The centre of your own poverty...

A door opens in the centre of our being and we seem to fall through it into immense depths which, although they are infinite, are all accessible to us; all eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact. God touches us with a touch that is emptiness and empties us. He moves us with a simplicity that simplifies us. All variety, all complexity, all paradox, all multiplicity cease. Our mind swims in the air of an understanding, a reality that is dark and serene and includes in itself everything. Nothing more is desired. Nothing more is wanting. Our only sorrow, if sorrow be possible at all, is the awareness that we ourselves still live outside of God...

You seem to be the same person and you are the same person that you have always been: in fact you are more yourself than you have ever been before... You feel as if you were at last fully born... Now you have come out into your element. And yet now you have become nothing. You have sunk to the center of your own poverty, and there you have felt the doors fly open into infinite freedom, into a wealth which is perfect because none of it is yours and yet it all belongs to you.

And now you are free to go in and out of infinity.

[T]he depths of wide-open darkness that have yawned inside you... are not a place, not an extent, they are a huge, smooth activity. These depths, they are Love. And in the midst of you they form a wide, impregnable country.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions, 1961, with thanks to Barbara, whose quotation from this passage set me off looking it up...

Merton is pushing the boundaries of what it is possible to express in human language, making what he once called, Raids on the Unspeakable. I don't know that, from my own slight experience of prayer, and with my own linguistic limitations, I can actually add anything to what Merton says here; but it certainly confirms what I have to my own small degree come near.

When we come anywhere near the immense unknowability of God - except as he reveals himself in Christ - our sight is darkened by his infinite light, and our hearing stilled by the breath of the voice that called the worlds into being. I Kings 19 - when Elijah stood on the mountain before the Lord, there was a great wind, then an earthquake, and then a fire, but the Lord was not in any of them, but "after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave."

This is perhaps what the anonymous author called the Cloud of Unknowing between ourselves and God, and he spoke of "smiting on" that cloud with our prayer - for it is all we can do. It is God who will open up to us, and what he opens is that door Merton speaks of here, in the very centre of all that we are. But it is only in extreme poverty of soul that we can come to that place, forgetting, as the Cloud author says, all we ever knew. There may be as many ways to that centre of poverty as there are people who pray; but the only way there that I know is through the terrible weakness of Romans 8.26, where, we having reached an end of knowing anything about praying, the very Spirit of God prays in our stead, with "sighs too deep for words."

Certainly it is in using words to bring us to an end of words - whether a prayer like the Jesus Prayer, or the Holy Rosary, or the Cloud author's "little word of one syllable" - that we come beyond knowing into unknowing, beyond seeing into a light so perfect that it darkens our vision, beyond hearing into the sheer silence of God. And in that "wide, impregnable country" is our true home, and our "infinite freedom." Oh, God, how I love you!