Psalm of the Hungry Mystery
To what can I compare you, O Holy Mystery;
is there on earth or in the heavens
anything to which you can be likened?
I cannot find an adequate image
to feed my ever hungry mind.
So I ask: Shall I name you a Holy Nothing,
like an invisible energy radiating nothing,
some dark, mystical black hole?
Each year, the black holes in space
effortlessly swallow
millions of giant sun-stars larger than ours,
as they vanish forever
into the massive mystery of magnetic Nothingness.
Scholars wonder whether each galaxy’s heart
may contain a black hole,
an invisible whirlpool tunnel
possessing all known gravity,
allowing nothing, neither time nor space
to escape its voracious appetite.
O Holy Mystery, are you such a dark womb,
invisible to the eye and the most sensitive scope?
Are you a Cosmic Lover drawing everything to yourself
in a passionate desire
to consume all in a total communion?
If so, my God, all I need do is let go.
Reflection: All God-talk is based on some earthly comparison or analogy. Images of God are rooted in human experience, thus making the Divine Reality in some way accessible to our experience. At the same time, any image puts human limits on the Mystery we call God..
This psalm offers the insight that it is not we who go in search of the Holy Mystery. Rather, regardless of whether the Mystery is called God, Allah, I Am , or by any other name, it is the Unspeakable Mystery that draws us. Like a devouring black hole, it seeks to sweep us up into itself.
Such an invisible, imageless image of the Divine can make us aware of our profound lack of gravity in relation to God and can be a bridge for communion with the wisdom of those religions that condone no images of the Divine one.
From Psalms for Zero Gravity by Ed Hays
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The Holy Eraser Psalm
Holy One who is everywhere,
make me a holy eraser
removing the old dividing lines
of sacred and secular.
For blessed are those who erase
the artificial boundaries that divide life.
Correct my biased bifocal vision,
seeing the holy as separate,
as set apart from the temporal world,
from the fabric of daily life.
For blessed are the eyes
that see all as good and holy
and fully saturated with you.
Daily empowered as your holy eraser,
may I boldly wipe out
all of religion’s confining graffiti,
those sharp sanctuary lines
that make the spiritual and practical
as different as earth is from sea.
Reflection: This prayer could well be called the Catacomb Psalm, for you are advised never to pray it aloud in public. As the early Christians gathered to pray in catacombs, the underground burial caves of Rome, you may want to go down into your basement to pray this prayer. While religion teaches that God is everywhere, it also has an ageless tradition of painting God-zone lines, borders that separate the holy from the everyday world, all across the Earth.
The faithful of each religion generally give wholehearted support to this defacing of creation fostered by their own religious denominations. Such boundary lines create a manageable gravity field of religion, conveniently keeping the Holy One out of our daily lives. Yet those who honor the mystical traditions of Taoism, Zen, Sufism, Christianity and Judaism strive to live daily in an Earth cleansed of set-apart sacred spaces.
From Psalms for Zero Gravity by Ed Hays
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Prayer action suggestion:
Practice being a Holy Eraser.
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