There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. The mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribeable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.
I am awakened, I am born again at the voice of this my Sister, sent to me from the depths of the divine fecundity.
-Thomas Merton, from “Hagia Sophia” in Emblems of a Season of Fury (found in the Postscript of When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature
(photo taken at Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC)
One Response
Thank you so much for posting this. Exquisite!