New Baptist Kidd on the Blog

If I try to summarise what the last few months have meant to me, I struggle for words. But a few weeks ago I found a brief poetic form shaping in my mind, and I it says much of what I think I have been about. The title I gave it is 'Praying Blind', and it reads like this:

BLIND PRAYING

Creator with no limit
darkly the silence grows a skin
on which, Relief!
we feel your face.
_____

In my journal (8th April 2006) I noted something like this: I have begun to get a feel for what it means to deal with God as a dark and silent space, the non-conceptual or pre-conceptual given at the heart of all things. I have been working with the story of the man born blind in John 9, the image of incarnation as God taking skin (John 1), and the idea of Jesus as one who was seen and touched by the first disciples (1 John 1). Together, these have become immensely powerful. It is ironic (a frequent motif in the Gospels) that God had not been as real for many years as God now becomes when I begin to let go the desire to own God as a concept.