Apophatic Prayer: A Transcription (2000)

by Peter Menkin

Invited by God into
a wordless kind
of prayer--Cataphatic is opening
the Bible
and believing
the images of entering
into the wonder of the scene.

The same one invites us
into the apophatic spirituality.

Desert, stripping, pain, addiction.
loneliness. (Aloneness.)

Desert spirituality will be deeper,
and this is one.
Invitation to an all
new spirituality. This is the

monk's.
Birth at forty.
Forty to eighty.
Eighty to one-hundred twenty.

Moses was offering deliverance. (Acts.)
Settles into what is
the symbolic period
of 40 years~into the future.

After 40 years he was learned to,
as a child,
look at this strange sight,
"Why the bush is not burning."

Look hard in the desert
at 80 years of age of age.
This is a life as a child.
In the Hebrew: ~ I must go across and look.

This is a leaving of where
he was on a life
with the sheep
and have a look
at something
new.

He must leave this security
of the plain to be
confronted with the mystery.

How far the Lord wanted Abraham
to go as did Peter
in his early morning
as he waited for Christ. As did

Martha when she organized Christ,
or the Spirit.
Martha learns
something when Lazaraz
dies.

God knows when we are
in the desert when he calls
in the desertwhen he calls,
"Where is Moses."

It is in the Holy Fire
of God
when we take off our shoes,
as did Moses.
We do it
alone,
in solitude.

The very thing is the presence
of God
waiting for us.

I have heard the suffering
of my people. (Father Michael.)

God liberates Moses,
who in his
brokenness discovers his identity,
and in his~finds his mission.

Contemplation (from male spirituality):trust
in the insecurity of the painful
victoryby putting on the mind
of Christ. "Mercy."
reads an Oblate, "instead of sacrifice.
"went to the desert."
Moses meets God
in the inner Desert
and leads those in slavery
outside.

There are two deserts:
The invitation, the inside us
that is the other/Merton calls this
the great self within that is
the God within us. (The ineffable
now of truth.) Entailing
the creator,

we are in failure invited
into another truth,
the abandonment into the word.
For the Oblate (for me),
getting up early,

God very seldom comes as a
gentle invitation.
It comes as an assault on our invitation.

The Gospel only
makes sense
to the poor,
(the weakness of the poverty
of our humanity.)

We are
all struggling with the ideal
of our body, of a woman
and of a man.

The Little Book notates
poverty of spirit-- a Little Book:
New look at spirituality,
new look at being human,
new look at who God is.

The Little Book notates entering into
the dying and stripping
--stripped with everything and just being
left with the now.
A cup of wine becomes sacred.
A desert allows us

to find a meaning (a place)
in the sacred.
Cup of wine

a desert allows
burning bush
yes.
This flow is within us
and other people. There
is surrender here.
There is surrender there.

Without doing.
and not going against
the nature of things
we have to go
where we are fed by Christ.
God takes Moses
into the heart of God.

(Words & thoughts by Father Michael, OSB Cam;
poem & transcription by Peter Menkin Obl Cam OSB.)