O Self-Radiating One
[“Were not our hearts burning within us?” (Lk 24:32)]
O Lover,
In the later decades of my life I occasionally have had enigmatic experiences of which I only slowly became aware. Both then and now I eschew viewing them as supernatural, and I have flirted with the notion that they were self-delusory. More recently I have been gravitating toward an assessment which is other than either of these options. In this post, as always in Your presence, I seek words for what has been unfolding within me in these experiences.
Beauty, it seems, is where most, perhaps all, of the experiences in point begin. Beauty—whether audible as in orchestral music like Mendelssohn’s String Octet in E-flat major, visual and tactile as in a recent birthday celebration in a Michigan vineyard, dialogical as in a small group’s fresh exploration of the Mystérium, liturgical as in the Ágnus Déi achingly sung by the Basilica choir, human love in its sundry expressions—is initially and invariably the beckoning hook, the narthex to the sanctuary, the midwife of depth.
And how am I impacted as these experiences unfold? I am aware that a strangely wonderful absorption in a protracted now leaves me largely oblivious to my surroundings with distractions minimal. My heart seemingly opens and is suddenly awash in wonder and marveling that such beauty into which I am being drawn, now increasingly cohesive and convergent, could actually be! My scatteredness is momentarily recollected. It is as if I were being caught up however briefly in a whirlwind aura involving all of my faculties, as if all around and within me were of a whole, a singularity. And, in the coinage of Julian of Norwich, I find myself aware that “all manner of things will be well.”
Upon slowly emerging from this mode I might find myself weeping for no particular reason, as if what is enveloping me were too spacious, too beautiful, too wonderful not to spill over into the affective, the somatic, and beyond. Surfacing with varying intensities, these experiences can be neither summoned nor negotiated, only received: unsolicited, unpetitioned, unaccounted for, unfettered in time. Throughout I do not machinate, but am ambushed. Interestingly, rather than occurring “amidst” practices of prayer (extraordinary time), these experiences generally appear in the “between” of ordinary time. Juan de la Cruz has taught me not to give undue attention to them lest they distract me from that which they intimate. Thus I do not yearn for, seek to foster and protract, or hoard them. But I do take note, I do savor, and the residue lingers.
Well you know, O Lover, that I am by now unable not to attribute the above “thin places” to You. They inexorably and irrevocably bleed from wonder and gratitude into awareness of Your presence. I marvel, but unknowingly. No exotic phenomena, trophy jolts or departures from nature’s laws, yet miracle through and through!!!
A fresh image, less inadequate than most, has been surfacing for Your role in these experiences: radiation. This image is rooted in the newer testament in particular. For example, You are declared to be Light which cannot be extinguished (Jn 1:4-9; also I Jn 1:5). The Christ is the “effulgence” (“radiance”) of the splendor of Your light (Heb 1:3), the same radiance which burned within the Emmaus duo (Lk 24:32). It is You who “enlighten” the holy city (Apoc 21:23). In the subsequent tradition the mystic Juan de la Cruz in The Living Flame writes of Your Light as dark, purifying and transformative fire. The heart of Henri Nouwen’s spirituality has been described as Your Love “radiating out.”
What does the image of “radiating out” intimate about You, O Lover? First, tenacious constancy. Rather than acting upon us on occasion, this image of ongoingness accurately points to You, the bringer of Your sun to shine on the just and unjust alike (Mt 5:45), as ever diffusing Your very Self. Thus the brief occasions cited above are Your gifts to me of heightened receptivity against the backdrop of who You are both now and always. For You are Light-, Heat-, Radiance- and Effulgence-Itself (Heb 1:3) ever burning bright. This luminous kenósis of Self-giving, referenced by Eckhart as Your ebullítio (“boiling over”), is Your identity; it is who You are. Furthermore, the cited experiences, segments of ordinariness briefly rendered more thin and translucent, are proleptic glimpses into the fruition of Your indescribable dream of a new heaven and a new earth. Your radiating out is the other side of Your eternal drawing in.
O Radiance, O Effulgence, O dark Luminosity! Open me further to Your ongoing Self-donation.
