Last night I came across a text in a book by John of the Cross. (Living flame of Love)
It's a passage which has struck me several times before when I have come across it in that other book on John (forty reflections? but I cannot remember the title - it has certainly cropped up in the blog at least once).
It was such an influence upon me (albeit too late to save my vocation) in the mid-90's.
Even at Worth, groping in the darkness, I had known that it was John of the Cross that I had needed to read - if only I had known where and how.
The passage I read last night was quite extended but I was gripped by it all: perhaps the core of it is here:
It is as though a portrait of supreme and delicate beauty were touched by a coarse hand, and were daubed with coarse, crude colours. This would be a greater and more striking and pitiful shame than if many more ordinary faces were besmeared in this way. For when the work of so delicate a hand as this of the Holy Spirit has thus been roughly treated, who will be able to repair its beauty?
As with so much of John, one feels first that it is all far above anything that one can comprehend or find useful but then he adds the following crucial element:
Although this evil is so great and serious (ie the daubing of the portrait) that it cannot be exaggerated, it is so common and frequent that there will hardly be found a single spiritual director who does not inflict it upon souls whom God is beginning to draw nearer to Himself in this kind of contemplation. . . . . . . . . . .
He will say: "Come now, leave these periods of inactivity, for you are only living in idleness and wasting your time. Get to work, meditate and make interior acts, for it is right that you should do for yourself that which in you lies, for these other things are the practices of Illuminists and fools."
Reading through this now , I realise of course that it is not so much a 'spiritual director' who says these things but my own mind tempting me away from darkness and silence, [and perhaps one's environment?] or perhaps more pertinently doubting that one ever knew it or trusted in it.
At the end of the passage one is left wondering again whether it really does relate to one's own predicament, and yet one knows instinctively that it does. John does not speak just to saints, but to all of us. His explanation of Christian mystical experience is relevant to all those who pray, whether 'successfully' or not and he picks us up where he finds us and moves us a little further along.
When I was ill (full-time as it were), I did find a silence which I now feel that I have lost through the constant inner noise which accompanies my work [and my doubts about my ability to do it.]
Would it be true to say that I can only stay here in Iceland if I can find a way of keeping silent even while I work?
And if I do not stay what will I do? Where can I go? What would my options be?
For the moment I must simply juggle and hope for the best.
The crucial thing though is trust and how hard I am finding this! Perhaps it is trust that is the actual key: if I can find the trust then perhaps I will find the silence too?
One thing I have to remember: there can be no going back. There is only the way forward and tomorrow will be different from yesterday. Any attempt to go back is doomed to failure. Today I must find a trust in today and a silence in today. Yesterday's silence is already a mere dream.
this takes me back to the early days of the blog.
travelling inwardly. . . . . . .
but again I must beware the temptation to look back!