Poem by Peter Menkin: Apophatic Prayer: A Transcription, December 1999 (Unabridged‪)‬

This work was originally a set of transcription notes from a talk given by Father Michael Fish, monk, New Camaldole of Big Sur, at Incarnation Monastery, Berkeley. Father Michael spoke of his life in contemplative prayer as a Benedictine living in Big Sur at Immaculate Heart Hermitage. In an effort to catch the poetic sensibility of his long talk of more than an hour, held in the urban monastery chapel, I distilled the notes from the talk I attended as a poem:

Invited by God into a wordless kind of prayer - Cataphatic is opening the Bible and believing the images of entering into the wonder of the scene. The same one invites us into the apophatic spirituality. Desert, stripping, pain, addiction. loneliness. (Aloneness.) Desert spirituality will be deeper, and this is one invitation to an all new spirituality. This is the monk's.