yesterday was immensely difficult. separateness, despair, confusion, and much darkness. the letter sits here unsent.
last night I thought: this letter is unsendable rubbish.
he will send a polite two-line reply and put it in the bin.

last night I was reading 'wound of knowledge'.
so much of this book is intellectually beyond me.
I struggle to relate what he is saying to my own experience and some sections fill me with anxious lassitude. Occasionally though I glimpse something that makes sense to me.
I was reading the passage about Luther. It struck me very forcibly and I think that this must be the passage which Father Daniel was thinking of after he got my letter that day.
It's a long passage but all of it is important so I won't try to abbreviate it. (I doubt that I could.)

Knowledge is a historically conditioned affair, it is not intuitive grasp of transcendental states of affairs. But to take this seriously means equally to reject the idea of privileged authoritative propositions delivered from religious illumination. It means to grasp that any speech made about God is speech about an absence: the world we inhabit does not present God as simple fact. God is made known to us in the cross, in a man's death in abandonment. So for all human beings God is to be met in what 'contradicts' or opposes him, in sin, in hell, in pain and guilt and lonely despair; theology begins here, in the Godless world at its most extreme. Only here, in what negates and mocks all human conceptions of God, can God be himself. Paradoxically, the real and absolute transcendence of God can only be understood in circumstances and experiences where there are no signs of transcendence, no religious clues. It is, as Luther again insists in the 'proof' of thesis 20, useless to consider the transcendence of God, 'His glory and majesty', independently of the human encounter with him in the godlessness of the cross. Here, where all theological speculation, all conceptual neatness and controlledness fall away, God is simply God. It is an experiential and historically oriented restatement of the tradition of negative theology: God himself is the great 'negative theologian', who shatters all our images by addressing us in the cross of Jesus. If we are looking for signs of God's authentic life, activity and presence, we shall find them only in their contradictories, in our own death and hell as in Christ's. The theologia crucis concerns itself only with the visible, the worldly; but it grasps and values the worldly for what it truly is, the garment of God. The theologia gloriae seeks to escape from the worldly and so turns its back on God.
. . . . . . . .
and further down the same page (p. 147 in my edition: D,L & T)
That Christian authenticity begins from the wreckage of all human efforts to contain or control God is a view which we have seen to be central to the mainstream of Catholic tradition. What Luther (and the classical Protestant world in general up to the present century) objects to is the perversion of the contemplative approach into a 'mysticism' which imprisons God again in a set of human experiences.
. . . . . .If Luther can be read in the light of Eckhart (and of Eckhart's pupils, Suso and Tauler, whom Luther studied extensively), it is clear that the reformer cannot simply be interpreted as an enemy to contemplative theology and practice: he is, rather, an uncompromising champion of the innate iconoclasm of contemplation.
. . . . . . (p. 150) the fact of Christ's perfect oneness with the Father is not touched by his experienced agony. Christ's cross is, from one point of view, the supreme demonstration that holiness is nothing to do with mere states of mind.