The mercy of littleness

James Finlay writes, in the Centre for Action and Contemplation article 'The Mercy of Littleness':

At the beginning of Thérèse of Lisieux’s autobiography Story of a Soul, she admits that she wondered for a long time why God raises some people to the level of sainthood “who had offended Him” and seemed to have God’s graces forced upon them, having “no obstacle in their way when coming to Him.” Her wrestling is relatable in a world where success, fame, and comparison place us on a scale of worthiness and often lead to self-judgment. But then, Thérèse says, Jesus set before her the book of nature — a vast field of flowers in which “the splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the Lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy.”

Hence known to us as the “Little Flower,” Thérèse continues: “And so it is in the world of souls, Jesus’ garden. He willed to create great souls comparable to Lilies and roses, but He has created smaller ones and these must be content to be daisies or violets destined to give joy to God’s glances when He looks down at his feet. Perfection consists in doing His will, in being what He wills us to be.” Thérèse’s insights are reflective of Thomas Merton’s words a half-century later: “For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”

This remarkable awareness by a young French Carmelite nun, who was steeped in the writings of fellow Carmelite forebears St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila, reminds us that life should not be oriented around climbing to a place of importance. Instead, we discover who we are in Christ through the ordinariness of our lives. As Fr. Richard Rohr learned from Paula D’Arcy, “God comes to us disguised as our life.” Thérèse looked at her life and spiritual path and found them to be little, ordinary, and unremarkable. St. John of the Cross experienced his dark night of the soul amid imprisonment, Teresa of Ávila explore her interior castle amid sickness and ecstatic visions, and Thérèse discovered her Little Way as a daisy in a field of lilies and roses.

The Jesus Prayer, it seems to me, exists precisely in that space of littleness and mercy. As Jesus himself once said "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children." (Luke 10:21 NIV). The Prayer is simple, no more than 12 words, and to pray it asks no more of us than merely to silently repeat the words Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

We cannot know the results of our prayer. We are not praying for anything tangible, so we can't tell if we've received it or not. There is no special technique involved, so that we might know if we've mastered it or not. We are not aiming for an altered state of consciousness, so that we might be able to discern whether we've achieved our goal. We are simply sitting quietly and saying the Prayer in the silence, expecting nothing.  It is the plainest and smallest of disciplines, and all it asks is mercy.

The last resort of the helpless

Prayer is something deeper than words. It is present in the soul before it has been formulated in words. And it abides in the soul after the last words of prayer have passed over our lips. 

Prayer is an attitude of our hearts, an attitude of mind. Prayer is a definite attitude of our hearts toward God, an attitude which He in heaven immediately recognizes as prayer, as an appeal to His heart. Whether it takes the form of words or not, does not mean anything to God, only to ourselves. 

What is this spiritual condition? What is that attitude of heart which God recognizes as prayer? ... 

In the first place, helplessness. This is unquestionably the first and the surest indication of a praying heart. As far as I can see, prayer has been ordained only for the helpless. It is the last resort of the helpless. Indeed, the very last way out. We try everything before we finally resort to prayer. 

This is not only true of us before our conversion. Prayer is our last resort also throughout our whole Christian life. I know very well that we offer many and beautiful prayers, both privately and publicly, without helplessness as the impelling power. But I am not at all positive that this is prayer. 

Prayer and helplessness are inseparable. Only he who is helpless can truly pray.

Ole Hallesby, Prayer (1931) pp.10-11 

We grow up learning to admit to almost anything but helplessness. "God helps those who help themselves!" we are taught, even though there is no such verse in all of Scripture. But helping ourselves is really no more than grasping - John Keats' "irritable reaching after fact and reason" - instead of simply waiting in the stillness of longed-for grace. Oliver Murray writes, 

We live in a world in which we are very good at grasping... 

Today, perhaps more than ever, it is about learning to receive the world — reality itself — as gift. Creation points beyond itself, not because we force it to, but because it comes from the hand of a Creator. Christ tells us, "Seek, and you will find." But Christian seeking is not the same thing as grasping. Sometimes we have to become quiet enough to notice what has been there all along. 

"We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us...  And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit..." (Romans 8:26-27 NIV). To remain still, in the open acknowledgement of our own helplessness, is the very heart of prayer. And it's for this reason that contemplative prayer, and especially hesychasm, the prayer of helpless stillness, is so often the shortest way in Christ to God - to the ground of all that is given, of all that is. 

The paradox of discipline

The classical Disciplines of the spiritual life call us to move beyond surface living into the depths. They invite us to explore the inner caverns of the spiritual realm. They urge us to be the answer to a hollow world. John Woolman counsels, ‘It is good for thee to dwell deep, that thou mayest feel and understand the spirits of people.’

We must not be led to believe that the Disciplines are only for spiritual giants and hence beyond our reach, or only for contemplatives who devote all their time to prayer and meditation. Far from it. God intends the Disciplines of the spiritual life to be for ordinary human beings: people who have jobs, who care for children, who wash dishes and mow lawns. In fact, the Disciplines are best exercised in the midst of our relationships with our husband or wife, our brothers and sisters, our friends and neighbours.

Neither should we think of the Spiritual Disciplines as some dull drudgery aimed at exterminating laughter from the face of the earth. Joy is the keynote of all the Disciplines. The purpose of the Disciplines is liberation from the stifling slavery to self-interest and fear. When the inner spirit is liberated from all that weighs it down, it can hardly be described as dull drudgery.

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, p.1

The regular discipline of some contemplative practice is as necessary a thing to the spiritual life as breathing. (It is no coincidence that so many practices do involve some level of attention to the breath.) 

Many of us may not immediately recognise our favourite practice as either contemplative or classical, but it seems that the patterns of the spiritual life continually recur whether we immediately recognise them or not. The method of prayer and Bible study known as Lectio Divina dates back to the 3rd century BC; yet it is in essence what countless evangelical (and other) Christians practice daily, and refer to as their "Quiet Time". Bare attention to the breath is a contemplative practice that likewise dates back in the Christian tradition at least to the Desert Fathers and Mothers - and in the Buddhist East many centuries further back - but it is in essence the practice used by thousands of followers of various secular programmes of mindfulness, not to mention Centering Prayer and its variations among contemporary Christians.

But the spiritual disciplines are channels of grace and freedom beyond anything that might be expected of things with so unpromising a name. They set us free from the dreary confines of our own impulses and inclinations, from the exigencies of our digestion or sleep patterns. They are habits of prayer and contemplation that will grow, the more we practice them, to be as natural as breathing itself. We can rest in the quiet necessity of habit as in a well-made chair, knowing that it can be relied on to support us however unpromising our feelings at the time. We can trust the the steady pattern of our chosen discipline - actually it is usually more like a calling, a movement of grace, than an choice; but that is a matter for another day, perhaps - when we can't trust our own inclinations. To return to our practice, no matter whether we are tired, or anxious, or distracted, is its own freedom, quite apart from the familiar benefits of the practice itself.

Words for the ineffable

For all its inspiration, for all the lives it has changed, the Bible is undeniably problematic. Put in the hands of egocentric, unloving, or power-hungry people or those who have never learned how to read spiritually inspired literature, it is almost always a disaster. History has demonstrated this, century after century, so this is not an unwarranted, disrespectful, or biased conclusion. The burning of heretics, the Crusades, slavery, apartheid, homophobia, and the genocide and oppression of native peoples were all justified through the selective use of Scripture quotes...

The Christian’s goal is to be transformed by the renewing of our mind into the mind of Christ (see Romans 12:2; 1 Corinthians 2:16; and Philippians 2:5). That is why I try to read the Bible the way Jesus did, following Jesus’ hermeneutic (a method of interpreting sacred texts)... Jesus was a master of winnowing the chaff from the grain (see Matthew 3:12 and Luke 3:17) and “bringing out of the storeroom new treasures as well as old” (Matthew 13:52).

The Bible is an anthology of many books. It is a record of people’s experience of God’s self-revelation. It is an account of our very human experience of the divine intrusion into history. The book did not fall from heaven in a pretty package. It was written by people trying to listen to God. I believe that the Spirit was guiding the listening and writing process. We must also know that humans always see "through a glass darkly . . . and all knowledge is imperfect" (1 Corinthians 13:12). Prayer and patience surrounding such human words will keep us humble and searching for the true Living Word, the person of Jesus, which is how the Spirit best teaches (1 Corinthians 2:10,13)—through living exemplars. This is surely what it means to know "contemplatively."

Richard Rohr, What do we do with the Bible?

We tend these days to adopt polarised positions on Scripture - as on so much else. Either the Bible is the literal word of God, inerrant in every verse, or it was made up out of whole cloth by church and civic authorities seeking to bamboozle believers into unquestioning obedience. Rohr here expresses perfectly my own long-held - if instinctive - belief that the biblical authors were honest people doing the best they could, with the often severely limited cultural and literary tools at their disposal, to eff the ineffable.

Spiritual experience is, at least so far as I have found, impossible to discuss or even to recount without the use of images and concepts derived from religion, literature, society; words common to my readers, words that resonate, that convey something felt by both reader and writer. All writers build on, or else contradict, those who have gone before: as Harold Bloom saw, we can do nothing else. It was no different for the people whose words form the canon of Scripture.

So what are we to do with Scripture? I think there is little useful we can do unaided: we cannot resist becoming drawn off into critical theorising, political mining operations, or the excision of slabs of text to abuse each other with. But by reading prayerfully we can allow ourselves to be questioned by the text; we are both questioned and changed by what we read; ultimately, by God. We open ourselves to the same process - the same Spirit - that formed the text in the first place, in the minds of those who wrote it down.

As Rohr goes on (ibid.):

When history finally gets to the Risen Jesus, there is nothing to be afraid of in God. Jesus’ very breath is identified with forgiveness and the divine Shalom (see John 20:20-23). If the Risen Jesus is the full and trustworthy unveiling of the nature of God, then we live in a safe and love-filled universe. It is not that God has changed, or that the Hebrew God is a different God than the God of Jesus; it is that we are growing up as we move through the text and deepen our experience. Stay with the Bible and with your inner life with God and your capacity for God will increase.

Grace, faith and the numinous

So what kind of a thing is faith? So often we hear of it as Wikipedia defines it, "belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion", but that can't be it - or not all of it, anyhow. As Alan Watts points out, 

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

And the Apostle Paul says, "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God..." (Ephesians 2:8 NIV)

So if we are saved by grace through faith, and faith is the gift - the grace - of God, then there is something spooky going on, and the Holy Spook is God himself, as the doctrine of the Trinity makes clear.

The term "numinous" implies an encounter with the mystery of God - or with something the subject experiences as God or however they explain him to themselves. The psychologist and contemplative Susan Blackmore describes mystical experiences as inherently numinous (Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, p.108). She writes,

There is no simple way to define or even describe mystical experiences, which are often said to be ineffable or indescribable. But they typically involve a sense of the numinous, and convey unexpected knowledge or understanding of the universe. Perhaps most central to the experience is a changed sense of self, whether this is a complete loss of the idea of being a separate self or a sense of merging with the universe in oneness.

And Aldous Huxley put it even more strikingly: 

The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the in-compatibility between man's egotism and the divine purity, between man's self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God. 

The Doors of Perception, p.55

 

To remain still, to obey Jesus' injunction, "But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen" (Matthew 6:6 NIV), is a more radical act of surrender than is sometimes realised. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews said, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." (Hebrews 10:31 NRSV) Perhaps contemplative prayer is nothing more, really, than this.

Self-repeating pattern

 The Jesus Prayer is not so much a prayer as a self-repeating pattern of prayer. The words Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner become an intention, a movement of the heart, rather than an invocation or a petition. Steadily, over the months and years of saying the Prayer daily, it becomes self-acting, as it were: something that has a life of its own, a small sparkling stream running sometimes out in the sunlight of the attention, and sometimes hidden beneath the roots and moss of the unconscious, purling softly within the shadows of the vacant or the preoccupied mind. And then, as Simon Barrington-Ward wrote,

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…

 

But the emphasis must lie on words like, "Soon I find that I..." It happens to one; it isn't done as an act of will. All the will can do is to initiate the process. After that - perhaps it is action at a level deeper than thought or emotion, perhaps it is simpler simply to ascribe it to grace - the Prayer takes over, lives its own life, changes. The Jesus Prayer has its own seasons, and they are not at our behest.

All we can do is to sit still, and put ourselves in the way of prayer. The rest is down to something far more profound - in every sense of the word - than anything that could be described as "saying" the Prayer. Somehow the Prayer touches the very ground of being, the bright expanse itself that never was not and is no thing and never fails. It is there we are held, and find our rest.

No purchase on borderless infinity

Nicholas [of Cusa] is thoroughgoing: we are ignorant concerning God and the world and Christ. His starting point is reminiscent of Gregory of Nyssa: we are to explore the implications of divine infinity. Knowledge requires boundaries to things that are to be named and measured, whose relations and distinctions it explores. Knowledge simply has no purchase on borderless infinity. 

JP Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality, p.103

Prayer - at least, contemplative prayer - is to put ourselves, as comprehensively as we are able, beyond boundaries. We are finite, bounded creatures; yet we are curiously able to reach beyond ourselves, not by knowledge or will, but by yearning, by love. 

John Keats once wrote, in a letter to his brothers,

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

The Complete Works of John Keats: Poems, Plays & Personal Letters, p.763

For Keats, "the sense of Beauty" seems to have given him the beginnings of a "purchase on borderless infinity" - at any rate, he has learned the limitations of knowledge, and of the wonderfully expressed "irritable reaching after fact and reason". 

"All our steps are ordered by the LORD; how then can we understand our own ways?" (Proverbs 20:24 NRSV) Our unknowing extends even to our own actions and intentions. There is not only nothing we can think of God: there is nothing we can do to search him out. All we can do is sit still, and call this stillness prayer.

The author of The Cloud of Unknowing (Ch.6) wrote, "God can be loved, but not thought. By love, God can be embraced and held, but not by thinking..." And this is the point of our prayer: to remain still, in silence, allows the heart to find the empty places that open up within itself. Only when we cease trying to think of God can God be found. In the self-repeating words of the Jesus Prayer, or in the wordlessness of centering prayer, the irritable scratching of the mind after form and definition fails, and love floods in.