Occupy Faith

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Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Social consciousness and contemplative prayer. Part 2

….I have dealt mainly with mysticism, the stress has fallen on silence, darkness, negation, unknowing and the rest. But the point I want to make now is that silence and darkness, negation and unknowing need to be complemented by words and light, affirmation and knowing. If you concentrate on one to the exclusion of the other you become horribly one-sided. Biologists might say that you are using one side of your brain to the exclusion of the other. Let me again put it schematically:

Silence needs works
Darkness needs light
Negation needs affirmation
Unknowing needs knowing
Intuition needs reason
Mysticism needs theology
Timelessness needs time
Non-objective prayer needs objective prayer
Existence needs essence
The feminine needs the masculine
Yin needs Yang

No one can spend his or her whole life in a cloud of forgetting. Human consciousness is, indeed, in constant flux. It floats from silence to words, from darkness to light, from negation to affirmation.

Related reading: 


On Social Justice: St. Basil the Great (Popular Patristics) 

  Great Mystics And Social Justice: Walking On The Two Feet Of Love

Contemplation in Action


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