I enter what enters me,
Reaching a place in me, yet not in me,
Releasing me to extend beyond
The sensed boundaries
Of my being alone in the world.
My breath taking in and yielding back
Your Breath, rarefying
My consciousness by
Your Spirit-oxygen.
The unspoken in me meets
Your silent Presence,
The one not confounding
But comforting the other;
Your vastness expands exponentially
The nameless expanse between us.
Nothing is lost but everything is gained.
I have no name for our unseen realm of meeting;
To attempt to circumscribe it with a name,
Could seem to reduce
You and me and us
To graspable conceptual constructs.
Naming inevitably births images,
And images risk possible idolatry:
Worshiping the image rather than what it depicts.
Images remain vulnerable to becoming surrogates
For true meeting and mutual abiding.
Naming God does not mean knowing God;
Naming our hidden place of meeting
Does not mean entering it.
When I do enter the nameless place,
My mouth will shut as my soul opens,
To receive and share directly
What cannot be put into words.
More than a mere space,
Which could be empty as well as filled
By quantities seeking named recognition,
What God opens between us Is never empty, nor nameable.
*This meditation builds on Meister Eckhart’s comment that you can only experience God in God’s own space. It also builds on my history of daily engaging in Centering Prayer.
From a volume of 90 poetic meditations on union with God titled, Finding God, Finding You.
Hal Green lives in Muscatine, Iowa, USA.
