advent apertures 2018 day 9: 'out there'

As I understand Eastern thought, notions of light and enlightenment are balanced by a deep respect for the yin, the feminine, the nourishing dark.  Each contains the other, and we need both to grow.  Lines from the Scandinavian poet Reide Eknar clarify the “both at once” of light and dark.

In the seed, the genes whisper: stretch out for the light

and seek the dark

And the tree seeks the light, it stretches out for the dark

And the more darkness it finds, the more light it discovers.

Or as the ‘Hymn to Ra’ from the Egyptian Book of the Dead says: “The truth of what we call our knowing is both light and dark.  Men are always dying and waking.  The rhythm between we call life… I walk in the dark feeling darkness on my skin.  Dawn always begins in the bones.”

J.Ruth Gendler, Changing Light

One of the markings on the vast stone sculpture The One and the Many by Peter Randall-Page is a text from Adam Frank, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Rochester:

‘In the beginning there was a single geometrical point containing all space, all time, all energy and all matter.  It did not exist within space, it was space, and there was no inside and no outside.’ 

As Randall-Page says,“It’s a scientific statement but it sounds as mythical as the epic of Gilgamesh from 2000 BCE.”

I don’t think I fear the idea of ‘Space’ as such, though my mind boggles when I try to imagine Frank’s ‘single geometrical point in time’; but I know there have been times when I have felt agoraphobic, overwhelmed by either a mental or physical sense of vastness which has so diminished me, to the point where I feared I would become so insignificant that there was little point in me continuing to try to live.  

Of course, I can’t get my head round the vastness of God either.  Yet, somehow, I do know there is a crucial difference between the desolate emptiness left by an attack of agoraphobia, and the lostness I face in the Mystery who is God.  

When seeking the One who is the Treasure of the Universe I am convinced I have no need to fear what’s ‘out there’.

love is the voice under all silences, 

the hope which has no opposite in fear; 

the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: 

the truth more first than sun more last than star

from ‘being to timelessness as it's to time’

e.e. cummings

found darkness discovered light. Canon 7D. f5.6. 1/30. ISO 100.