Wide-eyed seeing

Contemplation allows us to see the truth of things in their wholeness. It is a mental discipline and gift that detaches us, even neurologically, from our addiction to our habitual way of thinking and from our minds which like to think they are in control. We stop believing our little binary mind (which strips things down to two choices and then usually identifies with one of them) and begin to recognize the inadequacy of that limited way of knowing reality. In fact, a binary mind is a recipe for superficiality, if not silliness. Only the contemplative, or the deeply intuitive, can start venturing out into much broader and more open-ended horizons. This is probably why Einstein said that “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination  encircles the world.”

But how do we learn this contemplative mind, this deep, mysterious, and life-giving way of seeing, of being with, reality? Why does it not come naturally to us? Actually, it does come momentarily, in states of great love and great suffering, but such wide-eyed seeing normally does not last. We return quickly to dualistic analysis and use our judgments to retake control. A prayer practice—contemplation—is simply a way of maintaining the fruits of great love and great suffering over the long haul and in different situations. And that takes a lot of practice—in fact, our whole life becomes one continual practice.

Richard Rohr, Why Contemplation?

That’s what all this is about, isn’t it? Wide-eyed seeing – the necessity of awakening from the daze of subject/object, inward/outward. As I mentioned the other week, trauma – and the shock of love – can free us, instantly, from the fog of the default internal narrative, the user illusion of the “selfplex” (Blackmore) that occupies our days. But the moment fades; we can even begin to doubt it ever happened – or if it did, that it meant what it seemed to mean in the blazing moment that we were there, present for once, in the utter light of what actually is.

As Rohr says, our contemplative practice is only the way – the only way – that we can sustain ourselves in the presence: in the vastness of the open ground. It will not feel like that most of the time – in fact, it may hardly ever feel like that – but each day’s hour of sitting sustains us in the unknowing from which this wide-eyed seeing can proceed. This unknowing is the hollow place in us where, as in the moments of shock and trauma, what is can touch what we are. It is the crack where the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen saw.

Weltschmerz?

One of the main works of contemplation is detaching from the ego, from the self, from impure motivations of success or power, money or control. That will never stop, but it isn’t really that meaningful unless that detachment is accompanied by an attachment. What do we find after all the months and years we’ve been practicing some form of contemplation or meditation? Do we have an increased attachment, sympathy, empathy, and compassion for what I call in The Tears of Things the suffering of the world? For the women of Gaza, the children of Ukraine, the starving people of Africa, the poorest of the poor, and all those marginalized in the United States and around the world? If the emptiness of “letting go” is not pretty soon filled up by “holding on” to some kind of deep solidarity with the suffering of the world, I don’t know that it’s Christian contemplation or even meaningful contemplation at all. It seems we’re simply back into private spirituality again.  

Richard Rohr, Contemplation: A Path to Compassion

One of the “side effects”, for want of a better phrase, of my nearly 40-year practice of Christian contemplation was for me a sharp increase in my awareness of the pain of the world; a sense expressed perhaps more clearly than anywhere I have read recently in a passage from a murder mystery by Rebecca Tope:

The low, repetitive bawling was a distant throb of distress that Lilah had never grown used to, even though it happened every time a cow gave birth. Sometimes, at night, it was unbearable, the bereft mother calling and calling for her baby, the embodiment of despair. Sometimes it seemed to Lilah that in her short life she had been party to a fathomless ocean of pain and misery, that all this suffering was there inside her, barely supressed by her flippant ways and habitual optimism. And sometimes she couldn’t stop herself imagining every hurt and cruelty; every experimental laboratory; every horse used in war; every animal ill-used in the service of man; every creature sent terrified to the abattoir. All of it added up to an entire universe of horrifying anguish, and she had to breathe slow and deep to be able to carry on.

This passage (the wider context of the narrative makes it clear that the character’s experience is not confined merely to questions of animal husbandry, but relates equally to her grief at the murder of her father, and to the inhumanity of humankind generally) gives an extraordinarily clear glimpse into the aching hollow of helpless compassion that contemplative practice opens in one’s heart. For me, at any rate, this inescapable pain was the motor of prayer; a prayer of, literally, grieving with – which is the root of the word “compassion” – rather than “praying for” in the sense of asking a favour of a personal deity.

The standard Buddhist answer to this question is probably the practice of either metta or tonglen; but these too beg the question, how does it work? How can prayer, or some kind of directed sympathy, actually make any difference? Are we not merely kidding ourselves? And is so, are we not better off simply caring for ourselves, retreating into a private, if comforting, spirituality, and tuning out the cries of the world?

Simon Barrington-Ward writes, of the Jesus Prayer,

After all, the whole prayer becomes an intercession. Soon I find that I am on longer praying just for myself, but when I say “on me, a sinner” all the situations of grief and terror, of pain and suffering begin to be drawn into me and I into them. I begin to pray as a fragment of this wounded creation longing for its release into fulfillment… I am in those for whom I would pray and they are in me, as is the whole universe. Every petition of the prayer becomes a bringing of all into the presence and love of God…

How can we make sense of this, if we cannot join with Bishop Simon in his avowedly Christian phraseology? Joan Tollifson:

Perhaps this is what the world needs more than anything else—human beings waking up from the powerful hypnotic trance of ideology, division and apparent separation, waking up to the wholeness and the unconditional love that is at the heart of our being. It may seem that we are small and insignificant, and that this kind of devotion to presence can’t possibly affect the world at large. But we’re actually not small. Each and every drop contains and affects the whole.

We, and all whom we love, and for whom we grieve, are frail, temporary creatures; but we exist, if only for a moment. Isness, Eckhart’s Istigkeit, is the only ground of what we are.

The apostle Paul wrote, sounding for a moment almost like a Taoist, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17 NIV) The ground of being is just that: it is no thing at all; and yet it is the ground of all that is. There is nowhere outside this open ground; no end to its beginning, to the love that holds in being all that has come to be in it. Like Indra’s net, each node – each one of us  –  “contains and affects the whole.”

Faithfulness

The first thing that we begin to grasp, if we are listening to this teaching, is that meditation is a discipline, a learning process, something we must be faithful to, because in our meditation we are entering into the deepest relationship of our life. We must come to our meditation as if we are approaching the person we love most in the world, and what is needed in all relationships is fidelity. So we enter into meditation with fidelity knowing that in the discipline of it, we are becoming true disciples, true learners.

(from Aspects of Love 1 by Laurence Freeman OSB)

Meditation, any form of contemplative practice, is an odd, sometimes paradoxical kind of a thing in some ways; not least of which is the fact that despite its being so clearly a beginner's activity (see the last post here) it only reveals itself for what it is after long faithfulness. None of the contemplative disciplines is a practice for anyone looking for instant results: only after uncounted repetitions can you begin to see what is going on, and like a human relationship, only after long faithfulness can you truly touch the heart of it, and even then it's not a thing you find, but a place you find yourself in.

Hanging in there is sometimes difficult. It's so easy to think that if I only changed to some alternative practice my difficulties would be resolved, or I'd be able to step up to another level... But there it is again: this isn't about levels, it's about turning up, day after day, just quietly, not looking for any result, but letting go of the whole idea of results.

Meditation is also non-acquisitive. We are not trying to acquire anything; there is nothing to acquire. The dynamic of meditation is not trying to get anything but to lose, to let go. It is in the losing and the letting go that we will find everything that we have, everything that we are given.

(Freeman, ibid.)

Always beginning again

We are always learning; we are always in the learning mode; we are always open to experience. We are not judging our meditation; we are not comparing it. We are allowing it to be integrated into our daily life so that it becomes a normal and natural part of our life. The simplicity of that commitment, the simplicity of that discipline, opens up a path in which everything in our life can be channelled.

 (from Aspects of Love 1 by Laurence Freeman OSB)

I think this is one of the fundamental things to grasp about the contemplative life: that we are always beginning again, always beginners on a path we have trodden countless times already. It ought to be one of the first things we learn, but somehow it never is - the penny only seems to drop after years of practice, years of expecting to "get somewhere".

Of course, God being infinite, he is always infinitely beyond our understanding, however long we keep up this odd way of life; and so we can never really make progress in the practice of prayer. We can only begin again, each time we sit. 

Once again, I have to say that this is one of the things I most like about the Jesus Prayer, that it quite explicitly eschews the idea of progress, of levels of attainment and things like that. It is such a simple practice, open to anyone. You don't need to be ordained, or theologically educated, or have made a certain number of retreats, or have studied the right books: you just sit down and say, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." That's all. It takes about 12 seconds, and the rest of one's life, to pray that little prayer.

The edge of things

To live on the edge of the inside is different than being an insider, a "company man" or a dues paying member. Yes, you have learned the rules and you understand and honor the system as far as it goes, but you do not need to protect it, defend it or promote it. It has served its initial and helpful function. You have learned the rules well enough to know how to "break the rules" without really breaking them at all. "Not to abolish the law but to complete it" as Jesus rightly puts it (Matthew 5:17). A doorkeeper must love both the inside and the outside of his or her group, and know how to move between these two loves.

Richard Rohr, Life on the Edge: Understanding the Prophetic Position

I am coming, gradually, to see that the edge is the inevitable place for anyone called to the kind of quasi-solitary prayer that this blog describes. There is that in me, as there is in a lot of people, which grasps at belonging. It's a way of self-validation I suppose, of identifying with something more than myself, but it is profoundly unhelpful. To get caught up in the politics, in the identity mechanisms, of any organisation - however "holy" - risks damage not only to the solitary pilgrim, but to the church that comes to believe they can be relied upon. 

This is a painful admission. Rohr goes on: 

I am convinced that when Jesus sent his first disciples on the road to preach to "all the nations" (Matthew and Luke) and to "all creation" (Mark), he was also training them to risk leaving their own security systems and yet to be gatekeepers for them. He told them to leave the home office and connect with other worlds. This becomes even clearer in his instruction for them "not to take any baggage" and to submit to the hospitality and even the hostility of others. Jesus says the same of himself in John's Gospel (10:7), where he calls himself "the gate" where people "will go freely in and out, and be sure of finding pasture" (10:9). What an amazing permission! He sees himself more as a place of entrance and exit than a place of settlement. Funny that we always noticed the "in" but never the "out"! 

(ibid.)

To accept that permission, though, while remaining aware of one's own incompleteness (sinfulness), is an extraordinary freedom, despite the social and psychological risk inherent in such a position. As Rohr says, earlier in this same essay:

The edge of things is a liminal space -- a very sacred place where guardian angels are especially available and needed. The edge is a holy place, or as the Celts called it, "a thin place" and you have to be taught how to live there. To take your position on the spiritual edge of things is to learn how to move safely in and out, back and forth, across and return. It is a prophetic position, not a rebellious or antisocial one. When you live on the edge of anything with respect and honor, you are in a very auspicious position. 

It doesn't, I have to say, feel very auspicious. But perhaps that's as well: it would be fatally easy to mistake such liminality for heroism, as Colin Wilson pointed out in The Outsider many years ago. Nevertheless it seems inescapable; it appears that, to the extent one fails to recognise or accept the gift for what it is, one is doomed to reenact one's old mistakes. "Don't pay the ferryman," sang Chris de Burgh; it may be good advice, out on the edge.

The Human Condition

The contemplative journey, because it involves the purification of the unconscious, is not a magic carpet to bliss. It is an exercise of letting go of the false self, a humbling process, because it is the only self we know. God approaches us from many different perspectives: illness, misfortune, bankruptcy, divorce proceedings, rejection, inner trials. God has not promised to take away our trial, but to help us to change our attitudes toward them. That is what holiness really is. In this life, happiness is rooted in our basic attitude toward reality.

Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

One of the most common objections to the story-book conception of God is the often-heard, "If evil exists, then God must be evil, or incompetent, or else non-existent." I am not going to attempt to rehash all the many and complex arguments of theodicy; they don't convince anyone, anyway. Keating's comment speaks to my own experience precisely. 

Contemplative faith is, as the Quakers say, an experiential faith (see Quaker faith  & practice 19.02) - explanations and arguments appropriate to the rational, discursive mind so often skip over the surface of our deep selves, over the waves of grief and longing, the currents of desire, like stones over the sea; it is only when they have worn themselves out with bouncing that they will sink out of sight. 

It was Karl Rahner who wrote, "The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all." I have written of this before, often enough, but it bears repeating: the human condition is contemplative (whatever name you choose for that) or it has nothing whatever to say to the "fathomless ocean of pain" we are born into. Only love, the love that bore the Cross, can plumb that ocean's depth.

Praying in faith

Practices such as the Jesus Prayer, and the WCCM's "Maranatha", seem to me truly to be prayers, despite the latter's use of the term "mantra" for their repetitive formula.

The Jesus Prayer, as I have so often mentioned in this blog, derives from the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14) and the accounts of Bartimaeus' healing (Mark 10:46-52) and the blind men on the road from Jericho (Matthew 20:29-34).

Terry Hinks, writing (on 1 Corinthians 16:19-24) in New Daylight:

Finally, [Paul] takes up the pen from the scribe to authenticate the letter in his own hand and with his own personal greeting. These are not just words – they are a blessing and not to be given glibly, far less carelessly. Without love we are nothing, as he said earlier in the letter. The gift becomes a curse if there is no love – either for the Lord or each other. The Lord of love remains the heart of the matter, hence Paul’s prayer and the prayer of the early church: ‘Our Lord, come!’ (v. 22) – in Aramaic, Maranatha.

Love is the final word – the grace of our Lord Jesus and the love Paul has for his difficult church in Corinth – not just any love, but a love for all and a love that we see in Jesus.

These are prayers, addressed in all humility to a God whose grace and mercy are present to us, and to all that is, in Christ Jesus. They are not intended to generate an experience, or even primarily to give rise to a state of mind, in the one praying. They are more like an opening of the heart to that presence as the gift of the Holy Spirit; the prayer itself is then a cleansing and a penitent thing, and its effects, if we need to look for effects, are more peace and stillness than anything else.

Increasingly I am convinced that much of the literature associated with the practice of Christian Meditation, especially those works by Laurence Freeman and Sarah Bachelard, is applicable almost equally to the Jesus Prayer; just as conversely, there is much that WCCM practitioners could learn from authors like Kallistos Ware and Frederica Matthews-Green! One hopeful contemporary sign is the openness in much of the Church to ideas from other streams of Christianity; in contemplative prayer, since the middle of the last century, we appear to be learning to pray together and to trust each other in the way that people like Thomas Merton and Thomas R Kelly seem to have dreamed of.  

It is the latter who seems to me to have summed up the source of the impulse to this kind of prayer in the fewest words:

In this humanistic age we suppose man is the initiator and God is the responder. But the living Christ within us is the initiator and we are the responders. God the Lover, the accuser, the revealer of light and darkness presses within us. ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.’ And all our apparent initiative is already a response, a testimonial to His secret presence and working within us. The basic response of the soul to the Light is internal adoration and joy, thanksgiving and worship, self-surrender and listening.

Thomas R Kelly, 1941 (Quaker faith & practice 2.10)