The Quipu and the Cipher

God speaks to me in the moments my mind is focused on the words within a page. Those words written by another soul, God speaks. A sentence for Him to convey a thought, a notion, an idea to enter into contemplation with Him. Though to reveal the insight of Wisdom fails me.

Years ago, Ted Chiang recounted the basis, the structure, the essence of our language in how we communicate in 'The Story of Your Life'. His prose has remained at the forefront of my thoughts.

He discussed our perception as being in a sequential mode of awareness. At the same time, the beings within the story exhibited a simultaneous mode of awareness. That we experience events in order and perceive their relationship as cause and effect. They experience all events simultaneously and perceive the underlying purpose behind them all.

My life is but one period of time. I know my initial and final state. Can I understand the effects of life's events so that I might initiate their cause? Perhaps not. My writing requires one word to follow another, a sequential pattern of my thought to be communicated for others to perceive in that sequential manner. Yet, the page these words lie on has two dimensions; can I use the space to convey more, to move towards the purpose underlying everything?

My actions ripple across time like a stone thrown into a still pond whose ripples continue beyond my perception. Ripples interacting with other ripples from stones thrown from afar. A perception that remains finite, far from the infinite and what He desires.

So I pray. Never ceasing. A constant presence with God. Awaiting to see what He sees, for Him to speak, to hear the Wisdom He has. To listen for that whisper to direct the moment.

Though I fail in those moments of silence in which He seeks my suffering, but I am too broken to speak of them, to declare matters that pertain to my soul, I cannot. For my suffering is the purgation God has graced my soul with. Who am I to ask for His help in the trials He has given me?

I ask to remove those memories of evil, those images that haunt the soul, those walls of the fortress around my life. But how? For that is His Providence, while the language to ask God for such has slipped away. Father Lagrange writes, "every one of our sins is a mystery of iniquity, presupposing the divine permission to allow evil to exist in view of some higher good purpose, which will be clearly seen only in heaven."

In Peru I learned about quipu, their system of communicating and storing information through knots in rope. God has imbued in me the understanding that it is not I who cannot understand Him, but that my language has not yet developed to allow me to communicate what He has shared with me through the language of my soul.

For I have struggled throughout my life to articulate my thoughts, my ideas, and my essence, from which I have come, because language has failed me. Though language structures my thoughts and what lies deep within me, affording me the ability to share a fraction of that which is within, it has failed to reveal God and my relationship with Him.

How can I express the manner in which God speaks to me, when the manner He uses has no relation to our human nature? For there are aspects within words, equations, paintings, and music that can express a concept of life, but to share a collection of thoughts, the notions of a series of events over time, as a single moment within eternity, remains obsolete. God touches the soul for an advancement of language, an advancement beyond the sequential events of life, into a providential language. A language where the moments of grace are not measured in time, for they are the mystical aspects of our soul within God.