a flash of fear behind us

As Jacques Lacan attests there is some experience of an ideal state through which we are to both have great suffering and pleasure simultaneously and fleetingly.  For Simone Weil this state of being is found in Decreation, in the understanding of life as it passes through a void.  In my experience emptiness and void have always been both dynamic and fleeting.  This experience I find is a flash over the shoulder of one who would look behind themselves glancing at a spark that startles and awakens or kindles in them a very similar yearning which I believe Lacan, Weil, and I have experienced.  Through the years I have known that this experience does indeed happen for many people.  It is not a turn to Christ, but a fear that strikes one the his or her body as though something tremendous has happened, of which one cannot give word to and yet cannot be ignored.  

I feel my heart pound and my breathing become shallow, as some feeling which would situate itself in the darkness of St. John of the Cross and he might have feared.  This fear is healthy and devastating, a feeling that perhaps Schleiermacher or Kierkegaard or even Nietzsche or Schopenhauer might have described in a moment of angst and oneness with something totally Other than themselves.  The flash over the shoulder is driven by anxiety and startles one to uninhibited feelings of grace that for many are unrecognizable.   I hope that this flash leads to a yearning for many who would become inclined to linger in the fear and find something there that is beyond words.  This is not the numinous which Rudolf Otto spoke of, nor is it a light at the end of a tunnel, but something that seeps through the blinders we all have on which prevent us from, as Simone Weil would have it, being scorched by the Law, the Word, or the Face of God.  This scorching in Weil’s understanding is prevented by what she terms necessity, which is a sort of law of the universe that shields us.