Musings on a Shift
[“The whole earth is full of (Your) glory” (Is 6:3).]
O Lover,
Are not major paradigm shifts glimpsed primarily in retrospect after the tumult has peaked and a measure of perspective gained? Is this not particularly so when dealing with the mystery of Your engagement with us of the creaturehood? And am I not these days aware that I am being drawn through such a shift for which I have but grossly inadequate words or images? Does not my taking refuge in the interrogative evidence that ineffability? And yet, is not the impulse to try to respond even more urgent?
What were the initial antecedents of this shift in my awareness of You? Might it have been Paul Tillich (via Robert Scharlemann) who drew on two millennia of Christian thought to write of You as the Depth or Ground of Being rather than as an entity among others, however supreme, within the subject/object structure? Did I not decades later encounter in the Christian mystical “minority report,” most notably Gregory of Nyssa, Meister Eckhart and Juan de la Cruz, an implicit challenge to the Augustinian firewall between You as Creator and us creatures? And did not ancient Trinitarian words for “interpenetration” (e.g., perichorésis [Gr] and circuminséssio [Lat]) spill over to embrace You and all You have wrought, thus anticipating the beguine Hadewijch’s encompassing “Totality”?
Furthermore, was I not profoundly moved that such pathfinders, often marginated or worse, seemed to be experiencing You as Love Itself rather than issuing mere theological constructs? Did I not find their passion contagious, as addressing a lifelong void within myself? Was not my thirst for union with You being whetted via writings and practices modeling awareness of You as the core of all reality—my own self not excepted—as Reality Itself? What could have remained unchanged once Your Télos of “all in all” (I Cor 15:28) was glimpsed as the core of Your drama? Are You not, O Unnameable, also paradoxically Self-intermingler (Immanuel) throughout all the past and future “nows” of time? Did I not experience this movement from theology—never far from the cognitive—in the direction of the mystical—rarely far from Love—as something inexorably and relentlessly done to me rather than merely the product of finite agency? And had not intermittent glimpses into what Juan called the “living flame of love” left me momentarily both shattered and giddy, discombobulated and ecstatic? How was I to turn away from Your cosmic song, even, especially, in the present strange land (Ps 137:4)?
Finally, do I not labor now beneath the burden of having been made aware of, at least episodically, Light too searing and brilliant to sense, Reality too vast and sublime to encompass, Love too unconditional and wonderful to fathom or reciprocate? In contrast to earlier ideals and aspirations regarding my future December, is not that weightiness now my portion? And, O Lover, do I not live these days with the inkling that in this regard I of the persisting thirst am just about where I need to be, said shift not excluded? Indeed, is not the entire cosmos full of Your glory?
