Divine Darkness

It's a dream for every one who studies here in Rome to meet the Pope personally. Finally, by the grace of God I got that great opportunity this Easter as I assisted him in the Mass. After the Mass we could meet him individually and he asked me in the most respective form of Italian,"Di dove Lei, dell'India?" I was really astonished by his humble question and once again realised that meeting some one face-to-face could change the 'subjective pre-images' about him.

As a peregrinator I would always love to reflect about the meeting with God at my final destination (my great hope). What would be the nature of such a reality? Would there be any radical change in my previous knowledge and images about Him? The saints speak about it in terms of the "divine darkness". They say that souls' quest for the vision of God is like, “a progress from light to deeper and deeper darkness. The initial stage is the removal of the darkness of error by the light of the truth. But, from then on, the further the soul progresses the deeper is the darkness into which it enters, until eventually the soul is cut off from all that can be grasped by sense and reason." Here the darkness implies both the invisibility and incomprehensibility of God which transcends all knowledge and images of human experience.

Oops, it is not working anymore, okay… now I leave these super natural realms and come to the earthly realities, i.e. the vision about my fellow beings, my limited knowledge and images about them. Don't these distort or blur my comprehension of their true image? Yes, they do a lot, I can see within myself a 'live archive of prejudices' which hinder me from dealing with them as God wills. I don't want to keep such an archive of prejudices and negative experiences in my relations with others, which only leads me to criticize them harshly and often breaks the communion of love. I have to bury them for the sake of their true image and only in that 'darkness' can I see them perfectly.

Recently, we had a visit to the Vatican archives as a part of our course. The guide explained that if all the files in the archive were arranged in a single line then it would be almost 85 kms long. Thanks for the wise decisions of the Popes who denied the accessibility of this huge archive for all. I think if it is open to everyone, each and every minute detail of the social relations of our Church, a lot of human errors that are reported in the documents there, would distort more her true image which is incomprehensible and transcends all our knowledge. I believe that the true archives of the church should be the long catacombs here in Rome, where lies a lot of true images of Christianity after enduring strong persecutions. They were pure in heart and they could be cut off from all that can be grasped by sense and reason. They have the vision of God in eternity as the sixth Beatitude says, ‘blessed are the poor in heart, for they shall see God’.