Somewhere, sometime, somehow, something happened. I am sure it was not something I am now supposed to dwell upon, and I hear echoing in my mind the words of someone who, years ago, was essential to my journey in faith, telling me that my continued writing about and dwelling upon some of my experiences was only perpetuating the unrest I appeared to be enduring at that time.
In that respect, things do not appear to have changed much. I still write. I still ponder. I still use this process as a means to unravel the tangles within my mind, and now of course, I have even become used to doing it in a less private way through writing here at ‘the very edge’: a place to which, in one way or another, I have always been and to which I am likely always to return.
That I should ever have begun to broaden the reach of my soliloquizing in this way rather than keeping my thoughts very much to myself still surprises me, but it also makes me smile, as I have always been in need of something that would drag me out of myself: something to draw me from a solitude deeper than could be known when only looked on from a point well back from the edge.
In this case, the edge is that fine line separating the ordinary, normal, natural and every-day interaction between people, from the rare and intimate, inter-natural, spiritual, and almost entirely un-shareable opening of one person to another. We should hope to achieve and maintain this as part of our relationship with Jesus, but, other than in the form of a deep longing, this relationship with another living person, however close the friendship, remains almost untouchable.
This fine line is somewhat similar to the memory of the long-removed veil in the Temple; torn apart, all separation destroyed, yet in our minds still the closest we can get. We dare not approach that which had always been deemed unapproachable, and we find no reason to even consider trying to move into a place always deemed inaccessible. We have trouble enough with coming closer to God, but even when this hurdle has been placed behind us, we are still unable to step beyond a similar line with other people who have done likewise. Our fear of a real opening up, and of becoming truly and fully known by another is almost insurmountable.
It is the knowing that we are deeply unknowable, even to our friends, that makes time spent at the edge inseparable from solitude. In the company of others, and even in the company of a single particularly close spiritual other, we are kept back from the very edge by our fear of what lies immediately beyond the lip. We know that breath blows constantly over it, and breath gives power to speech. We fear that any utterance may not be only from The Holy Spirit, but a subsequent breaking of our own silence: our own breath moving over our lips suddenly giving rise to words spoken to another. It does not happen because we are unable to take ourselves that close to the edge when in the company of anyone other than God.
At times it may feel that we can return to Eden in our solitude. We can walk with God in the cool of the day, but we can be drawn into remaining there too long, becoming more isolated from others and thus further from where we are meant to be. Yes, we are each called to be in a close relationship with God, but we are not meant to remain in isolation. However it may feel, it is this isolation that should tell us we are not in Eden. In Eden we would be both in the presence of God and in the company of others.
The Lord God said, “It is not right that man should be alone...” (Genesis 2:18)
This is where we are today in the world as we now know it; not in Eden but as close as we can get to it. We were made to be in the company of others, and the only veil that remains un-torn is the one that keeps us out of Eden: the one that keeps us fundamentally apart.
There is only one faint glimmer on the horizon; for the few who can see it, it represents a seemingly insurmountable problem, but the fact that they see it at all is a beginning: a distant hope for all mankind. Our increasing environmental awareness is one superficial aspect of this hope, despite its being born of necessity and being one of today’s acceptable forms of global selfishness. The deeper consciousness of hope is in the minds of those few who may be able to begin the laborious process of one-by-one transformation through going beyond the very lip of their fear in the spiritual light of another’s gaze.
‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be, blest.’
(Alexander Pope. Essay on Man.)
Life can be quite unnerving at times.
It is meant to be. It is our natures’ way of telling us, not that we have got something wrong, but that we are on the verge of getting something right: that we have approached a little closer to that place where we sense the possibility of our breath giving rise to utterance. Something will break if that happens; it may well be us, but on the other side all fears will fall away. Christ in the one will become One with Christ in the other.
Those same words of John Henry Newman need quoting again:
........................................................................................................... ‘Perhaps the reason why the standard of holiness among us is so low, why our attainments are so poor, our view of the truth so dim, our belief so unreal, our general notions so artificial and external is this, that we dare not trust each other with the secret of our hearts. We have each the same secret, and we keep it to ourselves, and we fear that, as a cause of estrangement, which really would be a bond of union. We do not probe the wounds of our nature thoroughly; we do not lay the foundation of our religious profession in the ground of our inner man; we make clean the outside of things; we are amiable and friendly to each other in words and deeds, but our love is not enlarged, our bowels of affection are straitened, and we fear to let the intercourse begin at the root; and, in consequence, our religion, viewed as a social system is hollow. The presence of Christ is not in it.’ (Christian Sympathy. Parochial and Plain Sermons)
