whole: day 2

Who speaks the sound of an echo?

Who paints the image in a mirror?

Where are the spectacles in a dream?

Nowhere at all – that’s the nature of mind!

Tree-Leaf Woman

(8-11thc. Indian female practitioner of Tantric Buddhism)

What is it that I think I know of myself?  I may not want to look at the places where I my mind tells me I am ‘broken’, but as the fifth century monk John Cassian remarks:

Hidden things hinder wholeheartedness

My mind is capable of huge feats of self-deception.  There are many places within myself I dare not look, for fear of meeting the Kates I do not want to acknowledge exist.  Yet hiding from the whole of me is not going to facilitate my healing in body, mind or spirit.

So, with great reluctance, I have to turn and face the ‘darkness’* of me.  I need to be willing to look at the places where I am broken before the Spirit can truly mend them.  There are other places which I know I will deliberately have to break open, break into, to let out what is poisoning me, to enter into the dark, ambiguous, unknown places where God is in me.  All that I think I know may need to be let go of; I may need to ‘break’ in order to un-know.

Feeling broken, I then need to be courageous to look at the pieces that are left.  I need to make time to sit in the mess, with all the edges of me that don’t fit, with all the questions I want to ask God, to see that feeling I am a ‘fragment’,

is a reality of being creatures who can only apprehend with out senses – in bites, in touches, in smells, in sounds, and in focussed but shifting sight.  We live in the reality of these pieces where the world is always too much for us to hold all at once … God works with these fragments, moving in the spaces between them to form communion with us.  The fragments facilitate communion.

After Whiteness, Willie James Jennings (35)

What do I know?: that through ‘seeing darkly’, my wounds are the way to God: one broken fragment at a time.

The time will come when the sight of this wretchedness, which horrifies you now, will fill you with joy and keep you in a delightful peace.  It is only when we have reached the bottom of the abyss of our nothingness and are firmly established there that we can “walk before God in justice and truth” … The fruit of grace must, for the moment, remain hidden, buried as it were in the abyss of your wretchedness underneath the most lively awareness of your weakness.

Lettres Spirituelles, Jean-Pierre de Caussade

• Please note I do not automatically equate ‘darkness’ and ‘brokenness’; nor do I automatically equate ‘darkness’ with ‘evil’.  I never equate ‘darkness’ with ‘blackness’, with all the damaging cultural, colonial, social and spiritual histories that word has brought to people of colour and their ancestors.  Since I am a visual person, ‘darkness’ often conveys to me the sense of being blindn to the unknown.  It is also a word I often use as shorthand for the places where depression sits so profoundly within me, it feels as though those parts of me have become fossilised.  To ‘turn and face the darkness’ then, is about the need to confront what I wish to flee; to bring every iota of my creativity to bear on what is ‘dark’ within, in order to express the pain of negative thoughts, fixed thinking, self-harming and self-sabotaging behaviours, actions and emotions which has left such deep wounds within.  ‘Seeingdarkly’ in this context, is to treat darkness (within and without, physically, spiritually, materially, emotionally) as a mystery in which I might encounter the Godhead, where I might behold new revelations of Grace.  It is these associations of ‘darkness’ which I will be exploring during this Advent.

seeingdarkly. (iPhone image)