CowPi
 Journal

From Br. Joseph —

This is the fifth reflection on seven signposts for the season of Lent (and for all seasons).

Gravitate to humility.

This signpost points in the exact opposite direction the world points by pointing to the First Beatitude, the Beatitude from which all the Beatitudes spring forth—blessed are the poor in spirit.

When society or the world talks about humility, if they even recognize it, they refer primarily to a sense of proper self-esteem where one does not elevate or demean ones self in relation to others. A good self-esteem is very, very important, but Christian humility calls for something else, something more.

Christian humility aims for the complete and total nothingness of pride. We have nothing to boast of to God. We have no entitlements or any thing to lay claim on God. Everything comes from God, and so we are essentially nothing without God.

This can sound a bit disappointing, even depressing. In fact, the world calls this humiliation, i.e. to loose ones pride. But the thing is, it is not about degradation or loss of self-respect or disgrace. It is about grace, and letting grace in so that it will transform us from the nothingness of our poverty to divine royalty, daughters and sons within the Triune family of God.

In other words, if you are not empty, God cannot fill you up. Do you want to be filled up with stuff of the world or with divine stuff? “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world and yet forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36)

In having nothing before God, we have God, and therefore have everything. God is peculiar that way—the last shall be first, the lowly shall be exalted. The way to bliss, to true joy and happiness, is not through pride but through humility. Jesus is our example; he is the Way.

It seems fitting to recall last week’s poem. Love, by its very nature, always reaches outward.

As flowing water falls to seek the lowest point,
It gives all its energy away until none remains,
And then returns to the source to fall again.
What does the water gain from this falling?
What does life gain?

Just as water gravitates to the lowest point, so does love—by way of humility.

Keep hope alive.
Dare to trust.
Surrender to grace.
••• Reflect love. •••
Gravitate to humility.

Our Lady of Mercy is praying for us…

Found myself with a rare free moment during the day. After a quick check on the internet for something, I found this little signpost for encouragement. It is a strange signpost, but one none the less. And the trick to remember with signposts is to follow where they point, not to collect them or stand around admiring their form or cleverness in design.

I do not know if I have found answers. When I first became a monk, yes, I was more sure of “answers.” But as I grow old in the monastic life and advance further into solitude, I become aware that I have only begun to seek the questions. And what are the questions? Can man make sense out of his existence? Can man honestly give his life meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life? My brother, perhaps in my solitude I have become as it were an explorer for you, a searcher in realms which you are not able to visit … I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man’s heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts. An arid, rocky, dark land of the soul, sometimes illuminated by strange fires which men fear and peopled by specters which men studiously avoid except in their nightmares. And in this area I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is.

— Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love [via]

I am, or at least think I am, in this desert. Oddly enough, part of me wants to be here because I know or sense that it will strip me of my conceptions, my things and objects of God—my God who is objectless. What will remain? My mind still searches for explanations, at times desperately seeking something to hold on to, but only finds dust or thin wisps of smoke. Nothing satisfies. Emotions crave feelings to feed upon and to foster the illusion of a reality, almost any reality, of some solidarity to grasp. But more nothing, no-thing. Nothing satisfies.

Merton says, “…in which one learns that only experience counts.” I wonder. Explanations are like concepts, objects of the mind. God is beyond objects, beyond things. The mind takes experience and makes memories out of them, forming objects out of them. They become things, things to hold on to, to use and to manipulate. Experience is collected like others objects. It is not experience I can depend. But what? What remains? Nothing satisfies.

Pure relationship is what I think I seek. There is no certitude. In relationship, there is no object, no I-It. There is only I-You. There is no object to stand on. There is nothing, no-thing. And in there lies the despair, and the hope. One leads to death, the other to life. Oh! the thin border between the two. Some how, nothing, or no-thing, must satisfy.

On the thin border,
between faith and doubt walks Christ,
calling all to trust.

Reality is flowing. This does not mean that everything moves, changes, becomes. Science and common experience tell us that. It means that movement, change, becoming is everything that there is. There is nothing else; everything is movement, is change. The time that we ordinarily think about is not real time, but a picture of space.

— Henri-Louis Bergson [via]

There is one thing that never changes—silence. Silence never changes, never flows, never moves. Silence just is. Silence is the reality that allows flow.

Silence never changes. Only the connotation, your attitude to it, changes depending on the sound or noise you hear before or after the silence, giving you, as Bergson says above, a “picture of space”, or to mix metaphors, an image of sound. The nothingness of silence remains nothing independent of the sound flowing through the the silence.

Silence can be a metaphor for the foundation of existence or being-itself. Silence, which is no-thing, allows sounds and noise to be, to exist as things to change and move. Silence gives a sound its very existence by marking the beginning and end of a sound. Silence gives a sound space and freedom to move and change, to mix with other sounds, to become. But in order for silence to do this, it must not change.

Maybe this is stretching the metaphor too far (I apologize if it breaks), silence is unknown. It is unknown because it is no-thing. Silence also exists on a level of non-duality with sound where there is neither subject nor object. On the surface, this sounds impossible (sorry, pun intended) because it appears that sound displaces silence—either you hear sound or you hear silence. But it is not either/or, it is both/and.

It is nearly impossible to hear or even imagine silence co-existing in the same moment with a sound, but it is there. If you quiet yourself and listen deeply to a sound (it is easiest with music, especially with headphones), there is an underlying stillness along with, under, about, the movement of sounds. Stillness is part of silence.

The very physics of sound carries silence with its very being among the troughs and crests of its sine wave. As the nothingness of space surrounds and permeates all matter, even atoms and subatomic particles, silence surrounds and permeates sound. But unlike space, which can be bent by gravitation, silence never changes. Silence even surrounds and permeates space itself.

Silence just is. It allows sound to be and to do what sound does, to move, to flow, to live. That is what silence does. For silence, be-ing and do-ing are the same.

Silence asserts not.
It is simple nothingness
Around every sound.

Like God, silence waits
To be heard among the thoughts.
It never changes.

Not to soothe with balm,
Silence calls to stimulate,
To notice no-thing.

The song of silence
Teaches one to listen, and
Imbues with Presence.

The felt the big emptiness this morning. It actually started yesterday afternoon, but I did not notice or label it as such until this morning. It is not depression. I know depression. It’s close, but not the same. There is no despair, no deep sadness or lowness that comes with depression. It is just an empty feeling, an absence, and a deep sense of loneliness and longing.

At first, I noticed myself trying to cover it up with distractions, listening to music, watching television, doing sudoku puzzles, browsing through a bookstore. These are worthy pursuits in their own way, and in their own time, in moderation of course. There are worse types of distractions to chase after, but regardless of the labels, they are temporary, fleeting, ultimately unfulfilling. The emptiness remains. I can get myself all worked into a frenzy about it with this sense of bubbling negative energy that seeks desperately to be released, as the anxiety builds in a claustrophobic.

Labels can set limits to someone or something, especially ideas. There comes a sense of peace with labeling this feeling—it is not exactly a feeling, not exactly a knowing, but it is the closest word I can find to describe it—an empitness. I cannot define it. The label is just a pointer, a signpost to it. It is not exactly correct either. It is more like a nothingness. How do you describe or define nothingness, emptiness? Only by its outline, its edges, of where it is not, can you attempt to get a handle on it. But that is not exactly correct either, because there are no boundaries to it, to the nothingness, to the emptiness. It seems to permeate everything, as silence permeates and gives existence to every sound.

There is nothing for me to do. I feel a call to just sit with it, to be with it, and stare into it. Oddly enough, I do not expect it to doing anything in return. I do not expect anything to happen. I just want to be with it.

I repeat the prayer from last week’s post:

Do not take away the hunger of my soul
      or let me fill it with spiritual trifles,
      ready to hand, sweet to the taste,
      but good for only a moment’s satisfaction.
Deepen my hunger.
Enkindle my desire.
Come to me in the longing in my heart,
      for in my emptiness you are present.

Maybe this is what Simone Weil meant by “waiting for God”?

“…What I like doing best is Nothing.”

“How do you do Nothing,” asked Pooh after he had wondered for a long time.

“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, ‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?’ and you say, ‘Oh, Nothing,’ and then you go and do it.”

“It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

“Oh!” said Pooh.

— A.A. Milne

Must doing always have purpose? Does being have purpose? Can I exist without purpose? Can my purpose simply be to be?

Is the nothingness I yearn for
a return to the comfortable nothingness of the womb,
or a step forward into the unknown
of total giving, of emptying myself to You?

Is this want from my egoic,
fear and attachment-driven empirical false self,
or from my shy true self that knows itself
to be in, of, and with You?

The one is caused by fatigue,
total tiredness of struggling in the world,
frought with frustions of a feeble will.
The other is from desire to be,
to be with You, to let You fill me.

One is retreat, resignation, giving up.
The other is giving over.

One is about self.
One is about other.

One leads to apathy and hell.
One leads to love and heaven.

Lead me to You.

In an earlier entry, I mentioned something about having doubts. Doubts are funny things. You are never sure about them. (Sorry, pun intended.) But seriously, it is the fact that you are unsure that makes things challenging. I don’t know about you, but my mind craves certainty.

I have reached a point in my life where I can see two levels of doubt concerning God. The first is the one most people grapple with, that is, is there a God? And if so, does He interact with this world?

To resolve this issue of doubt, the only thing I can say is that it takes a “leap of faith.” I know that sounds like a copout. Somehow, you must step outside of yourself for a moment, step outside of your doubt, skepticism, intellectualism, emotions, and simply believe. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. It is something that you cannot do by yourself. No matter how much you try to force yourself, you will not be able just to believe. It takes God to help you. He has to call you. He calls everyone. The trick though, is knowing when He is calling you. Most of the time, I believe, most people do not hear Him because His call is lost among all the noise of the world. And if you do happen to hear His call, you still might not be ready if the “soil” of your heart is not ready. (If you are still waiting for this moment to happen, it will. Just ask Him. It will not happen over night. It may take years, as in my case, but it will happen if you are listening with an open heart.)

All of this reminds me of a scene in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. During the climax of the movie, Indiana Jones is following his father’s notebook through the cave to the Holy Grail. He comes to a giant chasm with no way across. He looks in the notebook and it says that one must take a “leap of faith.” Indy looks again at the chasm and chagrins. It is too far across to jump, too far to use his whip, too far to use anything that he may possess. Only a “leap of faith” will get him across. He stands helpless at the edge of the chasm. He looks back down through the cave he just came. He knows that he cannot go back. He stands up at the edge of the chasm, hesitates just a second to take a deep breath to steel his nerves, then takes a step forward into nothingness. By a simple act of faith, the will to believe, he steps outside of all of his doubts and skepticism. He steps out onto a hidden bridge across the chasm of doubt. That is what it means to take a “leap of faith.”

It is hard to take the “leap of faith.” The mind wants certainty. The mind wants to know. The mind wants to evaluate the pros and cons, to estimate the risks and benefits, and to make a connections between the facts. But none of these exist for the mind to get a hold of. To take a “leap of faith,” the rational mind must give up what it is most comfortable doing. The mind has to take a step into nothingness in order to believe.

Now, once the theological doubt about God has been settled and you believe in God (called faith), there enters a second level of doubt. No, not about God, but about yourself. This type of doubt is much harder to describe. It too is also about stepping out into nothingness. Thomas Merton had this to say about this type of doubt in New Seeds for Contemplation:

In a certain sense we may say that there are still “doubts,” if by that we mean not that we hesitate to accept the truth of revealed doctrine, but that we feel the weakness and instability of our spirit in the presence of the awful mystery of God. This is not so much an objective doubt as a subjective sense of our own helplessness which is perfectly compatible with true faith. Indeed, as we grow in faith we also tend to grow in this sense of helplessness, so that a man who believes much may, at the same time, in this proper sense, seem to “doubt” more than ever before. This is no indication of theological doubt at all, but merely the perfectly normal awareness of the natural insecurity and of the anguish that comes with it.

The very obscurity of faith is an argument of its perfection. It is darkness to our minds because it so far transcends their weakness. The more perfect faith is, the darker it becomes. The closer we get to God, the less is our faith diluted with the half-light of created images and concepts. Our certainty increases with this obscurity, yet not without anguish and even material doubt, because we do not find it easy to subsist in a void in which our natural powers have nothing of their own to rely on. And it is in the deepest darkness that we most fully possess God on earth, because it is then that our minds are most truly liberated from the weak, created lights that are darkness in comparison to Him; it is then that we are filled with His infinite Light which seems pure darkness to our reason.

Both types of doubts, the theological doubt in the existence of God and the personal sense of helplessness, are hidden bridges to God. It takes God’s help and a “leap of faith” to cross over both chasms of doubt.