This barren nothingness brings us to what Merton calls ‘the gate of heaven’ in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Getting there means traveling through a sense of vulnerable lostness, in which I've found comfort with this prayer, ‘There is no length to which He will not go, no depth to which He will not descend, to win the love of your heart and mine. God is always searching for us through that sense of separation that we may be experiencing. Even though God seems absent, God is never absent and is trying hard to reach us through what I like to call our sense of lostness.’ (Father Leo Clifford)
Finally arriving at:
‘At the centre of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us … It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…I have no programme for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.’
In the end, we find life is an endless series of internal spiritual surrender of situations which force us to let go of our old limiting beliefs which, one eventually finds, were only blocks from our Source of All Good.
Often times over the years this surrender has resembled a nervous breakdown as it involved letting loose of some of the innermost protective mechanisms devised to avoid this painful process. Ofte,n I felt vulnerable to every possible nightmare and fear imagined—unfortunately, this is part of the process and the only passageway through. In this dark internal barren wilderness, my real self was finally coming to surface. This was not a death it was a birth of spirituality, which is to say all good. Christians call it being saved or reborn. This horrific and intense but quite necessary time of grieving is a pruning and purification, a cleansing time of the soul.
I finally found the meaning of ‘Resist not this evil’ for it is making room for tremendous spiritual gifts to bring back and heal others with—realising this nowadays I relax and let it all come up and out.
It takes courage to start something, to realise the truth of our being and to step out in the direction that the Spirit leads us. It takes courage also to keep on keeping on. And that’s what he’s saying. And if you’ve already started it, it’s best to keep on keeping on because you can’t stop in the middle of it. It starts with that quiet place within us, and it ends by going deeper and deeper and deeper.
What happens when we start on that journey is that, at first, we have some tender remembrances and wonderful revelations come to us. But, also, the stirring of things within us that we need to release come to the surface, old beliefs, old habits, old limitations that need to go. So it’s not always a journey of light and life; it’s also sometimes a journey of darkness and struggle.
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