Friday, January 27, 2012

Do you want ‘spirituality’ ...

WYSIWYG
 


The real question, John [of the Cross] suggests, is about what you are really after: Do you want ‘spirituality’, mystical experience, inner peace, or do you want God? If you want God, then you must be prepared to let go all, absolutely all, substitute satisfactions, intellectual and emotional.

You must recognize that God is so unlike whatever can be thought or pictured that, when you have got beyond the stage of self-indulgent religiosity, there will be nothing you can securely know or feel. You face a blank: and any attempt to avoid that or shy away from it is a return to playing comfortable religious games. The dark night is God’s attack on religion.
If you genuinely desire union with the unspeakable love of God, then you must be prepared to have your own religious world shattered. If you think devotional practices, theological insights, even charitable actions give you some sort of purchase on God, you are still playing games.
On the other hand, if you can face and accept and even rejoice in the experience of darkness, if you accept God is more than an idea which keeps your religion or philosophy or politics tidy – then you may find a way back to religion, philosophy or politics, to an engagement with them that is more creative because you are more aware of the oddity, the uncontrollable quality of the truth at the heart of all things.

This is what ‘detachment’ means – not being ‘above the battle’, but being involved in such a way that you can honestly confront whatever comes to you without fear of the unknown; it is a kind of readiness for the unexpected, if that is not too much of a paradox. [American Digest Sidelines]


And yes, you can still like looking at women's breasts. I think.


8 comments:

pdwalker said...

oh... Good.

vanderleun said...

Thanks for picking it up and yes, the breasts are spectacular are they not?

leelu said...

......!

Rodger the Real King of France said...

Yes they are Gerard - did you know they've won a Clio for best design the last 8,000 years straight?

Anonymous said...

Rog, that singer is a real treasure. She is not only a looker but, she has a hauntingly beautiful voice. Thank you for the treat.

Bolivar

Fierce Guppy said...

Damn! The quote doesn't look any less dodgy after a half a bag of pineapple lumps. God gets hyperbole(d) into nothing humanly identifiable, but has unspeakable love and is the truth at the heart of all things. What's more, in accepting these stellar facts, believers in who-the-Hell-knows-what can face the unknown without fear.

Need. more. sugar.

vanderleun said...

Your stumps too short to box with God, Guppy.

Ten Mile Island said...

To assume that God has no sense of humour is to assume that we are not made in His Image.
.

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