In the opening entry of The Inward Morning, Henry Bugbee writes
“I have yet to discover how to say what moves me to the
endless search and research, the reflective turning over in my mind of
experience. The turning over is
all so much tilling….All this tilling can be but a burying deeper of what ought
to be coming out. The moments in
which something reliable has seemed to come of it all have impressed me as
sudden. Insight is earned, to be
sure, but it is not steered, and it must find its own articulate form. If it is to become more than sporadic
and utterly ephemeral, one must pay attention to it, it must be worked out.”
(Athens
and London: University of Georgia Press, 1999), pp.33-34.
This is as much about philosophy as
about mysticism; but it is a philosophic attention to mysticism. The difficulty is not discovering
what moves me to search; that is already known, albeit in a way that is not
easily said. The difficulty is in
learning how to say it. “God” and “the
soul” and “eternity” all present themselves as shorthand for this motive. It is enough to say them, sometimes,
but they are placeholders. They
must not be said in vain. We do
not possess God; we seek God. God
is, as Eriugena intimated (in his description of what it means to create), both that which we seek and that which impels our
seeking. God’s creativity and
origin-ality are complex, even if God is simple.
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