The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and an Epiphany Book

Grumbach is an excellent writer, and both books I've read from her, The Presence of Absence and 50 Days in Solitude, I found to speak to her, and our, search for meaning and fulfillment within ourselves in relation to the Sacred and, hence, our knowing some degree of regular silence with solitude is essential to this discovery, or re-discovery, for some of us, if not all of us.

This work, written prior to 50 Days..., provides a self-disclosure of Grumbach's struggle to reclaim an experience of the Divine she had in her early 20s. She entered the church, sometime after that epiphany, and later left it. She found the public rituals and prayers of the church did not facilitate her connection with the Sacred, though she tried to connect with her God in that setting many years.

Grumbach went on a private search for the Divine. She shares struggles over this leaving the public faith domain and going it alone, at times feeling guilt over this, questioning if she were being selfish, and wondering, as many would say, that this faith journey was a communal experience and one of service to others.

When Grumbach had her early epiphany, she had no faith of a religious nature, never had any trust there was a God, was a Marxist. Nothing had prepared her immediately to know this was God, though she admits the term "God" is not sufficient and misleading.

Her search to rediscover that intimate experience with her sense of God lasted decades. She found peace, at least a ceasing of the search, in the idea, found in many spiritual traditions, that the Divine is most known not in what we know but what we cannot know of this Mystery.

Also, Grumbach learned to know absence is the means of that sense of Presence she had known in her early 20s and, so, she could relax in knowing the powerful re-encounter might never happen. Grumbach details how writers like Thomas Merton and Simone Weal became guides on this discovery of Presence in absence.

For anyone who trusts in Something more than us, call this what he or she will, but struggles to realize it as a real presence, though possibly having known such before, this book can provide inspiration and guidance. Also, this opus can challenge persons who, like Grumbach had, have concluded the impossibility of that Something.

Grumbach had been ill-prepared for the early experience of the Sacred and the search this led her into. We can learn from her willingness to find her own way, while receiving guidance from others who had traveled the path of divine Wisdom before her, and us, as well as contemporaries who are, as in Grumbach's case, lights on the Way.