KENOTIC PLATEAU

Between heavy thunder and two rain showers I climbed up to the Venelifjellet plateau. This is always quite a sublime enterprise. The plateau combines focus with vastness. First you concentrate on your body mass, as you climb steadily for two hours. Then it all expires in the face of what you see. You empty yourself of yourself. In Gnostic interpretations of kenosis this amounts to a process of emptying yourself of your light. The fact that the divine possesses omniscient and omnipotent luminosity, which however has to be withdrawn from if humans are to ‘see’ anything, is a fascinating paradox. What happens is almost a reversal of the demand: “let there be light” into: “let there be logic.” Perhaps the Greeks were on to something after all. Yet, while standing on the plateau, I must say that I rather enjoyed the idea that the higher up you go, the more you experience absolute openness. The experience of this openness requires not digging, by formulating arguments and charting what lies at the bottom, however beautiful that may be, but doting on your sense of space. It is the space of the other that you pull towards you, as incarnated divinity has done, which makes climbing worth the while. On top, you can thus say: I watch you within me.