Yesterday, I had another CT-scan. It was scheduled exactly one week before I meet with my friendly neighbourhood oncologist to hear what the scan has revealed, specifically what it reveals about the eleven cancerous lesions living for a time in my liver. For exactly seven days then, seven including this one, I live and move and have my being in a cloud: a cloud of not knowing what exactly is going on inside me. Having by now become a Wily Veteran of London's various CT-scan facilities, I've walked in this exact cloud before, and I don't like it at all. What I don't like exactly is not knowing what a number of people here in London DO know about me and my liver, despite the fact that everyone of them is less attached to my liver than I am.
On a related note, The Cloude of Unknowyng is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in the second half of the 14th century (hence the strange spelling.) Evidently, it's a spiritual guide to contemplative prayer which proposes that the only way to truly know God is to abandon all preconceived notions and beliefs or knowledge about him and to be courageous enough to surrender mind and ego to the realm of unknowingness, at which point, the unknown author assures us, we begin to glimpse the true nature of God. So says Wikipedia. And that's all I know about that particular classic piece of Christian literature other than what is stated in the brief excerpt included in the Wikipedia article:
"For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting."
This brief description and short quotation may be too little to judge by and it might be quite unfair of me to do so anyway, but nevertheless I AM putting myself down as Not Interested in further spiritual direction from this unknown spiritual guide. It's specifically what I DO know about God that keeps the peace of Christ ruling in my heart. And it is specifically thinking about God that strengthens my heart and mind regarding what I am unable to see and know while my head is in this cloud.
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies endure forever. According to the riches of his grace, God works all things according to the counsel of his will. His people have been born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and have been granted an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven by God's power as we are guarded through faith for a salvation that is ready to be revealed at the last time.
The truth is, we all walk through life, one week at a time, with our heads in a cloud of unknowing. No one knows very much at all about what's really going on. We all live in some state of fog about what adventures are still awaiting us and about how long it will be until we stand before our Creator and Judge to give him an account of ourselves. But it's what we CAN know about the nature of God that can keep our hearts and minds at peace, with that peace that surpasses all understanding. And it is as we keep thinking about God -- about what he has done for us and what he is doing for us and what he has promised us that we are loving him with heart and soul and strength and mind, just as our Lord Jesus Christ has commanded us.
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