Part 2: We are searching for someone who has already found us
So, there is nothing there really? Just darkness? No, this is to misunderstand completely. Think of a person trapped in a dark prison cell in solitary confinement. There is no contact with any other living person for years on end. Then, one day, another person calls to you from beyond the cold, stone wall. Is it another prisoner in the next cell? Or someone free outside the walls? You will have to see what they reveal to you. You will never see this other person – the walls of the prison do not allow it. Yet you have the one thing that matters above all else: for the voice of the other can reach you in your cell. Still in darkness, you are no longer alone; you are no longer unloved. So, now you sit in your cell, your back to the stone, for there is nothing to see, and it brings your ear close against the wall, and on the other side, the other has their ear to the wall, and together you speak of life, and whisper words of love and adoration.
So, even though there is nothing there really but the darkness, this is everything. And I see now that there is no need to press through it, to stretch out my fingertips as though something was just out of reach, and if only I could stretch just that bit further, then I would grasp it. There is no need to worry that I only have fragments and not the whole. No need to be sad that I don’t understand. No need to be unfulfilled because it is beyond me and always will be. Completeness is already here. It speaks to us, day by day, in the fragmentary, passing moment. It is lived out in the myriad movements of hearts searching for wholeness, thinking that they do not have it, when all the time it is the dancing play of searching that makes us whole. It is something we cannot see because we are inside the life that creates wholeness – it would only be possible to see it if we were outside life. And once this is accepted, then we realise that we can already see, for each fragment that flits across our vision is a piece of the whole and speaks to us of God. And when the whirl of all this is just too much, then return to the embracing darkness, which is not emptiness, but fullness. And the voice in the dark calls to us, speaks to us, whispers to us, so faint we sometimes have to hold our breath to catch it, yet so clear, ringing with truth. A voice so small and close we can no longer tell if it is coming to us from the outside or from within ourselves. It proclaims: “I am everywhere, in everything. To catch the faintest glimpse is to see me in all my glory. All things can reveal me – though not all things do. But do not think that I am like stardust sprinkled throughout the universe; I am a person, and I move and have my will, and act to make myself known – as I choose”.
So, we are not separate from God. The veil is the illusion. The sense that he is out of reach, that is the stumbling block that trips us up. We must search for God, but it is not our trying and our searching that brings us close to him. We must search for God until he finds us. Or rather till we discover that he is always with us, waiting for us to stop banging our heads against a brick wall and realise that he has found us. The pain of crying alone in the darkness is so distressing. We are calling, and, it seems to us, he is not answering. Yet this is our mistake; caused because we do not see properly, and so, also, we do not look properly.
There is nothing else; just listen to the voice in the darkness whispering words of love and adoration. Live out the mystery of his presence.
Spiritual Devotion 