learning to look, hear, etc and learning faith

Dreams, dreams, dreams - This photo has to be a photoshop construction. The birds are the wrong size relative to everything else unless they are huge birds like pelicans. The cellist is too far out in the wash. The perspective and composition seems to be all wrong. Furthermore the end point seems to be on the middle of the left side running through from the cellist and from the wedding couple but the other elements don't support it. Just why am I looking at this picture? The romantic sweetness of the picture is not enough to overcome the incongruities of cellist in the ocean waves and the disruption caused by an almost solid line of birds two thirds up the photograph creating a false ceiling. Just what am I meant to be looking at? When I think about it learning to look is an important component to art, while learning to hear is equally important to music, and I suppose learning to taste and smell are essential to the culinary arts.

Yesterday I had two very important conversations about knowing the voice of God/recognising the hand of God/ seeing God at work and knowing that it was God. The language we use of God is semi-metaphorical because it uses sensory language see, hear, and touch. Sometime the Biblical "taste and see " is added but strangely I've never heard the fifth sense smell used. I think the language is only semi-metaphorical because although we use the language of the five senses the sensory dimension to the divine activity in human existence is not literally sensory but still impinges physical reality. There is a point where things are clearly of God or not of God. Of course there are times when you can't make a clear decision and other times when you can. I can see that a part of maturing in the spiritual life is living in the ambiguities of uncertainty which are yet rooted in former moments of certainty. Put another way there are moments in our lives where God has to shout to attract our attention but the rest of the time God simply whispers away and sometime we think we hear and other we don't. We also have to learn to overcome our selective deafness to only hearing what we want to hear. But then later things change.

As I've already reflected on it, the dark night (see the labels) is a period in transition to bring us to lose the sensory crutches and have only faith alone. Using sight and hearing and whatever language we wish to use to indicate an absence of God, this is darkness, deafness, a period of no longer feeling the presence. This is a call to cast our prayers into the darkness in the faith that there is a God to hear and act which is called the road of purgation in classic spirituality.