William of St
Thierrey
From Meditation
9
The struggle for
understanding
The wretchedness
that is in me, Lord, is at once so impenetrable and so extensive
that I can neither examine it in detail nor survey the whole in all
its amplitude. For even now, when I wish to speak and listen to
you, O Lord my God, the fog of it blankets me, as it so often does,
and prevents my seeing you clear or hearing you plain.
So it is that I am
forever finding myself cast out of doors by my own conscience. Is
it not a case of 'let the wicked be taken away lest he see the
glory of God'? And when I struggle on without the light of
understanding, groping my way towards my goal, the impulse of my
ardent longing is blunted and broken, and from your heights I fall
back into my depths - from you to me, and from me lower
still.
And once the driving
force of my best effort is exhausted, like so much dust thrown up
off the face of the earth I am turned into the
plaything of the winds, blown this way and that by the fantasies of
thought, and whim, and feeling, as multitudinous as the faces of
men, of moments in time, of links in the chain of events. So
while
your face is ever
bent on me in purposeful goodwill, I in my
wretchedness am always gazing down at the dull earth, and yet so
blind withal and lapped in darkness that I do not know how to,
reach your presence - nor can I, save in as much as there is no
hiding from the face of truth, which sees through all things
whatsoever their condition. And so, leaving my gift before the
altar, I take myself angrily in hand, rise up, and, lighting the
lamp of the word of God, in wrath and bitterness of soul I enter
the darkened house of my conscience, seeking to identify the source
of this murk, this hateful fog that comes between me and the light
of my heart.
At once –
imagine this! – a plague of flies erupts in front of my eyes
and virtually chases me out of my own private domain, the house of
my conscience. I enter, however, as of right, only to be met by a
swarm of thoughts so insolent, so indisciplined, so diverse and
disorderly that the human heart that spawned them is powerless to
sort them out. However, I prepare to sit in judgement on them. I
order them to stand in front of me so that I can identify the
particular features and the general type of each, in order to
assign to each its place in my household. But before I can
make them out and distinguish between them, they scatter and,
constantly switching places, seem to mock their would- be
judge.
