Silence Breaking

This past year has been one of grieving, growth, deepening friendships, and a new awareness of God. For all, I am grateful. Life is to be lived in all its disorder and messiness.

Any relationship with the Beloved is fraught with peril along the Way. People whose connection with the Divine is always neat and tidy, all wrapped in a bow, scare the hell out of me. Eckhart (as in Meister, not Tolle) prays "God rid me of God." Seems he, too, wrestled with the Ancient of Days as well, not settling for locking God in a tabernacle and throwing away the key.

What fascinates me is that growing up and for much of my young adulthood, I could sense God's presence strongly. Then came a Dark Night, and all was pulled out from underneath me. In that experience, I felt lost, yet still yearning for this seemingly absent Creator. Such is an experience I'd rather not repeat, but have been told by mentors that it will most likely happen again. So this is how you treat your friends, to echo Teresa of Avila!

God operates so subtlety, no grand productions here. It is so easy to miss these movements, but they happen if we are aware and expectant. Though I no longer experience God the way I did for many years, no longer really "feel" God, yet, God is more real to me now than ever, closer than my own breath. One of those paradoxes.

It is within a pregnant silence that the Divine One operates.  This "is not that silence is broken, but silence itself breaks, interrupts, the continuous murmur of the Real, thus opening a clearing in which words can be spoken." Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg speaks here from The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious of the Creation, but, it seems to me that these words can speak of incarnation: the Word is spoken.

Within silence, Word is and words are, uttered. Ah, yet another paradox. God, like a playful lover, leaves hints of Presence everywhere, beckoning us forward, deeper and more broadly. All Creation pulses with the Trinitarian whirl of the Creator, but is not God itself.

So, we empty ourselves but to be filled with and ravished by the Beloved, the only thing we need desire ultimately, for this is Who satiates our hunger. Happy New Year!