White Nothingness at Agnus Dei

White came during the night. It thickens and brightens, blows its nothingness through and without. Hours shall pass before the hermit departs for Mass and the quiet Sacristan tasks prior.

Gaudete Sunday brings the fullness of joy. Of its own, joy is white; it is nothingness; yet we utilize the color pink. Sun shining on white makes it sometimes pink, if one stares awhile. Perhaps the eye begins to see through blood, and that make the white seem pink. Seeing through blood brings love into all, and pink is the color of love, it is said.

Joy is nothingness in the visceral sense. Most connect joy with an intellectual definition which is exemplified in emotional response to something the body and mind "like." But in its supernal nothingness, joy becomes as snow in the soul: a reaction of molecules affected by climate; tangible until touched, then melted into memory.

The hermit ponders joy, as someone who suffers has left a comment on the victim soul writings, relative to asking for joy, and in faith, in believing, the joy is given. Joy in suffering is particularly mystical. The commenter mentions having spent the second year of suffering, being silent. It was in that silence that the Lord taught her more of suffering, and also then bequeathed the joy.

Within the Sacred Heart, there is silence; there is snow; there is the nothingness of joy. No one can touch upon it without its melting into nothingness, so it is best to not attempt to grasp joy but simply to view it as a gratuitous wonder. The joy within the Sacred Heart often shows nothing--nothing emotional. Snow simply appears as a result of unseen molecular transformations under certain conditions. Such is joy.

Now, from within the Sacred Heart came a question the hermit asked. "When did the Sacred Heart become Sacred?"

The hermit immediately answered from within, that the Sacred Heart became Sacred when the lance pierced Jesus' Heart, and His Blood and Water flowed. But the hermit thought how the hermit writes, and then often has to correct what is written!

The hermit then pondered this, and asked a priest, a canon lawyer priest of Africa. He said that the Sacred Heart has always been Sacred, that one must view the Sacred Heart as God-is-Love, and that it was Sacred from before time began, with the Word.

Yet the hermit wondered how it was that the hermit is within this Sacred Heart, and is being trained to view all through His Wound, as if from a tunnel looking out into the world, and from within being trained to view the other world, going in and in and in.

So the hermit asked the Associate Pastor of the Cathedral who is very learned--a savant of Catholicism. He said that the Sacred Heart became Sacred at the Incarnation, for Jesus had a human heart, divine yet human. It is perfect, yet it did not become a "Sacred Heart" until He had a human heart to be then an object of sacredness.

This made sense, but then the hermit considered that all the writings from early on as well as artist renderings, always seemed to link the Sacred Heart with His wounds and even drops of blood, and often with thorns surrounding. The wound seems a major inclusion in any writings of the Sacred Heart.

So the hermit asked this priest again, since he had the Benediction later that day. He sais, yes, that the Sacred Heart's wound was important in the fulfillment of Christ's mission for salvation of souls and reparation for sin. But he pointed out that the Eucharist had been instituted the night prior, at the Last Supper. But, he agreed when the hermit pointed out that the renderings are not of an embryo's heart or an unwounded heart--that it seemed that the piercing was necessary to show us the way: that we too must be wounded and die (or die and be wounded?) to ourselves in order to be in union with Christ, to come into Him fully.

After last evening's Mass, the hermit asked the high priest, the Rector and Vicar General, this question. He immediately said that the Sacred Heart, in the Church's view, is much broader than Christ's Sacred Heart in its human form. It encompasses all of time, yet it is also viewed as an actual heart, and the wounds are depicted and the Blood and Water flowed, and were necessary to flow from the pierced Heart, to show the outpouring of salvation and the Sacraments of the Church. The piercing was necessary, he said, for these to occur. He agreed that when the Heart was pierced, the fulfillment of Christ's mission was complete with these facets of the Church, the Sacraments, and the Salvation of souls--and their salvation in an on-going form. Yes, of course, if souls participate and cooperate.

The Church's sacraments are available to us as gift from the opened, wounded Heart of Christ, and after He gave His life for us.

The hermit has been wondering, has been trying to be stilled enough to comprehend, if there is still Blood and Water within the Sacred Heart? Or, is the hermit in here in nothingness of these elements. Is the Blood still being shed? Well, at the Sacrifice of the Mass it is being re-enacted in its timeless form: the Passion of Our Lord. He offers Himself again and again.

Is the hermit and all those others, unseen but in here--suspended within His Heart, surrounded and ensconced in His Precious Blood? Are the Waters of purification, of eternal quenching, of the Church and our Baptismal washing--are these Waters keeping us afloat within His Sacred Heart?

The realities of the genderless soul, in nothingness, nesting within the Sacred Heart, are somehow important to discern. There is adoration within the Heart, and thus adoration of all within the Heart. Nesting gradually senses the surroundings; nesting is not only a place but a movement, a continuous floating flow such as the snow floats either as visible elements of white or clear droplets or microscopic hydrogen and oxygen, and invisible cold (what is cold?) and wind suspending and flowing (what is wind?).

The hermit can appreciate the answers of the Canon Lawyer and the Rector: of the large, inimitable view of God and His Church, of the Sacred Heart in timeless largess.

Yet for now, the hermit is very, very small and still adapting to the visceral aspects of the Sacred Heart by means of tangibles--of the written and illustrated renderings, of the imagination and understanding and intellect's comprehension of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Yes, the hermit begins small commensurate with the smallness of the hermit's beginnings of this new life's now home within the Sacred Heart.

The expansive nothingness becomes immense with the growth of awareness, as adoration magnifies the soul's capacity to adore simply, and greatly, the Lord God.