6: The Language
6: The Language
Joan’s language was heavenly, meaning, it was a language of thought. We live through a fallen nature in a fallen world where sin obscures and conceals heavenly language by clouding our intellects. The Trail of the Dogmatic Creed before me, therefore, was clarity of thought. The dogmas, doctrines, and magisterial teachings of the Church formed guardrails between which the gathering progressed. Since Joan and Thérèse led me by a “gathering in the Lord’s gathering,” thinking, as the means of gathering this language, was the mode of being for the journey. Gathering, or thought, as a mode of being, required contemplation in the Lord’s own gathering of all creation in the Eucharist. Eucharistic adoration brought order to the aletheian physis unfolding around me. The egress out of the Dark Forest of my own subjective consciousness, circumscribed by the gleaming light of the Combined Hearts of Joan and Thérèse, unfolded the Trail before me. I had been blind, but as I stepped out, I could see, though only partially, as if peering into a serene, misty valley at dusk.
Then Mary Magdalene appeared to me in the dream. Her primacy to the adventure concealed in the valley ahead connected her forever to the journey. The Trail of the Dogmatic Creed disappeared in the mist before us. As the pure dark night of faith fell, the soft light of Magdalene’s poetic syntax appeared, forming the pathway’s lamp posts.