At the Centre of Things

I have found myself thinking a great deal about centres over the past few months — through Lent, Easter, and now as we move towards Pentecost. What does it mean to come to the centre of things? To dwell there, even briefly, amid uncertainty, change, and the demands of life?

It truly was a gathering of HeROES — people willing to journey towards the centre of things while navigating difficult, uncertain, and sometimes empty-feeling terrain. Together, we reflected on void-like spaces in our lives: places of transition, loss, unknowing, and perhaps even possibility. Yet woven through our conversations was a quiet but persistent hope — the growing awareness that God journeys with us even in places where, at times, that presence can feel hidden or hard to discern.

Some of the energy and openness of that gathering continued into a Soul Care Poetry retreat led by Liz Crumlish. There, too, participants discovered fresh inspiration by attending to what lay near the centre of their lives: their longings, stories, memories, creativity, and encounters with the natural world. Poetry became a way of listening more deeply — to ourselves, to one another, and to the movements of God within creation and ordinary experience.

Thomas Merton refers to a precious part at the centre of ourselves as le point vierge:

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God. . . This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak [God’s] name written in us. . . It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billion points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Bantam Doubleday Publishing Group Inc, 1994), 158