This Silent Agency, Part II

The Apocalypse Tapestries, Angers

Photograph by the author

Sept. 7, continued

 This silent agency which we have the capacity to come into relationship with contains an intelligence other than my ordinary mind. It commands respect simply because it respects on its own; and to contact it is to contact the fundamental respect I ought to have for life, if only I weren’t so willful.

Every time I touch the silent agency – actually, what happens is that there are times when it touches me — I see how undeserving I am. There ought to be a much deeper respect within my ordinary being for even the smallest particulars of what takes place. At those moments I have the capacity to see what an enormous blessing I live within, and how even the least event is an expression of The Perfection. 

This can be quite difficult, because my ordinary parts insist on evaluating everything according to scales of relativity. Said activity is attached to this level; and it takes place without understanding what love is. It does not see that its validity, though real, is limited. The annihilation in Love that is spoken of in Hadewijch’s visions is in this sense quite real; yet it's not particularly useful to me, because my existence requires me to balance the flawed and myopic substance of my own life with the insight that the silent agency of spiritual being can bring.

Something begins to grow in a human being over the course of a lifetime that, if nourished and nurtured, begins to understand how to love in a new and different way: a way that's not personal, that doesn't belong to me, but that takes — without naïveté — the facts about things in. One needs to learn how to love through understanding and forgiveness even as one appreciates deficiencies in love. In fact, it's the deficiencies themselves that ought to call us more intensely to that love: both our own, and those of others. But only an agency of silence can love in this way. The love that has words has already acquired a characteristic that contaminates it.

So I sit here on this Saturday morning in the midst of the inner stillness, engaged with this outward manifestation of it as I speak. (This piece is dictated, not written.) At this moment in time this instant of Being represents all of the instants that have ever taken place before it; it represents the instant in itself, as of now; and it represents all future instants which will take place following it. I inhabit it with a respect for its entirety. It's good enough as it is; it doesn’t need me. It has me, however; and this is another fact that I ought to bring a deep respect to. The mirror I hold in my awareness reminds me that although this present moment needs me not in the least, although I am entirely insignificant to it in the scale of the cosmos, I need it most absolutely, and it is of absolute significance to me in a relationship to Being itself.  

I am, in other words, entirely subordinate and my existence is in every sense a service. If I could see quite clearly what a privilege it is to be here I would behave and act quite differently and with a much greater intelligence.

 This comes back to the point I made at the beginning of the morning (in the last post), where I said that life makes a great deal of noise. It will always do so; and simply being outwardly silent is never enough to counteract the force of this noise. It’s the inward silence that will make a difference, if there ever is one. That inward silence is posed at the edge of what is real; it is a stillness at the heart of things.

 Let’s consider another vision from Hadewijch:

…I was taken up out of myself in the spirit; there I saw a city, large, and wide, and high, and adorned with perfections . And in the midst of it there sat Someone upon a round disk, which continually opened and closed itself again upon hidden mysteries. And he who sat there above the disk was sitting in constant stillness; but in the disk his Being circled about in unspeakable swiftness without stopping. 

And the abyss in which the disk ran as it circled about was of such unheard-of depth and so dark that no horror can be compared to it. And the disk, seen from above, was set with all kinds of precious stones and in the color of pure gold; but on the darkest side, where it ran so fearfully, it was like fearful flames, which devoured heaven and earth and in which all things perished and were swallowed up.

And he who sat upon the disk was One whose Countenance none could perceive without belonging to the terrible flames of this disk and being thrown into the deep abyss which lay underneath. And that Counte- nance drew all the dead to it living; and everything that was withered blossomed because of it; and all the poor who saw it received great riches; and all the sick became strong; and all who were in multiplicity and division became one in that Countenance. 

—Hadewijch, From The Complete Works, The Perfect Bride, vision # 12, p. 293

One who reads this vision may be struck by the manner in which Hadewijch appears to describe a black hole and its event horizon. Of course people of her time understood no such things about the cosmos; yet her description not only evokes the hole repeatedly pulsing as it feeds on the material world (it opened and closed itself again upon hidden mysteries); it also describes the essential physical nature of the object: it was like fearful flames, which devoured heaven and earth and in which all things perished and were swallowed up.

Yet the astrophysically naive Hadewijch has imparted to us a spiritual intuition that perhaps tells us a bit more than we currently know about black holes. 

First of all, the black hole is not a physical object but a state of Being; second, that it is personified; and third, that is it not an agent of destruction but creation.

 In this vision, the city is the infinite states of Being of which The Perfection is composed; and in this case, a galaxy. The disc at the center of the galaxy is of course the black hole, the aperture through which everything returns to God. (One might here contemplate the possibility that human beings have a scaled representative object of Being within themselves that takes everything they are back to God.) 

The Someone who sits upon the round disc sits in constant stillness.  This is that selfsame stillness of Being which inwardly observes and takes life in. The fact that this someone is not apart from life is indicated by the fact that in the disc, his Being circled about in unspeakable swiftness without stopping.

 This takes place within an abyss, that is, an emptiness that represents ordinary life. From above (a spiritual perspective) it is set about with precious stones and in the color of pure gold; yet from the darkest side— the horizontal level— it is like fearful flames, which devour heaven and earth and in which all things perish and are swallowed up.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.