Kindle Notes & Highlights
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February 3 - April 24, 2019
Growth in the spiritual life requires adopting a conscious “habit of being.” Far too easily do we embrace the illusion that changing places is the simplest way of changing ourselves.
The way of purgation involves an entry into what is unnerving, even grotesque in our lives, into what quickly reveals our limits. It seems at first, like most beginnings in the spiritual life, a mistake, a false start, an imperfection in God’s planning, a regression in our own growth. Only through hindsight do we recognize it for the unexpected gift that it is.
They knew that horror is accompanied by laughter in a resurrection faith.
But the grotesque is also a daring exercise in summoning the absurd, making fun of what is feared. Its goal is to defeat, at least in the space of a brief moment’s laughter, the powers of darkness.
First, it forces us to admit that grace rarely comes as a gentle invitation to change. More often than not it appears in the form of an assault, something we first are tempted to flee.
The paradox of the grotesque is that it summons those who are whole to be broken and longs for those who are broken to be made whole.
It’s a longing to reach out to the grotesque, stroking the bloodied head of a slain lamb as its image gradually changes into the fierce and kindly face of a Lion whose name is love.
Apophatic spirituality has to start at the point where every other possibility ends.
Fierce landscapes remind us that what we long for and what we fear most are both already within us.
Another way of saying this is that desert and mountain terrain provokes the identification and reordering of boundaries. It confronts people with their edges.5 In wild places, terror and growth-toward-wholeness walk hand in hand. “We need to witness our own limits transgressed,” wrote Henry David Thoreau.
Catching up with yourself at the edge of the map.
see footnote 5
In desert and mountain wilderness, people discover liminal places suggesting thresholds between where they have been and where they are going.7 Whether they experience these places as dream symbols or rites of passage, whether they physically travel through wild, disorienting terrain or enter it metaphorically through an experience of profound crisis, such sites mark important points of transition in their lives.
You quickly come to the end of what you have depended upon to give continuity and meaning to your life.
Psychologists observe that challenging terrain evokes a high commitment of personal energy because of the uncertainty it poses. Human motivation thrives on uncertainty. If a desert trek or mountaineering expedition seems guaranteed of success (or guaranteed of failure), motivation will never be as high as when there is genuine doubt of the outcome.
The human spirit delights in the exercise of uncertainty.
To the soul, the ordinary is sacred and the everyday is the primary source of religion.32
Spirituality is not the sublime transcendence of everything trivial and matter-of-fact. In the Western spiritual tradition, the journey of the soul into the vale of ordinariness is an equally good, if not surer, route to holiness.
The place of scarcity, even death, is revealed by Jesus as a place of hope and new life.
God is a mystery personified as Love, found only on the outer edges of human experience.
A person who wishes to experience the radiance of the eternal sun, which is Christ himself, must have the power of sight and must make his abode in mountainous country by gathering together all his powers.
In the Sahara he would find his own purgatory and dark night, his own place for learning to simplify and deintellectualize his faith, for discovering love and embracing the poverty of others.
When people are drawn geographically to the remote edges of our world, they are carried metaphorically to the edges of themselves as persons, invited to an emptiness as exhilarating as it is frightening. Encountering overwhelming fierceness at the end of all possibilities, they know themselves to be loved in wild and unanticipated grace.
To find oneself expended—lost at the end of the trail, without hope of return—and to be met there unexpectedly by grace is the soul’s deepest longing.
Yet this self-obsessed “wanting” was precisely what kept him from obtaining enlightenment.
Hence he declared, “The things that ignore us save us in the end. Their presence awakens silence in us; they refresh our courage with the purity of their detachment.” Becoming present to a reality entirely separate from his own world of turmoil strangely set him free. By its very act of ignoring him, the landscape invited him out of his frantic quest for self-fulfillment.
Job is given no answer, but in being drawn out of himself he’s met by God.
a relationship of deeper maturity.
Standing nakedly before the divine resplendence, they discover the indifference of God to be yet another form of God’s insistent love.
To be engrossed in the self is, paradoxically, to lose it altogether, as Jesus suggested (Mark 8:35).
A deep desire surfaces there, to be present to the night and to the God who hides, like the Song of Song’s elusive lover, within it.
God’s indifference to all the cares brought with me from the day’s events—an indifference mediated through the dark, slim images of night—makes possible a lighter touch on everything I’d considered important. It draws me out of myself into an indifference of my own, an ability to remain neutral and unruffled before all the various obsessions of the day.
“The indifferent heart,” Francis affirmed, “is a ball of wax in the hands of its God . . . ; it is a heart without choice, equally disposed for everything, having no other object of its will than the will of its God. . . .”10
Because of the deliberate hiddenness of God’s grandeur, biblical religion demands the repudiation of idols, of every word and likeness that might presume to guarantee the glory of divine presence.
The God of the Bible is ever an elusive one. The only guarantee of divine availability is God’s own promise to be present to those who empty themselves in perfect trust.
It is impossible for human intelligence to comprehend God, yet certain places may allow people to experience the necessary risk that opens them, body and soul, to what their minds cannot entertain. God’s places, in scripture and in the history of spirituality, are frequently fierce landscape settings like the storm-beaten slopes of Mount Sinai. God is “an inaccessible and pathless mountain,” as Philo described the peak Moses ascended in fear and trembling.18 Such liminal places are able, symbolically if not physically, to put people on edge, driving them beyond all efforts to control reality
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Augustine argued, “If you have understood, then this is not God. If you were able to understand, then you understood something else instead of God. If you were able to understand even partially, then you have deceived yourself with your own thoughts.”
Words are the fig leaves we continually grasp in the effort to clothe our nakedness.
The route to knowing and speaking of God is invariably the way of abandonment, the way of the cross.
The desert into which Yahweh invites Israel in Hosea 2:14 is the hidden mystery of God’s most intimate self.
The quest for a more immediate access to God than that offered by Christ and the cross must be judged hazardous and presumptive. The God who is met in the darkness of unknowing is none other than the One already revealed in Jesus at Gethsemane.
Ego dormio, sed cor meum vigilat, Saint Bonaventure declared in his Journey of the Soul to God. As the ego sleeps, the heart remains vigilant. Indeed, the more self-outpouring we are, abandoning the ego and all its frenzied needs, the more truly we become ourselves, taken to the heart of our deepest being in God.57
While God cannot be thought, God can be loved, the Cloud author declared.62
If God is to be loved as God loves, it will happen only in the dark corridors of emptiness. Only in devastating loss—beyond all security of language and identity, in despairing ever of obtaining the glory first sought—only then does a truth too wondrous to be grasped come rushing back out of the void. Love takes wing where calculation ends.
God hides from us in an act of loving play, wooing us to the very abandonment that makes love possible. Love cannot exist so long as it remains an object to be possessed. It is born only in the letting go of all grasping and being grasped.
True contemplation can never fulfill itself in “the false sweetness of a narcissistic seclusion.”73 It has to reenter the world of others with its newly won freedom.
They are able to “aim at nothing in their works, to intend nothing in their minds, seeking neither reward nor blessedness.”76 They move through the world with a compassionate indifference to all its threats and promises.
God is most God on the cross and most Man in the resurrection,’ wrote Karl Barth. It is in the cry of dereliction that God is most deeply revealed, for dereliction is God’s experience of God. Even God has to let go God’s ultimate idea of God in the divine kenosis.”87
Like many of us, including the mandarin in the Chinese tale, he balked at ordinariness.
We live from one moment of fear-stifling exhilaration to the next. Only in this way do we feel engaged with life.
In both cases, their “seeing” of God on the mountain was but an interlude in an ongoing struggle, given at a time when the absence of God seemed for them most painfully real.40
Any fleeting realization of apophatic union with God must re-engage the person on the mountain with the concrete concerns of social and political action.
