silent prayer garbled and disjointed: the wall. impenetrable, confusing and seemingly quite meaningless.

but I know this is not so: the meaninglessness a curious anomaly for the moment.

I cling to a memory of how it was before. what you said to me and what I heard. . . . 

the house, the place still seems to breathe against you. . . . . . and I let it.
the work of conversion goes on then. 

in mass reading today

Yes, there are those now last who will be first, and those now first who will be last.’

the passage beforehand made my heart sink, not for the first time.

There is a strange way, though, in which all those who would enter the Kingdom first have to be chucked out of it.

I need to bring you into my workplace.

the emptiness I feel at the moment is close to catastrophic.

I go through the motions.

the idea of 'eternal life' seems like a  condemnation in itself.

having said that, there have been glimmers over the past few days despite real problems with the work.
There is a growing underlying sense that I do know how to do this though and must simply follow my conscience; the rest I must leave to you and it is this that I am finding so nearly impossible at the moment.
every day I have to reconvert.
start again from heathen scratch.

today my self doubt reaches gargantuan proportions.

I feel like a painting by picasso

travelling to the supermarket is a massive round trip through wild landscape.

moments of breathtaking beauty.

the return journey over the steep mountain track in the dark,

rivers and pools on the flat black plain far below gleaming in the bright moonlight.

it seemed best to keep silence most of the way.

saturday vigils. 

yes,  but the silence remains just that: a silence.

the sense of you're not being in it is overwhelming.

first, I have to convert this room, this house, this landscape . . . 

that's how it seems.

an act of faith.

remembering what rw says about 'unholy places that have no hint of you'.

in the past I believed these rumours.

now I know that they are my perception only - whatever may be the underlying cause -

I was thinking again how essential, fundamental, overwhelmingly important is that single psalm -

(I've said it before, I'll say it again)

how many are my foes O Lord!  . . . .

everything speaks your absence, your separation, your irrelevance.

these voices cannot be listened to because they lie.

they say seemingly obvious things which yet have not a grain of truth in them.

and when the psalm ends, despite the fact that I still hear you in the words - some of the time at least - the silence which overwhelms me is an emptiness which chills me to the core.

And so I see that this leads to the need for an act of faith which is almost desperate: 

I hear nothing, 

I see nothing,

I know nothing,

I understand nothing, 

I hope for nothing,

I  rejoice in nothing,

I perceive only emptiness and futility,

and yet I will trust in you. 

I will trust in you.

knowing also, even as I write that, that I could not say even that were you not enabling me.

the psalms become my only sight. 

without them: blindness.

a blindness beyond blindness actually . . . . .

I have just abandoned IE 9 and am trying firefox. I was immediately able to use the edit features again. How strange that IE9 works so badly! 

sunday: I walked outside the village for the first time.
a silent landscape bathed in sunshine:
it sings of nothing but you.

reminding me quietly why I am here.

I've just read the title of a talk by Clare Catford:
'Blessed are the cracked for they let in the light’

the kite runner.

Icelandic tv might be bad but they show amazing foreign films.

all my prayer is an effort of will, but once I have started there is relief and moments of . . . . clarity?

silent prayer descends constantly into daydream, thoughts about work or mere dozing.

it's as though the house itself (I know I said this before) needs to be 'tuned' or warmed-up. At the moment it seems to stand between us - the wall again . . . . . showing perhaps that I still havent understood the nature of this wall.

This is just how it was in Durham and in Reading . . . . . it takes months. Remember this!

The advantage this time is that I came here because of you anyway. Without you I could never have done this. . . . . .It means that making a life of prayer here may happen just a little more easily . . . . I'm hoping so anyway.

having a lot of trouble with this blog. Since I uploaded IE9 I have been unable to edit the font or anything else and cannot access the html either.
 was thinking about moving it elsewhere but can't find anything I like better at the moment.
apart from the blog, things are still very bad. worse if anything.my future here looks very shaky.
will do my best and try to trust in you but that is beyond me at the moment:prayer is simply a repeat of the inner 'discussion' I'm having with the village . . .