Experience

1st Week in Ordinary Time - Thursday; Memorial of Saint Anthony, Abbot (17 January 2019)

Hebrews 3:7-14. Psalm 95:6-11. Mark 1:40-45.

See that you tell no one anything.

Every time Jesus works a miracle, as he does in today's gospel, he doesn't want people or demons to talk about it. In other words, Jesus asks the people to cherish and relish and digest the mystery-experience behind that miracle, and not go blah-blah about it. Silence seems to be the best response to mystery. Any deep experience of God has to be met not with words, but with our whole being, and in great respect and silence. And this is why Jesus says, “Do not talk about it.”

Because when we talk about our God-experience too early or pre-maturely we will freeze that experience into those few, inadequate words. Then we tend to forget the whole experience, and remember only those words. We could get stuck in those words or images, and not allow the experience to transform us deeply.

When you find a treasure in the field, you are asked to bury it back into the field. Only when you are able to buy the field (by selling whatever you already possess) can you appropriate the hidden treasure. Mind you, you can't buy the treasure but only the field. Only when you have allowed your whole self to be encompassed by the mystery and the experience can you use words though inadequate. Otherwise, an over-exposure can kill the experience itself. An over-exposure can short-circuit the whole experience and lead to its sudden, pre-mature death.

An overemphasis on words, concepts, rituals and liturgy can trivialize our incomprehensible experience of the Sacred. A similar overconcentration on social and communal prayer, with a tantamount neglect of silence, can make our prayer experience empty.

Until you've gone through the mystery of transformation from the false self to the True Self, don't talk about these things, because you will almost always misuse or misinterpret the experience. As Gregory of Nyssa beautifully summarizes, “Concepts create idols, only wonder really knows.”

Go beneath your words and thoughts, beneath your ideas and concepts. Discover the wonder that you are, the passion that you are. That is the only way you can go beyond the admiration of Jesus' miracles and wait in silence for the real meaning of the miracle and the experience itself, which is always inner transformation. Hans-Georg Gadamer himself observes, “I believe what is most worth telling is always what cannot be told.”

So when you pray, try to stay beneath your thoughts or emotions neither fighting them nor thinking them. Everything that comes also goes, so don't take any of it seriously. You are much larger than the good or bad stories you tell about yourself. These stories are never the whole you, not the Great You.

You are God's Wonder!