… most of what I have learned, I have learned in order to forget it again and thus to experience concretely, even in the area of knowledge, my own poverty, narrowness, and limitation.
Oh God, it is good to forget. In fact, the best part of most
of the things I once knew is precisely the fact that they could be forgotten.
Without protest, they have sunk gently and peacefully out of sight. And thus
they have enabled me literally to see through them in all their inner poverty
and ultimate insignificance.
Knowledge seems more like a kind of pain-killing drug that I
have to take repeatedly against the boredom and desolation of my heart. And no
matter how faithful I may be to it, it can never really cure me. All it can
give me his words and concepts, which perform the middle man's service of
expressing and interpreting reality to me, but can never still my heart's craving
for the reality itself….
How can we approach the heart of all things, the true heart
of reality? Not by knowledge alone but by the full flower of knowledge, love.
Only the experience of knowledge’s blooming into love has any power to work a transformation
in me… it is only in love that I am fully present--not in bare knowing, but in
the affection engendered by knowing.
Only knowledge gained through experience, the fruit of living
and suffering, fills the heart with the wisdom of love, instead of crushing it
with the disappointment of boredom and final oblivion. It is not the results of
our own speculation, but the golden harvest of what we have lived through and
suffered through, that has power to enrich the heart and nourish the spirit.
Thanks to your mercy, O infinite God, I know something about
you not only through concepts and words, but through experience.… You have
descended upon me in water and the Spirit, in my baptism… Then my reason with
its extravagant cleverness was still silent. Then without asking me, you made
your self my poor heart's destiny.
You have seized me; I have not "grasped" you.… Now
that you live in me, my spirit is filled with something more than pale, empty
words about reality, words whose tremendous variety and prolific confusion
serve only to perplex and weary me. In baptism, Father, you have spoken your
Word into my being… the Word in which all reality and all life subsists,
endures, and has its being.
Oh, grow in me, enlightened me, shine forth ever stronger in
me, eternal Light, sweet Light of my soul.… May you alone enlightened me, you
alone speak to me, may all that I know apart from you be nothing more than a
chance traveling companion on the journey toward you.
Be now my consolation, O Lord, now when all knowledge, even
your revelation expressed in human language, fails to still the yearning of my
heart.… You yourself are my knowledge, the knowledge that is light and life.
You yourself are my knowledge, experience, and love. You are the God of the one
and only knowledge that is eternal, the knowledge that is bliss without end.
Encounters with Silence, Ch. 4
