Light & Darkness

"You can wake deep in the night
And find that out of sight
. . . Right under your nose
A revolution grows"
Pete Towshend
"All Shall Be Well"

Dear diary . . .

If I had a diary, I suppose that's how it'd begin. To be sure, there's notebooks and a snowstorm of scrap paper all over my life with little scrawled words of hope and complaint read by none but me and God. And maybe that's why I'm here: to give God something to read in his spare time about life in the deep darkness far from home.

Exile.

Life. Life is exile from home, a home I don't recall.

Little words by a crazy man sent out into a night where he wishes a revolution would grow. Those things -- revolutions -- begin with little words whispered by crazy people to themselves.

What's the difference between whispering them here and whispering them to myself?

The sages teach that it all begins with little words here, logoi, that stir the heavens to move, that call out to the Divine Logos to come down and meet us halfway. We offer up a small spark in the night and The Holy responds with a rushing wind, a conflagration that consumes away the old and replaces it with something better and new.

Crazy, no?

I like to hope for something better and I like to dream of a reality more and different than the one where I've landed. I like to think that, out there, are others looking for the same things, each with their own special and discounted word -- words that never go ignored by the Above and which count for something. I look into the faces of strangers and see exiles, and I read hostile murmurings and hear the baffled language of people who have forgotten their true calling and who do not recall who they truly are.

I hear language about other and self and close my eyes. I hear talk about the divine and the mundane and am filled up with leaden sorrow. I hear of time and eternity and stand amazed.

What if all of these things are just words -- not logoi, but noises, shadows of words? Illusions of meanings?

What if there is no self and no other? When I look into the eyes of the other, what if, from the depths, I see myself? And if I look into myself, what if I am seeing none but the other? And in the blazing spark I feel smouldering inside my confusion and darkness, what if there is no one else but God?

And, so, in the presence of the stranger, what if I do nothing but face the Divine visage, a presence more Holy than an angel?

And so, in all things, what if there is nothing less than God's Own Burning Voice?

Time and eternity -- illusions formed by my own forgetfulness and weakness. Words in the sense of noises that mean nothing because time is in eternity and eternity in time. Both are sides of an unsayable Whole that my finite eyes cannot comprehend, yet my soul knows intimately.

Crazy words on a Saturday night.

What am I looking for? We send out words in hope of more returning, more meanings returning to unfold what we cannot explore alone -- a conversation.

But mostly I whisper to myself. And God, one supposes.

The wise say that each word and each intention creates an angel -- sends out an Angel of Light or an Angel of Darkness -- into the world, and God knows we wrestle with the angels daily.

To speak or not to speak, when the fate of the world is always dependent on what we say and what we hope-- or don't say and don't dare hope?

I broke a sort of oath not to speak publicly where it would probably be read by my fellow townspeople after a year-and-a-half. I wonder at the wisdom or folly of my choice -- or the wisdom in the folly. It brings frustration and sadness because shining a light always casts its shadows, and one always wonders just how strong one's light is when making pronouncements. One wonders if of is shining light or just creating an overabundance of shadow where darkness is already plentiful.

In the end, one is left alone on Saturday nights wondering in sadness because these questions don't really matter to anyone else, and probably can't. Yet . . . .

Something in me wants to speak. My soul, my destiny, what the Greeks used to call the daimon we all have, a peculiar calling and mission from God, prods me. I shut it up largely for a year-and-a-half and it made me unhappy and lonely. I speak and others are angered, but it seems to be what I was supposed to do. But like all angels, we wrestle with it -- I wrestle with it and wonder:

What am I supposed to be doing?

Hoping for a revolution. Doing what crazy men with small words do -- whisper them to God, scribble them everywhere, light and send them out on the wind and hope the flaming whirlwind returns with an answer.

What else is there to do while you're in exile than hope for a glimpse of home everywhere you look?

RVI
26 January 2008