Angela lived in Foligno, an Italian city about
ten miles from Assisi. She married and had several sons. In her 30s, about 1285, she underwent some kind of moral crisis:
she had committed some sin so shameful that she would not tell her confessor. She prayed to Francis of Assisi, who had died
some 60 years before, and in a dream he promised to help her. This incident acted as a conversion point for Angela: she did
penance for her sins and came to embrace the Franciscan ideal of poverty. When her husband, sons, and mother died within a
year, although she mourned her loss, she also saw it as a stripping away of attachments. She tried to give away all of her
property, but at first her family and even her Franciscan counselors stopped her.
Then in the following year, she told a Franciscan
friar of her visions; after considerable initial skepticism, he believed her and began to write them down in Latin
as she dictated it in her Umbrian dialect. These dictations continued for several years and were eventually published.
As
she lay dying in 1309 her followers asked her to sum up her teachings, and from this request we have fragments of what
Angela had told her disciples during her final sickness, from a few days before Christmas 1308 until January 3, 1309, the
vigil of her death. These last words of Angela constitute a sort of spiritual testament, a brief synthesis of her spiritual
teachings. At one moment she utters a significant and heart-rending cry:
"O unknown nothingness! O unknown nothingness! A soul cannot have a better awareness in this world than
to perceive its own nothingness and to stay in its own cell."
~
Reading these
lines I am stopped in my tracks. I cannot have a better awareness, she tells me, than to perceive my own nothingness and to
stay in my cell.
~
Seven hundred
years later we have living mystics who say things that appear to emerge out of this unknown nothingness. I would like to share
one such voice, that of Catherine Ingram. I am presenting below excerpts from a short piece by her entitled "Innocence" followed
by excerpts from a dialogue found oh her website.
"In
awakened awareness, we rediscover our innocence. The intelligence sees that, despite the memories of many years, there is
yet a presence that has never been written upon in memory and exists only and always now. We are once again along for the
ride, and life itself becomes a wondrous adventure as we let it take us rather than chase it down. This doesn't mean that
we passively lie around until someone says, "Go get in the car." It simply means that we feel and move through the world with
hearts of innocence. Wherever fate leads—in passion or quiet—an innocent heart makes the journey heavenly. Where
we end up or what we see along the way is of less consequence."
~
Q:
Isn't there a process? Don't we need to go through some sort of mental purification to realize what you speak of?
CI:
No. You don't have to purify anything. It's all done. This awareness, this love that you are is not diminished by your dips
into neurosis nor exalted by your soaring or poetic insights. It is always pure and clear, here and now.
Q:
I want to believe that.
CI:
No need to believe this. Taste it. Experience it. This is the feast and this
feast is so rich that we couldn't possibly begin to take in even what is in this room. Think of it, each of us a human universe,
yet made of all the same components. And all of this—the floor, the chairs, the flowers, the microphone, shimmering
with this presence. Shining and shimmering and pulsating with life. Release your notions of "someday, I may experience this,"
"if only," or any sense of deficiency or postponement. There is no need to sit at the feast and feel hungry.
Q:
Catherine, sometimes I have experienced what I think you are pointing to and it has come with a sense of boundlessness, nothing
to hold onto, a sense of being in some great wilderness with no end in sight. It is occasionally frightening when I am in
that state.
CI:
You get used to it.
