Lynne

“God sees everybody. I wanted to be special. I guess I thought it would be very fine if everybody said, ‘There goes Brother Gregory; he may only be a second son, but he’s really illuminated.’ But that just turns out to be Pride.” He sighed. “I guess you can’t find God by looking.” “I think—I think you can by asking. And—by listening …” She curled up in the covers and closed her eyes again. Gregory tucked his knees up, and put his elbows on them. Resting his chin on his cupped hands, he peered into the impenetrable darkness. He listened. First he heard his own breath coming evenly in the quiet, and the soft pulse of Margaret’s beside him as she returned to sleep. Then he heard the little uneven puffs of the baby in the cradle, and through the walls the children and old Mother Sarah and Cook and even the neighbors. The little thoughts that cluttered his mind like busy ships moving to and fro in the harbor had been swept away in the listening, and he no longer sensed himself as he listened. He wasn’t turning over old sins like moss-covered stones to see what was underneath; he wasn’t addressing prayers to the Virgin or imagining the Passion; he wasn’t naming the seven virtues or praising the mighty deeds of God. Not a thought of last night’s supper or tomorrow’s breakfast flitted past like a distracting moth. And still he listened, until he could hear the deep and ageless sound of the earth breathing. And beyond that, nothing. As he entered Nothing, a strange warmth sprang up in his breast, somewhere around the heart. And he didn’t say, Aha! this is described in the Incendium Amoris but not in the Scala Claustralium, but instead, Let it be. It kindled and sprang higher until he was ablaze with it. It reached high up, outward, and inward into the Nothing. Pure love, on fire. It blazed, for a fragment of a moment, all the way to God, like a spark rising in the darkness. And as it died down, he could sense that everything on earth was softly glowing with it. “Astonishing,” said Gregory to himself as it faded and he returned. “I must try this again sometime,” he mumbled, as he rolled over and sleep overtook him.”
― Judith Merkle Riley, In Pursuit of the Green Lion