Listening to Silence

"Above all things, love silence. Out of your silence will arise something that will draw you into deeper silence. If you practice this, inexpressible light will dawn upon you." ~St. Isaac of Ninevah

Listen to silence. The silence of listening is love. Attraction of a subject for an object, a lover for the beloved, is only one fractal of love. Before subject or object arise, before lover or beloved are born, pure love trembles in waves of the primal sea, the quantum void.

The darkness of love is the voluptuous color of  silence. Sink into this apotheosis of night. To attain light you must ascend, but to embrace divine darkness, you need only to fall. Give up the work of rising.

"Now the earth was formless and void." (Genesis 1:2). True prayer is returning to this primordial Genesis. Sink into the formless fertility of emptiness. Come home to the place where creation is born and be the silence before God says, "Let there be light." You are a seed dropped in the mothering furrow. Let gravity be your prayer.

The Black Madonna dwells at the core of every proton in your body. Prayer is not the work of thinking, but a chthonic sensation of the Ayin Soph in the heart of each particle.

In Jewish mysticism, the Ayin Soph - literally, "dot of nothingness"- is the singularity from which creation arises, the dark womb of all energy and light.

This self-effulgent dot of no-thing at the heart of a lepton is the same black whole that throbs in the core of the galaxy. All the information of the cosmos is stored in a grain of silence: quantum entanglement of quark and star. Every photon pulsates with the wisdom of Sophia, and the light of Christ.

The infinitesimal Ayin Soph of silence releases a silken spore, a thread of grace that floats up from your sacrum through each tear of joy and grief on the rosary of your spine. This subtle glistening root ignites your brain stem, illumining your cortex with arboreal fire.

Is your nervous system not the Burning Bush that Moses saw in the cloud of Un-knowing on Mt. Horeb? Let this radiant cilium, born from unconditional surrender to the dark, dance through your vertebrae to the soft spot in your crown, raveling you up into clustered galaxies.

The grace of the Mother weaves through the hollow of all that whirls, threads each mote of mater-matter to a sun. Silence in prayer and stillness in action are one and the same mystery, savored while in deep meditation, or walking down a forest path. Berries burst in the void, wood and stone suffused with compassion, dreamless seeds awakening in the frosted loam, murmuring, "April, April!" Nothing ever dies here.

Let the distance between your heart and the farthest star, whose fire will not arrive in your body for ten thousand years, dissolve in the splendor between exhalation and inhalation. Ever return to the inner solstice where fire is born, cradled in your chest. Did you not know that each breath mothers God? This is your labor of grace.

Photo: Spencer Butte, OR