Chipping Away

In The Orthodox Way (St. Vladimir's Seminary P, Crestwood, NY: 1979), Bishop Kallistos Ware enters a sculptor's workshop to find a wonderful metaphor clarifying what happens when in contemplative prayer we strip away all the predicates of our descriptive selves (for example, "I'm a professor; my name is Andrew; I'm a Lutheran; I go to church; I'm the father of many children; I pray; I'm married; I like beer, and so on!") and release ourselves from notions of importance (or insignificance), success (or failure), current happiness (or sadness), intellectural abilities (or lack thereof), and so on. When we practice "letting go" of such illusive notions about who we really are and arrive at our innermost heart--where God is always intimately one with us--then we down-dwell with Him (or Her, as some come to know the Presence) and we realize and enjoy our True Self Jesus, who/Who we are:

The apophatic method, whether in our theological discourse or in our life of prayer, is seemingly negative in character, but in its final aim it issupremely positive. The laying-aside of thoughts and images leads not to vacuity but to a plenitude surpassing all that the human mind can conceiveor express. The way of negation resembles not so much the peeling of an onion as the carving of a statue. When we peel an onion, we remove one skin after another, until finally there is no more onion left: we end up with nothing at all. But the sculptor, when chipping away at a block of marble, negates to a positive effect. He does not reduce the block to a heap of random fragments but, through the apparently destructive action of breaking the stone in pieces, he ends up by unveiling an intelligible shape. (124)