Friday, November 2, 2007

Gazing into the Abyss

Just read an fascinating essay "Gazing into the Abyss." by Christian Wiman. The Hound of Heaven is indeed active, and working, and we cannot predict His way of tracking and following and finding those whom He seeks. Here is a portion:

So now I bow my head and try to pray in the mornings, not because I don’t doubt the reality of what I have experienced, but because I do, and with an intensity that, because to once feel the presence of God is to feel His absence all the more acutely, is actually more anguishing and difficult than any “existential anxiety” I have ever known. I go to church on Sundays, not to dispel this doubt but to expend its energy, because faith is not a state of mind but an action in the world, a movement toward the world.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interior


Flat light and the white aisles of cotton,
sky like an idea of blue.
There's no space like this,
wide, fraught with God.

The past is not a place
but story upon story gone so far
inside of things it takes a touch
of almost inhuman love to tell them.

To be the wire through which that current burns,
conducting the stone's slow accretion
like a cry, deciphering sunlight,
to pluck sound from the rings of a tree . . .

More than this I want the silence that ensues,
to believe in nothing else but the fact of absence,
striking out again in a hard horizonless country
whose one road releases me like heat as I walk on.