness that, as Julian of Norwich said, all shall be well.

He is risen - and in that resurrection is our life.