The GRUND

that priceless "ground" of the soul, where no word or image can enter

“The grund is called the summit of the soul. It is the place where the image of God is found. It has no name.” — Thomas Merton

“It is there that is found profound silence. No creature and no image have ever penetrated there. Here the soul does not act and has no knowledge, here she knows nothing of herself, of any image, or of any creature.” — John Tauler (1300-1361)

The grund — a lovely German word — is that deepest ground of being in us that transcends all the stories we tell about who we are, and all the words we use as labels to define us. It predates names and so transcends them, just as God predates and transcends the names we use to describe him. It is a place where words fall through our fingers, clumsy and crude, like a sieve trying vainly to hold on to water. The only language there, if you could call it language, is silence, and that silence is the breath of God. 

It is a lovely and gracious thing to recognize this place in yourself: to know that God makes his home in the profound silence at the center of your being. As God revealed to Julian of Norwich, “I am the Ground of your beseeching.” Because God lives in the grounded silence of our being, he can always be found there, not in words, nor via the intellect, but as a direct experience of oneness, which is always available to us, as close as breath. 

It is this union the scripture points to when it says, “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Indeed, one could say that grund is beingness itself—the pure, unfiltered aliveness within us that is too deep to be captured in words, and too vast to be observed by our egoic selves.

We construct elaborate stories and build fortresses of names and labels around our grund in an effort to control our essence or to hide it from others or even ourselves. But none of our language can contain it. Words are both too crude and too small for such a task.

All that our egos can say is that there is something priceless and profoundly sacred at the core of every human being. We sense it every time we witness another life snuffed out; the loss is measureless.

The grund is that place in us where God has made a home, where he has clothed himself in a stillness and a silence that is also, mysteriously, our truest self.