The Word Before Words

We are approaching the depth named by the Logos.

In Greek, Logos reaches across speech, account, reason, and intelligible relation. Within the philosophical and scriptural worlds through which it developed, the Word can point toward a meaning deeper than a spoken sound.

Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher, compares the intelligible pattern of creation with the plan an architect holds before a city becomes visible. The inward pattern and the visible world are joined through divine reason.

John’s prologue brings Logos into a vision of creation, life, and light, and speaks of the Word made flesh in Jesus. Its opening recalls Genesis. It belongs to the encounter between Greek language and Jewish scripture, and to the Jewish world of Jesus and his earliest followers.

Within the Holy of Holies, these teachings become a question of participation.

Can the life toward which the words point become the ground from which we pray?

Augustine contemplated an inward word present before the sound of speech, even before an imagined spoken sound. He treated it as a human likeness through which the divine Word might be approached, while preserving the distance between finite knowing and eternal knowing.

We can recognize the doorway in an ordinary moment of understanding. Something becomes clear before we have explained it. Meaning is present together; sentences follow one after another.

Prayer, too, can begin before its explanation.

A person can say “Help me” while insisting that an outcome must obey their fear. The same words can arise through a willingness to receive, with the need still fully present.

The source of the prayer has changed.

This is the inward life of the Logos as it enters our journey: divine meaning received before it is divided into our explanations, a connection from which speech and silence can both arise.

The presence of the sanctuary becomes the place from which the person lives.

Meister Eckhart’s teaching on the birth of the Word in the soul carries this intimacy into another image. The birth must become actual within the person for its inward significance to be lived.

The seed we met at Bethlehem now acquires its fuller meaning.

A life of offering begins within the human being. The divine birth becomes a name for the awakening of participation, for a life increasingly received from its Source.

The state is our participation; God is its reality.

This protects the sanctuary from becoming dependent upon a passing mood. Warmth may come and go. Peace may be followed by irritation. The relationship can remain available through the changes.

Romans gives another voice to this depth when Paul speaks of the Spirit helping our inability to pray through inexpressible groanings. A prayer can exceed the words by which we try to measure it.

The ache and openness of the person can already be within the address.

Simone Weil’s understanding of prayer as attention gives us a companion here. The human being becomes receptive without trying to seize what is being sought.

Remain with that receptivity for a moment.

Nothing has to be produced for display. The connection can be attended to through the very willingness that offers the life now present.

The innermost place is therefore a place of communion. Awareness rests as the knowing subject while its whole life is addressed toward the Creator.

The mind has reached the threshold where it can remain conscious of its relation to a knowing greater than itself.

From here, the earlier chambers acquire another meaning.

The mind’s images are held within awareness. In the vision of Mentalism, creation is held within divine Mind. Within this sanctuary, the finite consciousness turns toward the Source that gives it the capacity to know at all.

There is an intimacy here that physical distance cannot describe.

The Qur’an speaks of a nearness closer than the jugular vein while preserving God’s incomparable nature. The Kena Upanishad points toward that through which the mind thinks and which ordinary thinking cannot grasp. The Cloud of Unknowing leads contemplation beyond the things the mind can hold.

Their voices reach us at this inward threshold.

The chamber contains no object that could exhaust the One toward whom it opens.

Solomon’s question still stands: if the heavens cannot contain God, how could the temple contain Him?

Yet the temple can become the place of meeting.

The inward sanctuary can hold the human side of the relationship: attention, receptivity, intention, the willingness to offer. Divine consciousness remains its Source and ultimate recipient.

This is the distinction through which the Godward place remains open. The connection is attended to without turning God into something observed among other things.

The deepest direction is therefore available without a mental portrait of either end of the relationship.

The Big Eye does not have to appear as a figure in the room. The Father does not have to become a form beyond it. The image of a superior watcher and the image of a divine recipient are both appearances that can be caught and offered.

Awareness rests as the subject of knowing, already Godward.

This is why Catch and Offer cannot be divided into two separate spiritual lives. First becoming an isolated spectator, and only afterward remembering the Father, would allow the observed emotion to become its own center again.

Within the sanctuary, recognition and address belong to the same movement.

A thought is recognized while intention is offered. A feeling is known within the same orientation. The urge to control the process enters with everything else.

The word “connection” names the relationship in which this is lived. It is not a demand that the mind supply a sensation to certify its success.

Even the wish to have absolute certainty about God’s will can come into the offering. A powerful inward conviction is still something consciousness can recognize. Discernment remains necessary within a life directed toward the Father.