Pure Absence
What would the radiant sound of a Red-winged Blackbird be, without the extraordinary power of your ears?
Pure Absence
What would the radiant sound of a Red-winged Blackbird be, without the extraordinary power of your ears? What would the pale, sailing moon look like without your astonishing eyes? What would your love even know what to do with itself, without the ache you intuit in inevitable loss? And who is it comes to life in you again and again, and every time as a new miracle, on the other side of grief? And then there is this: if you had not come into this world just as you are, and just in the way you came, could anyone anywhere ever have lived your life in your stead? And then the question toward the end that might be no end at all, is there anything or anyone you meet after death you will recognize? No easy answer to the really, really beautiful questions of life, they are just the everyday hidden invitations that have always been made to you, something beckoning you to understand through every day of your living and your dying, no possible resolution you could ever make sense of, except to begin every question in wonder. As Meister Eckhart was at some pains to tell us. What you seek, is nowhere to be found by answering questions. God’s full presence felt only in the absolute essence of absence.
This is an instance of one good friendship leading to another. The thirteenth century Dominican theologian, Meister Eckhart’s answer, of ‘Nowhere’ to the heartfelt question: ‘Where is God?’ – I first heard from my friend and fellow enquirer, John O’Donohue, over dinner, as we looked out of a broad window over the mountainous heart of Connemara.
The sense that human beings make their way home through the bodily ache of absence has always been part of my own understanding, so that evening, in passing on the answer ‘Nowhere’ John took my hand and put it into the companionable and merciful hand of Eckhart, who has been a good friend to me ever since.
—from Still Possible
A sincere thank you for all of the comments contributed to this post. Pure Absence was written in the midst of lockdown when so many things that were so close and so taken for granted were now absent or at a distance. As many of us were lucky enough to experience, (though many due to their straightened circumstances were not) shedding this outer skin allowed a new complexion to emerge from within, and a new, quieter, more vulnerable breathability to begin: the natural world with its birdsong, its passing pale moons or its restless arrival on the seashore became a daily companion to many, helping us to realise what might have been 'absent' all along. DW
'What you seek,
is nowhere to be found
by answering
questions.
God’s full presence
felt
only in the absolute
essence
of absence' .