On Words and Images

The Pope spoke recently about the need to fast from words and images: "It seems to me that the time of Lent should be a time of fasting from words and images, because we need a little silence, a little space, without being constantly bombarded with images. We need to create spaces of silence [...] to open our hearts to the true image, to the true word."

This is clearly an invocation of the via negativa, as (who else?) Eliot writes in The Four Quartets:

"There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

Being between two lives—unflowering, between

The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:

For liberation—not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past. ...

... See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern."

Later he writes, "You would have to put off / Sense and notion." This putting off of sense experience, this "midwinter spring"--a spring not like one we typically experience--is for the purpose of prayer and communion.