Your mind is the double mirror of the outer world and of your inner world. It is always actively making pictures of things. If you lost your mind, you would lose your world as well. Your mind is so precious and vulnerable precisely because it holds your world. Thoughts are the furniture of the mind. They are the echoes and pictures that hold your world together. This is the fascinating adventure of perception. When you become aware of your thoughts and your particular style of thinking, you begin to see why your world is shaped the way it is. It is an exciting and frightening moment to realize your responsibility for your own thoughts. Then you know that you also have the freedom to think differently. Rather than having to travel always along a predetermined track of thought, you now begin to realize the excitement of thinking in new directions and in different rhythms. You see that thinking has something eternal in it. In the Western tradition, thought has been understood as the place within the human person where we are most intimately connected with divinity. Thought is the place of revelation. The dance of thoughts is endless. In his essay on John Donne, T. S. Eliot suggests that a thought to him was an experience as immediate as the scent of a flower.
Thought is a profound form of longing. Much of the thought that cripples us is dried out, dead thought. There is no warmth of longing alive in it. Thought that loses touch with feeling is lethal. This separation is the fracture from which fascism and holocaust emerge. Knowledge is intimacy. This is most evident in the activity of friendship. When the longing awakens between you and a stranger, you want to know that person—to come close. Closeness without knowing can be either a fascination and reverence for mystery or the prostitution of longing. Spiritual longing is what first draws you close to a friend. This desire refines and deepens itself in coming to know him or her. Friendship is one of the most beautiful places in which longing reaches initial fulfilment and is then further deepened, refined, and transfigured. You can also see the longing of thought in the fascination of ideas. When you find yourself in a cul-de-sac in your life and you feel lost and trapped, a new insight or awareness can come to you, enabling you to free yourself.
Thought crosses fascinating thresholds when it engages mystery. Mystery cannot be unravelled by thought, yet the most interesting thinking always illuminates some lineaments of mystery. It opens our minds to a depth of presence that cannot be rifled by even our brightest or most vigorous ideas. Mystery keeps its secret to itself. With its reserve, it invites us ever nearer to the hearth of truth and belonging. Mystery kindles our longing and draws us out of complacency into ever more refined and appropriate belonging. A life that has closed off mystery has deadened itself. Perhaps this is why modern discourse so often sounds inane; it is a forsaken language in which thought has lost its kinship with mystery. When this inner conversation is broken, the sense of mystery dies. When we lose the guidance of mystery, our culture becomes flat. At the end of these flat fields of thought, there is no horizon, merely piles of negativity, an apocalyptic doom that darkens all hope.
Thought is the form of the mind’s desire. It is in our thinking that the depth of our longing comes to expression. This longing can never be fulfilled by any one person, project, or thing. The secret immensity of the soul is the longing for the divine. This is not simply a haunted desire for an absent, distant divine presence that is totally different from us. Our longing is passionate and endless because the divine calls us home to presence. Our longing is an echo of the divine longing for us. Our longing is the living imprint of divine desire. This desire lives in each of us in that ineffable space in the heart where nothing else can satisfy or still us. This is what gives us that vital gift we have called “the sense of life.”
The wonder of presence is the majesty of what it so subtly conceals. Real presence is eternity become radiant. This is why the “sense of life” in us has such power and vitality. Our deepest longing is like a restless artist who tirelessly seeks to make our presence real in order that the mystery we harbour may become known to us. The glory of human presence is the divine longing fully alive.
A BLESSING
