(27) The abracadabrant story of the Moon Child

“Late have I loved you, O beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! And behold, you were within, and I was without, and there I sought you; and in my unloveliness I rushed upon those lovely things that you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you; those things kept me far from you which, if they were not in you, would not be at all. You called, you cried out, and you broke through my deafness; you shone, you blazed, and you dispelled my blindness; you spread your fragrance, I breathed it in, and now I long for you; I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace.
When I shall cleave to you with all my being, there will be no more sorrow or toil for me, and my life shall be alive, wholly filled with you. But now, since he whom you fill, you lift up, and I am not yet full of you, I am a burden to myself. My joys, which ought to be wept over, struggle with my sorrows, which ought to be rejoiced in, and I do not know on which side the victory lies. Woe is me! Lord, have mercy on me.”

 

Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 

 

 

 

For the Moon Child, truth is not an object to be attained, but a presence to which one opens oneself, and which demands an inner transformation. It does not give itself to the one who seeks it as knowledge, but to the one who becomes capable of receiving it. He knows all this long before he can think it… and, of course, before he can say it.

 

Notebooks of the Moon Child

 

There is, in the very idea of truth, a light that seems to call for its own diffusion. A truth, one first believes, is meant to be brought into the open, to be spoken, shared, offered to all as an evidence finally wrested from shadow. But this evidence is deceptive. For every truth is not only that which illuminates; it is also that which burns.

What must be questioned is not so much truth in itself as the capacity of the one who receives it. A truth never exists alone: it presupposes a gaze that sustains it, a mind that lets it come into being without dissolving into it. Yet certain truths exceed this capacity. They do not refuse themselves out of caprice or out of jealousy of the initiated; they withdraw because they require, in order to be borne, a transformation of the one who approaches them.

Thus, the secret does not primarily arise from a will to conceal. It is born of a gap between what is and what can be received. It is not truth that hides; it is the gaze that cannot yet sustain it without faltering. There is here a kind of ontological modesty: reality itself withdraws before that in us which could not receive it without collapsing.