My image, a collage of images, of the Divine as the God of Christianity, the God of anyone and anything apart from others, the God of my evangelical Christian upbringing, had dissolved back into the wonder of the One known through unknowing. I realized I could not know God as I know objects, by what I could observe and assign to them. This God, now known but unknown, is more like poetry than prose. The God of my past was prosaic. Poetry is fluid, hints, evokes, seduces. If I say God is Love, that would be true and untrue, untrue for Love in its absolute excellence and grace would be unlike what I could fathom or articulate of Love. All became an intimation of and to the Unknown, yet knowable. But how knowable? Knowable by that this Unknown is, but not by that I had been told or could be told of It, or myself say or think of It.
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So, here, detached from the past images of Life, are words I wrote a half-decade ago, on Christmas Day...
I was coming to be able to joyfully exclaim, as did the Franciscan mystic Blessed Angela Foligno (b. 1248) repeatedly while on her deathbed, "O Unknown Nothingness! O Unknown Nothingness!" Foligno had direct, or contemplative, encounters with Divine Presence. She described that Presence in the world:
The eyes of my soul were opened, and I beheld the plenitude of God, in which I did comprehend the whole world, both here and beyond the sea, and the abyss and ocean and all things. In all these things I beheld nothing except the divine power, in a totally indescribable way; so that through excess marveling the soul cried with a loud voice, saying, "This whole world is pregnant with God!"
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The Psalmist, in the Hebrew Bible, Psalm 114.7-8 (AT) speaks forth...
In the Presence of the Supreme One, tremble, earth, in the Presence of the Eternal One of Jacob, the One turning the rock into a pool of water, the stony rock into a spring sprightly with water.
Christmas bears the message of the centrality of emptiness in the Spirit-life, that where nothing is something is given. This life is none other than cooperating with holy Spirit to form within us a void, an opening for the plethora of Grace. This vacancy, however, is not a mere negation. This receptivity is the field for the seed of Love, Joy, and Peace to birth and bless. The arid waiting becomes a watery womb of promise. We, like Mary the mother of Jesus, surrender our life to conceive and birth another One, another life. We, like her, say "Yes," and that "Yes" is an answer to another "Yes" living inside us, waiting to be listened to and replied to, and which has prepared us to respond "Yes" to "Yes."
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The emptiness seen at first threatening, for it means a loss of the life we are familiar with, the known, turns out to be a joyful emptiness, for filled with Life and gifting us with a fulfilled life. Yes, to lose my life for Life, so that my life and Life are one, is supreme blessing! To lose what I thought of Grace, so that there was and is a spaciousness to know Grace as Grace shows Itself again and again and again~Wonderful!
Life is always giving birth the Unknown being known in new ways
Christ always and now
wonderful Gift!
Life! Yes and yes
Video can be accessed on original site via upper artist-title here...
