Misael Galdámez’s Reviews > Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing > Status Update

“The “I” that is Myself is, primordially, a self that is loved. I am beloved. This awareness is not a knowing and—here is scandal and the wager—it emerges as a primordial givenness only when we pass through the cloud of unknowing. It is not an awareness that dispels uncertainty. It is an awareness that enables one to live with uncertainty—to go on through uncertainty.”

Silence is a prelude to a liberation we didn't know we needed or wanted.

Liberated for what? Awareness, the mystics answer. It is a mode of attending that Brother Lawrence and Thomas Merton both call "loving awareness," by which they seem to mean love as awareness. 45 Another word for this would be wisdom.

“Solitude is not an escape from heartbreak or obligation; it is, instead, a place where our attention is recalibrated such that we can see the heartbreak that calls out to us in those we encounter, in the creation we've ignored.”

“I Blessed are those who, mired in the myriad obligations of a late modern life, nonetheless find a way to retreat in the midst of it all.”

“…the telos of the mystical path is union and communion with the divine but also, as a spillover of love, with fellow human beings (neighbors, even enemies) and creation as a whole…

Crucial to this mystical path, then, is the transformation of perception—of God, of our neighbors, and of ourselves. The end or goal of contemplation, the mystics would say, is both to see God anew and to see how God sees.”

“The contemplative life is not so much the achievement of enlightenment as learning to live the question-living into spiritual wonder. Merton continues: "It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question, so that the contemplative is at the same time question and answer."”

I used to imagine my calling was to defend the Truth. Now I’m just trying to figure out how to love.

Reminded how much of this journey I’ve been on w James KA Smith. His essay on depression made me realize I was depressed and it seems we’ve been on a similar journey of letting go of certainty and embracing the givenness of life.