"One sets out from God to go to God..."

Photography by Ann L. Krumrein

The Spanish sailors who accompanied Christopher Columbus mutinied several times, going so far as to threaten him with death if he did not issue the order to turn back, long before they had reached the vicinity of San Salvador.  Nothing less was needed for America to be discovered than the marvelous trust in God of this incomparable man, who said to the incredulous: "Give me three more days and I will give you a world."

But America was not the Absolute.  It was a point of arrival where it would be possible to catch your breath, and from which in the end you would come back.  The Absolute, on the contrary, is without return journeys.  One does not come back from it because it is a journey without end.

The mystery is that the Absolute is not only an abyss opening on Eternity, but that it is at the same time the one and only point of departure, the starting place.  One sets out from God to go to God, and this is the only shift in place which has any appreciable meaning, any usefulness.  Everything else, that is, any journey in which one thinks one is going somewhere, is literally stupid, and the faster one goes, the more idiotic it is.

But once again, the Absolute is a journey without homecomings, and that is why those who start on it have so few companions. Think of it! Always to want the same thing, always to go in the same direction, to walk night and day, without even veering to right or to left, and – were it only for an instant – to conceive the whole of life, all thoughts, all feelings, all acts down to the last heartbeat, as the perpetual working out of an initial decree of the all-powerful Will.

~Leon Bloy, in Pilgrim of the Absolute

"I am Alpha and Omega;

the beginning and the end.

To him that thirsts,

I will give of the fountain of the water of life, freely."

~Revelation 21:6