The Nameless Place

I cannot put into words what it is like to have a mystical moment of union with God. Yet I keep attempting to do the impossible. Here is one such recent attempt. If you have had such a speechless moment with the God beyond all image, you will hopefully get what I am saying. If not, you have this to look forward to, since God desires you far more than you can desire God.

THE NAMELESS PLACE

I enter what enters me,
Reaching a place in me, yet not in me,
Releasing me to extend beyond
The sensed boundaries
Of my being alone in the world.

I rest there in Your resting in me,
My breath taking in and yielding back
Your Breath, rarefying
My consciousness by Your Spirit-oxygen.

The unspoken in me meets
Your silent Presence,
The one not confounding
But comforting the other;
Your vastness expands exponentially
The nameless expanse between us.
Nothing is lost but everything is gained.

I have no name for our unseen realm of meeting;
To attempt to circumscribe it with a name,
Could seem to reduce You and me and us
To graspable conceptual constructs.
Naming inevitably births images,
And images risk possible idolatry:
Worshipping the image rather than what it depicts.
Images remain vulnerable to becoming surrogates
For true meeting and mutual abiding.

Naming God does not mean knowing God;
Naming our hidden place of meeting
Does not mean entering it.
When I do enter the nameless place,
My mouth will shut as my soul opens,
To receive and share directly
What cannot be put into words.

More than a mere space,
Which could be empty as well as filled
By quantities seeking named recognition,
What God opens between us
Is never empty, nor nameable.