You Have Become My Darkness

A Colloquy in Unknowing and Trust

Soul

God, I feel lost.

Everything that gave me a sense of security and identity is vanishing.

I am not depressed. I am adrift, as if on an open ocean, no shore behind me, no horizon ahead.

Each day there is a deeper humiliation, not dramatic, not theatrical, but quiet.

A stripping.

Even my past feels unreliable, as if I lived inside distortions of my own making.

Silence alone feels real, because I cannot project myself onto it.

It swallows everything.

And yet I sense that You are that abyss.

How does one enter without losing one’s mind.

How does one love what cannot be grasped, remembered, contained.

Is this a leap of faith.

Is this falling into Your hands.

Will the self disappear.

Or will something truer emerge.

Have mercy.

⸻

God

You are not lost.

You are undone.

And there is a difference.

You call it humiliation because everything that once reflected you back to yourself is being taken away.

But I call it truth.

When Peter stepped onto the water, it was not courage that held him there.

It was attention.

When he looked for something to stand on other than Me, he began to sink.

You are not sinking because you trusted Me.

You are sinking because you are no longer allowed to trust what is not Me.

⸻

Soul

But I feel as though nothing solid remains.

No image of myself that I can inhabit.

No role that reassures me I am real.

Even prayer feels like standing at the edge of something immeasurable.

I fear losing coherence, losing myself.

⸻

God

What you fear losing is not your self but your defenses.

The Fathers called them logismoi, the thoughts that construct a livable illusion.

They fall away when the soul grows quiet enough to hear Me breathing beneath them.

Did you think I would heal you by reinforcing what was built on sand.

I do not come to stabilize the false self.

I come to bury it.

Remember what I said through the prophet.

You shall pass through the waters, but they will not overwhelm you.

The waters are not your enemy.

They are My hands, opened.

⸻

Soul

But how does one consent to this without madness.

How does one live when nothing can be held.

When even meaning seems to dissolve.

⸻

God

By learning the difference between dissolution and surrender.

Madness is clinging when there is nothing left to cling to.

Peace is consenting to be carried.

Abba Isaac said that when the mind enters the cloud, it no longer works by images but by trust.

This is why silence frightens you.

It does not mirror you back to yourself.

It leaves you unguarded before Me.

But you have mistaken this nakedness for annihilation.

⸻

Soul

Then what of the self.

Does it disappear.

Was it always an illusion.

⸻

God

No.

But it was unfinished.

What disappears is the self that needed to be seen in order to exist.

What emerges is the self that can remain even when unseen.

Did I not tell you that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone.

But if it dies, it bears much fruit.

I did not say it ceases to be a grain.

I said it becomes what it was meant to be.

Elder Sophrony said that when the soul descends into hell willingly, it finds Me already there.

Not as an idea.

As presence.

⸻

Soul

So this falling is not failure.

⸻

God

It is obedience without comprehension.

Which is the purest form of love.

You ask whether this is a leap of faith.

It is not a leap forward.

It is a letting go of the ledge you have already outgrown.

I am not asking you to understand the abyss.

I am asking you to trust that it is held.

Even now, you are not suspended over nothing.

You are suspended over Me.

⸻

Soul

Then remain with me.

I do not ask for clarity.

Only not to be abandoned.

⸻

God

I was closest to you when you thought I was furthest away.

I was silent not because I was absent, but because words could no longer carry what I was giving you.

Stay.

Do not flee this poverty.

Do not rush to name it.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Not because they feel secure.

But because they have nothing left to stand on but the Kingdom.

⸻

Soul

Have mercy.

⸻

God

My mercy is not coming.

It is what you are standing in.

Remain.