Telling the Truth

December 9, 2025

A secret special passage mediates between me and the message that wants to get through. One mess (or not) involved with access to and movement within this passage involves the collection of books that somehow shuffle around desk, floor, shelves, boxes… to say nothing about drop-ins from used book stores, goodwill, on-line sources, and recommendations... Just yesterday (or maybe the day before) I was browsing about the basement library hoping that something would light up. Although Taylor’s Disfiguring was the right book to be reading, the copy I had was just too cluttered with a previous owner’s ink underlinings and marginal notes. Connecting Taylor’s terrific commentary on Modernism/Post-modernism, art, transcendence/immanence and integrating this with personal experience was demanding enough. Trying to block out the distraction of someone else’s grappling/frustration with the text was too much. So I gave in to the need to order a replacement and to find another good read while waiting for it to arrive. 

     A gift really, because when looking about the possibilities, my eyes fixed on a slender volume with Truth in the title, by an author I’d not read before, Frederick Buechner. The first glance wasn’t compelling enough so I kept browsing, but maybe that golden thread that Blake says leads the way must have been tugging me back. So I returned and took down Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. 

     A day or so later I’m very grateful because not only is this book terrific but I’ve now found two other books by Buechner that were lost in the other side of the basement library thus promising prospects for wonderful hours guided by his imagination, the opening of truth, the Word in the rich dimensions of depths of each human’s life expressed through tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale. 

“The preaching of the Gospel is a telling of the truth or the putting of a sort of frame of words around the silence that is truth because truth in the sense of fullness, of the way things are, can at best be pointed to by the language of poetry—of metaphor, image, symbol—as it is used by the prophets of the Old Testament and elsewhere. Before the Gospel is a word, it is a silence, a kind of presenting of life itself so that we see it not for what at various times we call it—meaningless or meaningful, absurd, beautiful—but for what it truly is in all its complexity, simplicity, mystery.” p. 25

December 9, 2024

Confounding of Suffering/Joy

Pre-Dawn December 4

 Hard to imagine writings of more importance on spiritual walking than the work of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, and equally difficult to find anyone better for guidance into their texts than Edith Stein. Wikipedia’s entry for her begins with this background:

Edith Stein [in religion, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross] 12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942) was a German philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. Edith Stein was murdered in the gas chamber at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp on 9 August 1942, and is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Stein

The Science of the Cross is Volume VI of The Collected Works of Edith Stein and it focuses on St. John of the Cross. In Kieran Kavanaugh’s introduction to this volume, he says that Stein “weaves together John’s words and her own. The fire that was dark, consuming, and painful is now brilliant, loving, and gentle” (p. xxxi).  

Moving into this material seems impossible without willingness to persist in mystery; the “Dark Night of the Soul” admits passage only as one yields to the Unknowable and to the Incomprehensible Love. To sustain the journey, the traveller leans into frequent confounding of suffering/joy and dark/light, accepting just what is sufficient to take a next step, uncertain of the ground yet trusting in the guide. The manna is rich, complex, and it thus requires time to integrate into the grey moments of personal experience, in order to gain candle-like illumination, for receiving sufficient light and warmth on the way.

For example, in relation to feeling the Presence of the Guide, Stein elaborates in Chapter 17, “Rays of Divine Glory,” on  Stanza 3 of St. John’s Living Flame of Love :

O luminous lamps of fire

In whose resplendent rays

The caves of sense—profound abyss—

Which once were dark, bereft of sight,

With rarest beauty unite

In gift for the Belov’d, warmth and light

[p. 203, Science of the Cross, trans. Josephine Koeppel]

In Living Flame of Love , St. John followed the poem with his commentary which includes this discussion of Stanza 3 (paragraph 23):

“Yet—may the Lord help me—since it is true that when the soul desires God fully, it then possesses Him Whom it loves…the greater the soul’s desire the greater will be its satisfaction and delight rather than its suffering and pain” 

(pp. 618-19, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, Trans/Ed Kieran Kavanaugh & Otilio Rodriguez)

In her discussion of this material from St. John, Stein notes:

“Yet, if the soul longs for God in truth, she already possesses the one she loves and so it seems that she is no longer capable of feeing any pain…the more intensely she desires to possess God, and she will do this all the more because she lives all the more in possessing him. Therefore she, too, feels neither suffering nor pain.” Stein, p. 207

Moments felt as dark can be incorporated with the three abidings: faith, hope and love. Suffering can be known as refining faith, as affirmation of God even when it’s inexplicable (cf “why hast Thou forsaken me?”); hope may be extended into times when no positive way is seen or imagined; and love claimed even when it seems no one cares.  There, in the darkest night, is God found. In ways and knowing beyond…

In Chapter 11, Enkindling of Love, Stein elaborates the preparation for and initial experience of union with God.

The human intellect, united with the divine through supernatural illumination, becomes divine. In like manner, the will is united with the divine will and divine love, and the memory, affections, and appetites are converted and changed according to God. . .

The dark night of the soul also deprives the soul of satisfaction in good things, yes, even in supernatural and divine things. This is so because the soul’s impure, lowly, and very natural faculties can receive supernatural things only according to a human and lowly mode. Through ‘being weaned, purged, and annihilated…they will lose that lowly and human  mode of working and receiving, and thus all these faculties and appetites of the soul are tempered and prepared for the sublime reception, experience, and savoring of the divine and supernatural that cannot be received until the old self dies.’  

[pp. 137-8; Stein references St. John’s Dark Night, Book 2, Ch 16, para 7, 9, 13, 14 which may be found in Kavanaugh and Rodriguez,  pp. 365-368]

The fire felt, the darkness of knowing, the aloneness of bereavement, all witness the Divine transforming the soul (will, intellect, feeling) that moves, knows, and loves into the ineffable, the unseen, through embraceable longing, all that mediates toward, possibly even into, union with the Oneness.

Full Moon Rising, December 3