|
| “
|
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.
|
|
LLYW
