Home by Another Way: Trusting the Dark Journey of the Non-Sensorial
- Paula Pryce
- Feb 6
- 8 min read
“If you are searching, you must not stop until you find. When you find, however, you will become troubled. Your confusion will give way to wonder. In wonder you will reign over all things. Your sovereignty will be your rest.” – The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 2
If you are searching, you must not stop until you find:
The Child slept in timothy and alfalfa, shining with earthy brilliance – more luminous even than the blazing star that had enticed the Magi to wander.
The journey of the Magi has stoked our imaginations for centuries. We have built all kinds of stories around those few lines in Matthew: kings and pageboys; empires and astrology; old women hosts and motley caravans seeking respite from the sun. All on the track of God.
But scripture tells us almost nothing about that entourage of star gazers. Only that they trusted their knowledge and their senses, and that with the epiphany of their encounter, they understood the necessity to heed God’s warning: return home by another way.
They had not forgotten Herod. In the Child, they felt both the might of God’s presence and a piercing tenderness vulnerable to the human universe of hierarchies. The Incarnation shot through their senses and sharpened their perception more than all their years of self-cultivation and learning. So clear: their task was now to safeguard and nurture burgeoning Life. Just as Mary and Joseph discerned their need to find shelter in Egypt, the nomads heard the call:
Be clandestine. Step out of the gaze of armed men, for everyone’s sake. Find another way.
When you find, however, you will become troubled:
"It is so dark that I cannot tell which way to go . . . My spirit longs for light, but my heart is in darkness . . . It understands nothing." – Jean-Pierre de Caussade, The Joy of Full Surrender
The season of Epiphany has just concluded, and we, like the Magi, have turned onto a new road. Let’s accompany them on their journey. Their trail has gone dark, however. Yes, the Magi had agreed to go home by another way, and we dare hope that they scented the air, found their feet, and oriented themselves to a new direction. But without their guiding star, perhaps they discovered a sky strewn with foreign and unreadable constellations. Or maybe the winds rose and whirled, throwing the stars behind a haze of whipping sand. Before long, the travellers would have discovered the latent brutality of stepping into unknown wilderness, dark as untold stories. Imagine them slowly coming to realize that their beloved and trustworthy tools of navigation could no longer help them.
Or maybe the glory of their Bethlehem encounter had blasted the Magi out of known orbits, disarming their skills and unsettling their faculties. Perhaps they had huddled into the blush of stale reminiscence – as mesmerizing as opium – trying endlessly to recreate the holy night that had filled them to bursting with God’s power. Had they said yes to the unknown road, then never really attempted it?
The Magi had adeptly followed a clear and exuberant sign to the door of the crèche, but now they found themselves stumbling headlong into the unknown.
Over the centuries, people just like us – ordinary, wise, imperfect – have found themselves in similar trouble: doubting ways of knowing that had once felt dependable and secure, and yet becoming reticent when the lay of the land changed. Often without warning, people just like us find themselves on a threatening road, so incomprehensible that they cannot fathom its boundaries.
Dark nights like these are not really a choice. We are thrust into them.
For me, the unimaginable road – the one that has knocked me and many of my assumptions flat – has been a fraught plunge into the non-sensorial. The known way has been scrabbled and obscured, sharded with hidden dangers. Like the wise nomads of my imagination, I have faced the reshaped world with confusion and have not easily perceived a route home. How does one read the signs of a cosmos blown to pieces?
Some of you, perhaps many, may have found the sensorial universe to be akin to the Magi’s guiding star. I certainly have. As long as I can remember, my spiritual parameters have been strongly marked by sensation. A family and community dedicated to contemplative life coached me from childhood to depend on sensorial encounter as a measure of whether I was keeping to the way. Even after years of academic study, I have honoured sensation as a primary guidepost, learning with time to give intellectual directives their appropriate supporting role. The Christian Wisdom work, therefore, with its emphasis on listening for the Divine in one’s own body and being, has been an easy fit. For me, the Wisdom way of setting aside doctrinal rigidity in favour of sensorial openness and kenotic guidance, including the paradoxical sense of apophatic ambiguity, allowed a return to Christianity. For some twenty years, Wisdom Christianity has been my home.
But something shifted. Sensorial connectedness began to wither, initiated some five years ago with the pandemic’s various disruptions. Months rolled along and the spiritual malaise of acedia intensified. The practical map upon which I had long depended – varieties of contemplative action and prayer – seemed now to lead in circles. Again and again, I’d find myself back at a decrepit signpost that led nowhere. Arrow without path; bush without fire; symbol without sacrament. Water was scarce in this foreign land, and I began to panic. The delightful and reassuring torch of the sensorial Divine had withdrawn, it seemed. I found myself groping blind in unfamiliar wilderness.
In that profound silence of the senses, I judged myself severely. I could not see the larger hand at play.
How easily we humans fall prey to errors of interpretation. One of the most basic lessons on the Wisdom path is that so-called “spiritual experience” – sensorial encounter – is a consolation one should never expect or even seek. Time after time, teachers tell us not to let sensorial experience distract us. Instead, they say, keep to the task of serving others with a kenotic heart.
The senses can easily confuse us. For sensation – of which spiritual experience is a type – is an essential tool in the Wisdom school of Christianity. Attuning the senses, physical and spiritual, is a way of learning to stay awake, keep attention, and listen for silence. With Divine assistance, sensorial work can be a kenotic tool, a catalyst for letting go of that which confines us. It is a time-honoured way to help us open to God and defuse the tyranny of our intellectual illusions and emotional triggers. Focusing on the senses helps us to let go of fantasies and constrictions that keep us from life here and now, where God and community are, rather than in a desolate expanse of self-imposed interpretations.
The senses matter immensely. But our interpretation of the senses can be a quagmire.
I, for one, have fallen into that quicksand. Somewhere along the way, I have layered the sensorial with unhelpful meanings and inverted purposes, confusing the senses as an instrument of letting go with the senses as a marker for self-assessment. Unwittingly, I staggered along a well-rutted track of erroneous self-determination and faulty childhood lessons that claim sensorial encounter is the true indicator of God’s presence.
The muting of sensorial connectedness has been, for me, like an astronomer facing a blank sky.
Your confusion will give way to wonder:
"Can one love absence so intenselythat even Your presenceseems like an intrusion?" – Thomas Keating, “Twilight of the Self”
What lessons did the Magi, in all their nobility and wisdom, have to unlearn to find a way home?
Under empty skies, their astrolabes were of little use. No star. No star chart. They sensed peril, I imagine, and cursed the limits of their knowledge. Shuddering fear, disillusionment, self-blame. How long before they stopped resisting and allowed the non-sensorial its fragrant wonder?
On the borderlands of sensation and non-sensation, there is the barest inkling of sound. A precursor. Insensible, imperceptible in the generative darkness, it is the ground in which the One, the Three, and the profuse multiplicity of Creation take root and germinate. Something so far beneath known worlds that all one can do is accept its invitation to listen.
This time of shadowed passage has been for me a critical bridge to a release from self-created constriction. The greatest gifts of this dark night have been the diminution of self-judgement and self-concern, and a watch light on my stagnant images of the Divine. I had interpreted this unexpected universe as failure, abandonment, and acedia, yet the wasteland begins to reveal a latent, open face of God, well outside my own categories. The non-sensorial has allowed another way home.
Judaic wisdom reminds us never to name the Divine, for God cannot be contained by our images and ideas, no matter how beautiful or clever we think they are. Yet inevitably we become lax and succumb to pigeon-holing without ever really noticing. How easy it is to embody the idols of our own concepts and experience. The Divine, manifest or unmanifest, invites us – no, dares us – to let go of what we think we know, to hold lightly with gratitude the ever-deepening paradox of knowing and not knowing, and to trust enough to pare ourselves down to serving others with naked intent, conscious presence, and an open heart.
In wonder you will reign over all things. Your sovereignty will be your rest:
The Magi searched and found, then pledged themselves to protect the glorious Divine of their encounter. As I have imagined it, confusion soon took over, however. Expertise failed them, and they found they could not navigate the rocky crags of their doubt and fear. Yet these wanderers have been called wise for a reason. By stilling themselves and waiting in silence, the Magi’s vision began to adjust and the ground rose to meet them, leading them home where they could share their new, unanticipated wonder.
Let us learn from the Magi’s uncertain journey. Returning home by the well-worn route may no longer be an option, not if we want to stay alert enough to tend the flame of emerging Life. Whether by the glow of shining constellations or hidden under dark hood of night, we too can trust in the unknown way that leads to wonder, sovereignty, and rest. For God is our path, present equally in dark and light.
"The silence of pre-existence bursts into boundless joy." – Thomas Keating, “The Secret Embrace”
Acknowledgements:
Rev. Dr. Therese DesCamp, friend and wisdom teacher, inspired my thoughts when she mentioned during the season of Epiphany that she had been pondering the meaning of another route home in our time of great suffering. Her ideas led in another direction, however. I take full responsibility for the path of thought I have offered here.
Many spiritual guides have written about the dark night and the unmanifest Divine. See in particular Cynthia Bourgeault’s most recent book, Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Christian Mystic, for a discussion of Thomas Keating’s experience and emergent theology of the unmanifest.
Paula Pryce writes reflections for The Contemplative Society every other month. She is a cultural anthropologist and writer who specializes in ritual studies and contemplative religions. Her publications include The Monk’s Cell: Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity.
To connect with Paula about this reflection, please e-mail TCS. Your e-mails will be forwarded onto her.
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