Nothingness for Love

 

May 6

“As you proceed along the Way, you will attain a state of everydayness…
Why leave behind your proper place, which exists right in your own home, and wander aimlessly off to the dusty realms of other lands? If you make even a single misstep, you stray from the Great Way lying directly before you. . .
Form and substance are like dewdrops on the grass, destiny like the dart of lightning—vanishing in an instant, disappearing in a flash.” (p. 5, The Heart of Dogen’s Shobogenzo, trans. Norman Waddell and Masao Abe.)

The next section in The Heart of Dogen’s Shobogenzo tells of Dogen’s “pilgrimage in search of the Dharma in Japan and China” (p. 7). 

     This text and other recent readings open wandering amid the paradox:  A) the lifelong search for the Way, and Z) right alongside is realizing “the Great Way lying directly before.”  Of course, the answer is Love, God is Love. Here, there, everywhere, there’s only the One Love. But what a great mystery this makes in living it out!

     From life’s journey supported by fabulous readings, perhaps there’s come an absorbing of  “nothingness.” Accepting the mystery of love conjoins with my inability to say “I love” because love transcends my naming-containing it as if I could give love. And yet by getting lost/found in submission to the I/not-I, a possibility seems given for love-coming-through. God loves. With this realization, the not-I opens for a flow, like a space through which the wind is moving. 

     Also around 3:32AM, I note the movement through life’s journey by “not” (again, the theme of recent recent readings and posts).  Early on, a detour (an about-face?) happened in this life journey when forced to admit I’m not a preacher (despite Mother’s wish) yet I’m given (a thanks-for-trying prize) a devotion to rhetoric and a (different?) career path. Then drawn by love’s hand into the mytho-poetic but soon enough comes hard knock of not : Not belonging there and not a poet. Yet provided a surprise-gift of a dedication to teaching-story.  In addition, Fate decrees: Not a city dweller nor university professor but this propels to woodland stewardship in our cosmic ecosystem. 

May 6

Another no/not was to a dream design combining quantum storytelling with natural horsemanship. Instead a blog writer reading theology and musing in the middle of the night.

Way. No way. Dewdrop journey from
Fundamentalism but
Disillusion with hellfire conversions into
Relativity. Multiplicity. Philosophy &
Analytical psychology to
“Follow your bliss,” Joseph Campbell; 
Mythopoetics with Robert Bly & Gioia to
Teaching Story— 
Poetry, especially Rumi—but not a poet so
Sweat lodge & “Day for Men” for twenty years…
Then to Sufi healing but not a healer. And
Confronted by the “Death of God”— 
Return to Jesus, theology of the cross.
From Existentialism to Oneness to
Emptiness & Nothingness. Thus
The Way. Is. no-way

May 7 dawning 

Cornflaked

 

Cornfield, July 25, 2025

Why did the cornflakes cross the road? It’s not a joke…well, maybe it is hinting toward one, inviting the kind of humor that copes with such mind&heart-numbing craziness that’s swirling off the world: political lies and flagrant abuse of law/morality/justice, religious hypocrisy, the obscenity of wealth concentration coupled with neglect of the poor, the threatened, the environment … 

Anyway, closer to home and concerning the usually-more-manageable woodlands and gardens here, the west wind’s been delivering mail: “cornflakes.” The no-longer green field across the road, now littered with debris from the harvested field corn, 

Cornfield, Nov 22, 2025

sends over each day (or minute) the thrashed remains. Here’s our front garden featuring the west wind’s recent unwelcome delivery contrasted with its appearance before getting cornflaked:

Nov 17, 2025

May 8, 2025

Perhaps the cornflakes could just be left to rot, but internet info says their decomposition takes over a year. Assuming that only in a few months, spring will come again, what’s the chance that the poppies and iris will break through layers of heavy leaf stubble in order to bloom and bring their blessed end of winter?

Iris Garden, May 19, 2025

The “joke” is that sometimes it takes an overwhelm to enable a breakthrough. Perhaps such a mess is necessary to push past normal sense-making in order to make way for a crucial insight or inner development, particularly vital for the spiritual pathway. St. John of the Cross says certain transformations cannot come by any human effort. No prayer, no contemplation, not even the ascetic acts of the hyper-religious mystic can do it. Only the power and gift from God.

Yet God always acts in this way—as the soul is able to see—moving, governing, bestowing being, power, graces, and gifts on all creatures, bearing them all in Himself by His power, presence, and substance. And the soul sees what God is in Himself and what He is in his creatures in only one view, just as one who in opening the door of a palace beholds in one act the eminence of the person who dwells inside together with what that sovereign is doing. Therefore what I understand about how God effects this awakening and view given to the soul (which is in Him substantially as is every creature) is that He removes some of the many veils and curtains hanging in front of it so that it might get a glimmer of Him as He is. And then that countenance of His, full of graces, becomes partially and vaguely discernible, for not all the veils are removed. Because all things are moving by His power, what He is doing is evident as well, so He seems to move in them and they in Him with continual movement. Hence it seems to the soul that, in being itself moved and awakened, it was God who moved and awakened. [“The Living Flame of Love” kindle version, p. 117; print version: Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, p. 645  Trans/Ed Kieran Kavanaugh & Otilio Rodriguez]

“Cornflakes” that can never be managed by human effort are obviously not just about the physical debris left after the harvest of field corn. And acknowledging the inadequacy of human effort is not to deny the necessity of it. In other words, to “let go—let God” does not mean a dismissal of the need for prayer-without-ceasing and other acts of devotion.

In addition to being overwhelmed by the literal cornflakes brought by the west wind, an inner message that has been struggling to get through for over twenty years may have gained extra current. It seems the body’s complaint (stooping, raking, hand picking, hauling, grrr…) was needed to conduct the message. This aching body was almost to the point of generating curses that might spark out at the causes of this undeserved heavy burden. 

And perhaps the charge came in that presumption of judgment and vengeance (cf Matt 7:1, “Judge not” and Deut 32:35, “vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” also Matt 5:38, Rom 12:19, Heb 10:30…) that the better angel was roused and prompted to whisper “now, now” or an admonition more harsh, along the lines of “do you think you’ve got it so bad…what about all the hungry children…” Thanks, Mom, I needed that. Seriously though, if suffering is required, cornflakes are a piece of cake. And I found myself substituting gratitude for this light burden, easy yoke, which could have justifiably been more severe.

But, let not escape the elephant: Is suffering required? For there’s the real deal within the cornflake kerfuffle. How does a person deal with the Job issue? Why does an All-Powerful, All-Loving Creator make and allow so much pain and suffering as witnessed in each morning’s news? 

A pretty good sized library is needed to contain the writing on this issue, 

sometimes called “theodicy.”

Studies of the book of Job and other volumes on this topic might approve the summary expression given by David Burrell’s Deconstructing Theodicy in his subtitle: Why Job Has Nothing to Say to the Puzzle of Suffering. Perhaps the best and/or only reaction to this unsolveable problem is found in Silence (with awe). 

Tired enough by raking out and hauling off cornflakes, it became easier to yield to this: “You have to suffer and you aren’t able to know why!” And that surrender may have allowed a next step. Previous attempts to “get” St. John of the Cross hadn’t been very successful, but now the guidance from his works began coming through. St. John says:

It cost God a great deal to bring these souls to this stage [of solitude and tranquility], and He highly values His work of having introduced them into this solitude and emptiness regarding their faculties and activity so that He might speak to their hearts, which is what He always desires. Since it is He who now reigns in the soul with an abundance of peace and calm, He takes the initiative himself by making the natural acts of the faculties fail, by which the soul laboring the whole night accomplished nothing [Lk. 5:5]; and He feeds the spirit without the activity of the senses because neither the sense nor its function is capable of spirit. 

The extent to which God values this tranquility and sleep, or annihilation of sense, is clear in the entreaty, so notable and efficacious, that He made in the Song of Songs: I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes and the harts of the fields, that you stir not up nor awaken my beloved until she please [Sg. 3:5]. He hereby indicates how much He loves solitary sleep and forgetfulness, for He compares it to these animals that are so retiring and withdrawn. p. 95 kindle; p. 631, para 54 in Kavanaugh & Rodriguez

Amen. Yes, there is a blessing for humility and a season for stillness, for a maturing, a seasoning, a special kind of purification particularly to take out toxicity of arrogance, entitlement, egotism, and suchlike.

And then, perhaps another season follows. Having gained through humble surrender a sensitivity in accepting that the human mind is not sufficient, a purpose takes form in relation to moving further into an increased sense and/or feeling of the divine presence. How is God being revealed each moment? In this particular case, when tending gardens where the Beauty of Nature usually comes, why might our labor be frustrated, even destroyed, by cornflakes? Could this relate to a preparation to receive a special gift, that involving a God-given transformation in the capacity to hold the overwhelming problem of suffering: 

Stanza 2 of The Living Flame of Love

O sweet cautery,

O delightful wound!

O gentle hand! O delicate touch

That tastes of eternal life

And pays every debt!

In killing You changed death to life.

St. John seems to be saying that pain is the price of the path. That’s an overly simplistic reduction of his teaching, but it suggests the inarticulate grasping that hours and days of dealing with cornflake extraction might approximate a gentle and loving application of the cautery requirement. St. John comments on these lines: 

The reason these trials are necessary in order to reach this state is that this highest union cannot be wrought in a soul that is not fortified by trials and temptations, and purified by tribulations, darknesses, and distress, just as a superior quality liqueur is poured only into a sturdy flask that is prepared and purified. By these trials the sensory part of the soul is purified and strengthened, and the spiritual part is refined, purged, and disposed. Since unpurified souls must undergo the sufferings of fire in the next life to attain union with God in glory, so in this life they must undergo the fire of these sufferings to reach the union of perfection. This fire acts on some more vigorously than on others, and on some for a longer time than on others, according to the degree of union to which God wishes to raise them, and according to what they must be purged in them.

 Through these trials in which God places the spirit and the senses, the soul in bitterness acquires virtues, strength, and perfection, for virtue is made perfect in weakness [2 Cor. 12:9] and refined through the endurance of suffering. Iron cannot serve for the artificer's plan, or be adapted to it without fire and the hammer; as Jeremiah says of the fire that gave him knowledge: You have sent fire into my bones and have instructed me [Lam. 1:13]. And Jeremiah also says of the hammer: You have chastised me, Lord, and I was instructed [Jer. 31:18]. Hence Ecclesiasticus says: What can anyone know who is not tried? And the one that has no experience knows little [Ecclus. 34:9-10]. 

And here it ought to be pointed out why so few reach this high state of perfect union with God. It should be known that the reason is not that God wishes only a few of these spirits to be so elevated; he would rather want all to be perfect, but he finds few vessels that will endure so lofty and sublime a work.

p.51 kindle; p. 604 in Kavanaugh & Rodriguez

Shifting a worldview may be like moving a sand dune, grain by grain. Like decomposing “entitlement” or “power-over” or “THE truth” so that the God-given may take form. 

This experience with cornflakes should obviously be taken as highly individual and not preached as literally or metaphorically applied to anyone else. St. John has strong words to say for anyone who presumes to impose prescriptions:

Thus the whole concern of directors should not be to accommodate souls to their own method and condition, but they should observe the road along which God is leading one; if they do not recognize it, they should leave the soul alone and not bother it. And in harmony with the path and spirit along which God leads a soul, the spiritual director should strive to conduct it into greater solitude, tranquility, and freedom of spirit. He should give it latitude so that when God introduces it into this solitude it does not bind its corporeal or spiritual faculties to some particular object, interior or exterior, and does not become anxious or afflicted with the thought that nothing is being done. Even though the soul is not then doing anything, God is doing something in it. Kindle p. 88 ; p 627; para 46 Kavanaugh & Rodriguez

Homeward, Nov 19, 2025

Harmonizing with Resonance

Energy in autumn leaves, Nov 8, 2025

Sound and light are forms of energy, vibrations, frequencies, bridging for those ready to hear and see the expanse and interiority of space and time, infinity and eternity. One of my very favorite themes, resonance, is wonderfully amplified by Frank Wilczek, winner of Nobel Prize in Physics. From his chapter “Quantum Beauty 1: Music of the Spheres” in A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design:

Each natural vibration pattern takes place at its own natural frequency.  The natural frequency is also called a resonant frequency, for the following reason. If the frequency of your driving force is close to the natural frequency of some pattern, that pattern will leap out in powerful response. For then, and only then, does the external driving force match up with the internal forces, cycle after cycle, to build up the strength of the motion. (pp. 173-4)

Color in woodlands, Nov 8, 2025

 

Wilczek calls James Clerk Maxwell “the first truly modern physicist” (p. 7) and quotes from Maxwell’s private journal:

Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession.

Thus ought man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible, nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it. (from p. 164 in Wilczek’s A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design) 

Morning light, Nov 8, 2025

The Whole World

Today looking east

In the opening pages of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology, Douglas Christie quotes the source of the title: 

When the mind has put off the old self and shall put on the one born of grace, then it will see its own state in the time of prayer resembling sapphire or the color of heaven; this state scripture calls the place of God that was seen by the elders on Mount Sinai. --Evagrius of Pontus 

This compelling book culminated for me, fittingly, in the closing chapter with its focus on “Practicing Paradise.” The capacity to revision paradise developed through a recurring theme related to the ecstatic, which connects with those special moments in the mystical journey and yet must not be cut off from everyday experience in nature. 

… we come to know ourselves in relation to the living world. Ecstasy begets intimacy, an intimate knowledge that can come to us only through relinquishment of a narrow, bounded self and an openness to an ever-emerging sense of participation in a larger whole. Attention to these moments when such ecstatic expansion occurs can quicken and deepen one’s sensitivity to the world, can open one to the possibility of a continuous exchange, an ever-more encompassing exchange. (p. 235) 

 We must honor and suffer our deep inner truth while also feeling and engaging our interconnectedness with the whole world, with all people and the rest of creation. Thoreau and Merton are frequently referenced for illustration and modeling. Considerable attention is also given to Denise Levertov, Czeslaw Milosz, Simone Weil, and others to show the way while leaving space for the necessary individual design and fit. 

      While the up-side of the path brightens the way, the essential passage through darkness must not be diminished. The next to last chapter “Kenosis: Empty, Emptied” attends significantly to affliction. “Mysticism must rest on crystal-clear honesty, can only come after things have been stripped down to their naked reality” (p. 283, quoting Etty Hillesum). Extending from the work of Simone Weil, Christie asserts “Healing and renewal and hope can issue forth from such contemplative practice; but the practice itself cannot be predicated upon expectation of them. One is called to remain empty, open, alert, always attentive to the presence of the other, particularly the suffering other” (p. 287). 

      With this inclusive acceptance of the whole, both the light and the dark, Paradise shifts to a texture that may be more complex and yet more real, perhaps more accessible. After all, didn’t the Garden of Eden include the serpent as well as the apple, nakedness as well as fig leaves, the self encountering the Other. The closing pages of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind encourage us to constitute a restructuring of paradise that empowers resistance to the destruction of our healthy space for living. 

It seems increasingly clear that we need the language of paradise to help us feel and understand the enormity of what we have lost and what we might yet recover. Which is why the personal accounts of engagement with paradise—lost, broken, renewed—remain so important to the larger work of healing the world (p. 348).

Today looking north

Wonder-ing

Sunday, April 13, ~4AM

I’m wondering when and how I got nudged (catapulted?) into a recent focus (near-obsession?) around a theme that I’d as soon not be caught in and yet seem unable (unwilling?) to get myself out of. Although the phrase may be more confusing than clarifying, the gravitational source for this orbit (wobble? whirlpool?) seems to be around “the death of God.” Yikes! Some exploration of that phrase is forthcoming, so have patience but also abandon all hope for a satisfactory clarification.

While I recall a sense of being struck at some point when reading (probably on the essential and unequivocal crux of Christianity that must be known in the cross/crucifixion), I’m not finding a specific place or even the text that threw me into this “flow” and therefore splash about supposing that maybe this location/focus/muddle might be more like a crest of a wave that developed over the past year or so than that it happened in an isolated passage. And (staying with the water metaphor), my motion feels more as treading than like swimming with a purposeful, well-defined target in sight. Maybe a dimly-detected direction developed rather gradually as I was being drawn to read some seven books by Stanley Hauerwas, three by Don Cupitt, and five by Rowan Williams.

Whatev-ah, to borrow the summary term effectively voiced by younger friends. Perhaps that tone works because some things in life just refuse focus. Like that shape-shifting form that Odysseus wrestled, these moments (decades?) are not meant to be confined to one stable meaning or center. Still, a bit of review across the terrain/sea might add insight or at least ease frustration.

Moon Setting, April 13, ~6AM

Likely the most compelling writer over the past year has emerged as Thomas J.J. Altizer (1927-2018). In his “theological memoir,” Altizer offers one interpretation of the key phrase:

Why is it not possible to understand the death of God as occurring in the Crucifixion itself? Is the sacrifice of Christ not finally the sacrifice of God? Is this why the cross is the most offensive symbol in the history of religions, one wholly unique to Christianity, and yet profoundly resisted by Christianity itself, as can be seen not only in Christian theological thinking but in Christian art and iconography… Even Dante could not envision the Crucifixion, and when this first fully occurs in Western poetry in Paradise Lost, it occurs only through a revolutionary vision of both God and Christ, one in which an uncrossable chasm separates the absolute sovereignty of the Father from the humiliation, suffering, and death of the Son. This is a chasm that only deepens in the further evolution of a uniquely modern Christian vision. And when the death of God is first called forth in Western vision and thinking, in Blake and Hegel, it is inseparable from a pure vision or a pure thinking of the Crucifixion. Is not the very ultimacy of this offense a decisive sign of the presence of an ultimate faith? Is a truly profound offense possible apart from the depths of faith? Is not an ultimate offense only and wholly within? pp. 106-7 in Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir by Thomas J. J. Altizer, 2006 

Altizer’s synthesis of his own work is stated: “my deepest theological goal eventually became one of discovering a coincidentia oppositorum between [Satan and Christ]. Elaborating on this, Mark Taylor comments in his foreword to Living the Death of God:

It is important to understand that the ‘coincidence’ of opposites is not the ‘union’ of opposites. When opposites coincide, they are not reconciled but juxtaposed to create a tension, which is simultaneously the most profound suffering and its overcoming. As Altizer’s thinking matures, he comes to understand this passion in terms of the death of God. Far from an abstract philosophical concept or literary trope, the death of God is, for Altizer, an actual historical event first enacted in the person of Jesus and then actualized in the course of history, which culminates in the ‘absolute abyss or total darkness’ of modernity… p. xiv

A search for meaning in this “abstract philosophical concept or literary trope” requires considerable willingness to enter the expanses of paradox, parabola, mystery, and suchlike. While wading/sinking into the depths of “the death of God,” I’ve also found it helpful to move back and forth into “fiction,” particularly the novels of Walker Percy, and across into theology, especially the work of Altizer. Helpful also is interpretation of Altizer’s work offered by his colleagues: Lissa McCullough (e.g., her chapter “Theology as the Thinking of Passion Itself” in Thinking through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer; and Robert Detweiler, Breaking the Fall.

Altizer affirms the importance, the vital necessity, of the role of literature and art in our moving forward.

I found that it was literary scholars who were most deeply unveiling this [‘that ultimate crisis which had become our destiny, a crisis shattering modernity itself, and therefore dissolving modernity’s comprehensive negation of theology’], discovering in our most profound literature a religious or ultimate vision that is simply inexplicable through our given theological categories… p. 24, Living the Death of God.

Sun Rising, April 13, ~7AM

As noted above, reading Walker Percy’s novels provide a very helpful weaving from the theological into the fabric of life. For example, in Second Coming, the protagonist searches for God traumatic experiences of suffering, physical/mental/emotional illness, death, and suicide.  In particular, he struggles in knowing the names of “death” (pp. 272-3) and in confronting the ways people seem to be “living death” (p. 324). 

Altizer’s work also contributes to finding peace and presence of the divine even in the times when we feel abandoned:

…the very disappearance of God, or the pure invisibility of God, could make possible a total presence of God. [Monet , Water Lilies… only seen with pond  totality… we can only see these paintings by actually seeing the pure emptiness of God, for only that emptiness makes possible a seeing of the invisibility of God.

    Nor is there even an echo of a mysterium tremendum . Now every mysterium tremendum is absolutely silent and invisible, and only thaat invisibility and silence makes possible such a pure mysterium fascinans , a mysterium fascinans which here undergoes an epiphany as totality itself … an epiphany of the sacred, and perhaps most so because it is not an epiphany of God. Is this a genuine  coincidentia oppositorum of the sacred and the profane, and one in which both the sacred as sacred and the profane as profane are dissolved, or in which each fully passes into the other… Thereby we actually see a pure moment of incarnation, and a moment which here and now is all in all, so that now Earth itself is actually paradise, and paradise in this absolutely joyous moment

(pp. 80, 81, Living the Death of God.)

Morning, April 13

        I think this has something to do with my attraction to photography of Nature and the editing that moves toward the invisible. For now, let’s close with a sense of opening:

While ultimately faith is a gift of grace, humanly it is an ultimate struggle, and the absence of struggle can be understood as an absence of faith, but the struggle itself can only be a truly individual struggle. Hence this is a struggle transcending any possible guidelines or rules, and wholly inseparable from one’s unique condition and situation.  (p. 155, Living the Death of God.)

April, full of Spring!