Readings for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time.

The apocalyptic vision of Jesus is not about the destruction of our physical world but it is about the end of our world, that is, our egocentric world. By extension, this apocalyptic vision looks to the end of all the evils perpetrated by the individual and the group ego such as poverty, war, violence of all kinds, and, ultimately, sin and death.

Jesus describes the cosmos collapsing. Ched Meyers, a scholar of the Gospel of Mark, writes, “Mark specifically identifies the darkening sun with the revelation of the Human One.” The Gospel author identifies darkness with Jesus or the Son of Man, which he translates as “The Human One.” Meyers continues, “As Jesus hangs on the cross, at least one of the cosmic signs of 13:24 is indeed realized: ‘There was darkness over the whole land’ (15:33). This is the heart of Mark's apocalyptic argument. The Human One's death and his revelation ‘in power and glory’ are the same moment.” The end of the world is the end, first, of our world and it happens through the darkness of the cross.

The world of the ego ends when we sink into prayer. The mystics pick up these themes of darkness and silence to communicate the transcendence and incomprehensibility of God. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a sixth-century Syrian monk who took the name Dionysius the Areopagite from Acts of the Apostles, uses Moses’ experience of God on Mount Sinai in a brief treatise titled The Mystical Theology:

“The holiest and highest things perceived with the eye of the body or the mind are but the rationale which presupposes all that lies below the Transcendent One.  Through, them, however, his unimaginable presence is shown, walking the heights of those holy places to which the mind at least can rise.  But then [Moses] breaks free of them, away from what sees and is seen, and he plunges into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing.  Here, renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and invisible, he belongs completely to him who is beyond everything.  Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.”

Moses stands for the soul. Leaving behind what the senses perceive and the mind grasps, Moses “plunges into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing.” He plunges into God’s incomprehensibility, symbolized by darkness. This is not a bad or immoral darkness. St. Angela of Foligno, a medieval Franciscan mystic explains, “I saw him in a darkness, and a darkness precisely because the good that he is, is far too great to be conceived or understood.  Indeed, anything conceivable or understandable does not attain this good or even come near it…In this good, which is seen in the darkness, I recollected myself totally.” Beyond all that we can conceive lies the goodness of God. For our minds, this divine goodness is shrouded in darkness.

But then comes the darkness. The experiences of light disappear before the insurmountable darkness of the divine mystery. Pseudo-Dionysius advises, “leave behind you everything perceived and understood, everything perceptible and understandable…with your understanding laid aside…strive upward as much as you can toward union with him who is beyond all being and knowledge.  By an undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself and everything, shedding all and freed from all, you will be uplifted to the ray of the divine darkness beyond being.” Prayer means turning to God within by going beyond thinking. We speak with God, read scripture, think about God, imagine ourselves in different scenes from the Gospels. But ultimately, prayer means letting go of everything the mind can think and feel to rest in the divine presence in an inner silence. This a call to let go of the self in prayer, to lose the self in the darkness of God’s supreme mystery.