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.

The weak things of this world

God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things - and the things that are not - to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God - that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: 'Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.'

And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. (1 Corinthians 1:27-2:3 NIV)

Then [Jesus] said to them all: 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.' (Luke 9:23 NIV)

What is going on here? All this is as deeply counterintuitive to us as it was to the honour-bound Jews and the conquering Romans of the first century. But as Rowan Williams wrote: "Pretty well everything we read in the New Testament is shadowed by the cross. It is, first and foremost, the sign of how much has changed and how it has changed."

The longer we persevere with the contemplative life, though, the more this kind of language begins to make sense. Prayer - and especially contemplative prayer - is a matter of weakness, and unknowing. To walk within the cloud of unknowing with the brokenness of the world on one's heart can be a very particular form of suffering, especially considering the total absence of feedback, of knowing whether there is, humanly, any point to our activity whatever. 

Anyone taking the eremitic vocation seriously is bound to feel helpless, quite impotent, in fact. Hermits are determined to help, to make a positive difference, but how? What can one person do, hidden and alone? Sometimes, solitaries may feel blameworthy because they live lives which shelter them from much of the suffering that so harshly mars the existence of their brothers and sisters. Love and compassion well up in them … but is it enough? What should one do and how? This is where passionate intercessory prayer and supplication spontaneously arises. 

The challenge is to live a life given over to praying for others while accepting that one will seldom, if ever, see any results. No one will be able to ascertain how, or even if, their devoted prayers are efficacious for others. It is a terrible kind of poverty—to live dedicated to helping others, yet never know what good one may be doing. All that hermits can hope is that they are doing no harm. Believers leave all results to the mercy of their God. Others rely on their convictions about the interconnection of all humanity, trusting that what affects one, touches all. This is a form of intercession expressed less by words than by a way of life. 

A Camaldolese monk once wrote: “Prayer is not only speaking to God on behalf of humanity, it is also ‘paying’ for humanity.” Suffering is part of the hermit’s vocation. One of the most acute forms is to never know whether one’s chosen lifestyle is worthwhile or has any value for others. Hermits enter into the darkness, the dusky cloud of unknowing, and walk without any light beyond that which is in their own hearts. Often, unbeknownst even to themselves, they have become beacons for others. 

Karen Karper Fredette and Paul A. Fredette, Consider the Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life, pp.213-214

What the Fredettes write applies, of course, to the contemplative life however lived, whether in community or in physical solitude. We are, like anyone called to a life of prayer, cast up on the shore of a sea of troubles. The great 20th century Russian contemplative teacher Sophrony Sakharov wrote, with startling relevance for our present time,

The Jesus Prayer will incline us to find each human being unique, the one for whom Christ was crucified. Where there is great love the heart necessarily suffers and feels pity for every creature, in particular for man; but our inner peace remains secure, even when all is in confusion in the world outside… 

It has fallen to our lot to be born into the world in an appallingly disturbed period. We are not only passive spectators but to a certain extent participants in the mighty conflict between belief and unbelief, between hope and despair, between the dream of developing mankind into a single universal whole and the blind tendency towards dissolution into thousands of irreconcilable national, racial, class or political ideologies. Christ manifested to us the divine majesty of man, son of God, and we withal are stifled by the spectacle of the dignity of man being sadistically mocked and trampled underfoot. Our most effective contribution to the victory of good is to pray for our enemies, for the whole world. We do not only believe in – we know the power of true prayer…

 

The life of prayer is the way of the cross. It can't be any other way. To pray in the name of Jesus (John 14:14) is precisely to take up one's cross in prayer, to resolve to know nothing at all in prayer except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

A small update...

I have slightly revised the static page on the Jesus Prayer (link in the menu above, or click here) in order to make it, I hope, slightly more use as a practical introduction.

21 this month

The Mercy Blog is 21 years old this month. I made my first post here on 13 August 2005, though it was not until mid-October of that year that I began publishing regularly. I suppose by now I must be one of the elders of the blogosphere...

As anyone who has followed the blog all those years will know, the posts here have traced a long and sometimes winding road; but they have always, one way or another, led back to the Jesus Prayer, and to apophatic spirituality in general. After all, it was in 1978 that I was first introduced to the Jesus Prayer, and it has clung to me ever since, no matter where I have turned.

I had thought, five years ago, to move my blogging activities entirely to An Open Ground, but things didn't work out that way. An Open Ground seems to have been a deconstruction blog, if I can use that phrase; it has not really ever done the work I have sought to do over here. To underline the fact that that work is not finished, not by any means, The Mercy Blog seems to have retained a loyal readership even over the time when this site was lying fallow. 

I don't know yet what the next months will bring - "All our steps are ordered by the LORD; how then can we understand our own ways?" (Proverbs 20:24 NRSV) - but I will try to remain faithful to the original premise of The Mercy Blog, and record here some of my own adventures and misadventures in prayer, and more importantly, some of the words I discover from those further along the pathless path (Martin Laird) than I.