Dark Light

Writes Helen Prejean, CSJ . . .

Beginnings are always dark. The most creative works we ever do are conceived in darkness. Mystery defies delineation. We can’t codify mystery just like we can never name God. Certainly, Love – the deepest of all mysteries, with its amazing capacity to unite hearts and minds, defies ever being quantified. Mystics speak of holy encounters as dark light, the “cloud of unknowing.”

Trees know what to do in winter darkness. They shed their leaves, those wondrous energy factories in which they catch and eat photons from the Sun and turn them into pulsating energy to push down their roots, sprout leaves and stretch their branches ever higher to catch their share of Sun.

In winter darkness trees know to pull inward, to move their life-juice down into their roots where they hover, they abide, they contemplate. Outwardly they look bare, bereft. If we didn’t know spring was coming we’d swear they’re dead. But trees know Winter’s season is the time to nurture their “within-ness” (the word so treasured by Teilhard, Duns Scotus and Gerard Manley Hopkins). In winter, trees become mystics full of God.

– Source

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Mysticism of Trees
• Honoring the Dark While Celebrating the Light
• Sweet Darkness
• Dark Matter: “An Intriguing Aspect of the Universe”
• Photo of the Day, 5/3/2015: “Black Is Sacred”
• God’s Good Gift
• Mistwalking
• Holy Encounters Where Two Worlds Meet
• The Prayer Tree
• The Prayer Tree . . . Aflame!
• Photo of the Day – February 24, 2019
• Photo of the Day – November 29, 2017
• Cosmic Connection
• Trees on Summit Avenue
• Thomas Moore on the Circling of Nature as the Best Way to Find Our Substance
• “Radical Returnings” – Mayday 2016
• Balancing the Fire
• “I Caught a Glimpse of a God”
• At Hallowtide, Pagan Thoughts on Restoring Our World and Our Souls
• The End Is Not the End . . . It’s Just a Beginning
• Magician Among the Spirits

Image: Michael J. Bayly.