Sinking into darkness
letting go
consenting
to the unfolding
nothingness
the emerging
everything
I try to name it
but it rejects my words
I try to hold onto it
but it evades my grasp
I try look into its face
but it darts out of sight
for words cannot name
what has been whispered into my soul
the mind cannot apprehend
what awareness has revealed
eyes cannot see
the shape of eternity
take me back
into the vast nothingness
take me back
into the beautiful everything
take me back into you
~Robert Van Valkenburgh
Reflection:
There is a place the soul knows before the mind can name it — a place of dissolving edges where darkness is not absence but a kind of rich, pregnant silence inviting us into deeper love. Like the mystics and saints before us, from St. John of the Cross who taught the soul’s night of spirit to the desert mothers and fathers who embraced the desert’s barren heart, the Christian path is not a climb toward certainty but a surrender into God’s mystery. In the dark night we learn that what we are most afraid to lose — our words, our control, our grasp of God — is exactly what must be relinquished so we may receive everything. Scripture whispers the same paradox: “For those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). In this consent to nothingness, we find that God was the hidden source of both the nothing and the everything all along. Our attempts to name God — as if a finite phrase could hold the Infinite — fall away. And in that letting go, we discover divine love more vast than any word, more intimate than any thought. This is not a retreat from life but a deeper immersion into the life of Christ where the soul, stripped and surrendered, becomes a dwelling place of the Eternal.
Meditation Question:
What in your spiritual life are you still trying to hold onto that God is inviting you to surrender so you might know deeper union?
Related Scripture:
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” — Matthew 5:5 (ESV)
For Further Reading:
If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to read Letting Go Of God To Receive God: Detatchment, Grace, and Divine Union (Lectio Divina)
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