Reverencing the Real Absence
[“‘Is the LORD among us, or not?’” (Ex 17:7)]
O Lover,
My exámin across recent months has had me noting my awareness, or lack thereof, of Your presence. Rather than being about whether You, O Lover, are present or absent, the words “my awareness of” focus on whether or not I am conscious of experiencing You. As I scan my recent past I acknowledge that “my awareness of” Your presence is . . . uneven.
In my finite and fractured way I thirst for You, O Lover. I periodically find myself longing to lose myself completely in Your interior Divine Life. I intermittently pine to be drawn into Your “all in All” (I Cor 15:28). However, the actual experiencing of You for whom I long is but episodical and then fleeting. My efforts to freeze the shimmering moment are no more successful than were those of Simon Peter in the Synoptic accounts of the transfiguration. It is as if having whetted my thirst, You have repeatedly left me sans satiation. Thus there is a tension at the center of me, one both compelling and discomforting. This prayer is about that tension.
Furthermore, I am conflicted as to how to hold the reality of said tension. As for the option of simply being content with each of its poles, that choice is long since in my rearview mirror, my now decades-old rubicon being the cry “I want You!” I do occasionally wonder whether I am being greedy in pining for more of You. But is it even possible to be greedy regarding You? Another response to said tension would have me simply forgetting that You are, a notion both laughable and immolative.
So what is the shape of Your guidance for me in my dilemma? As starters, Eckhart’s big picture in general, his teaching of ebullítio (“spilling over”) in regard to Your relationship with what You have wrought in particular, renders inextricably fused Your presence and Your handiwork. You as Creator cannot be cleaved from us creatures as we humans do with subject and object, this and that. That there is something rather than nothing signs Your presence.
From Juan de la Cruz I have learned that my seasons of aridity can in fact be Your weaning of me from the consolation-rich food frenzy so prevalent in religiosity today, and that You are thus freeing me to love You alone simply because of who You are. Thus my “dark night” may indeed be the experience of being “blinded by the Light” of You.
Having long since learned that You “hem me in behind and before, and lay Your hand upon me” (Ps 139:5) whether I experience You as absent or present, the Reality of You eludes deniability whatever my disposition of the moment might be. Like the Psalter’s “light and darkness” (139:12), Your perceived presence and absence as Lover appear to be oxymoronically one and the same. Present? Absent? Whatever! Or to borrow eucharistic language, are not Your Real Presence and Real Absence one and the same, each and both Francis Thompson’s dogged stalker ever ensnaring Your beloveds in Your agapaic embrace?
So then, while acknowledging said tension, can I accept Your invite simply to rest amid it? Can I yet again find a place to stand having in previous times experienced that “If I make my bed in the realm of death, behold, You are there” (Ps 139:8)? Can I set aside my cache of arguments and trustingly abandon myself into You, sight unseen, experience deferred? Can I with my entire being embody “yes!” to You as Immanuel (“[You] with us”) whether in Your perceived presence or absence?
