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.

Radical negation

[R]adical negation and the deliberate use of unlike likenesses will characterize our apophatic speech... the language of unknowing. Inadequate words – all words, that is – are not only to be unsaid but unlearned, unknown.

...We are not to think of the kind of ignorance that just refers to a lack or deprivation of knowledge; that is like the kind of darkness that can be dispelled by light. Just as there is a higher darkness at the top of Sinai, a pregnant and shining darkness, so there is another kind of ignorance, a holy unknowing that transcends our knowing of all that is knowable... Whereas negation or unsaying is a process, a continual practice along the whole of the ascent (or, in the more passive language these texts [of the Dionysian corpus] prefer, the process of being ‘lifted up’), unknowing not only describes the repeated decision ‘not to know’ ideas along the way but also, and more often, a state of being, the mental state of one who has come into the cloud atop Sinai. If God is beyond knowledge, then unknowing is the state of mind in which we meet him... 

So unknowing is different from ignorance, both in that it knows it cannot know and also in that it has gone beyond knowledge, has digested the wisdom of knowledge about God’s activities all the way up to their highest point, and has kept itself free of entanglement in concepts. In the state of holy unknowing, the mind is not a blank: it is full of wonder and glory.

JP Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality, p.87

Radical negation is not radical negativity: in fact it is the diametrical opposite of that. Only by telling of what is not, only by unknowing all we thought we knew of God, can we know God.

There is nothing we can say of God that is not less than God; and if we are to step out onto the mountain with Elijah (1 Kings 19) everything we knew of God turns out to be empty. Only in the hollowing out of what actually is can we find the silence of God, who is the ground of being itself; and that is what prayer is for.

Solitude and unknowing

Like sight, knowledge depends on an element of duality. Grammar distinguishes the ‘knower’ from ‘the object of knowledge’. Aside from the fact that the Creator of all cannot be any kind of ‘object’, the divine activity of ‘onyng’ [Julian of Norwich] finally removes the ground from under any duality. The soul’s ‘solitude’ is not necessarily a denial of divine presence; when it is united with God, there are not two beings to count. Peace and holiness are ‘held at no remove’, as John [of the Cross] says. In so far as the soul speaks at all there, it stammers, tripping itself up, disrupting its own saying. 

Apophatic teachers therefore use the language of unknowing to mean something that is the opposite of blank ignorance. It signifies both an emptiness, an absence of anything that the mind can catch and hold on to, and also a fullness or excess – the heart and mind so filled with the vivid and dynamic life of God that there is no space or time left over as a ground for observation. The cloud of unknowing is not the same thing as God or union; it is a place of vulnerability where the divine may meet us. The beloved is sometimes present in the Shulamite’s chamber but sometimes there is only crushing absence there. We may climb to the top of the mountain but we can’t make God be there for us: that is a matter for grace. 

JP Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality, p.65

It is an odd thing we've found here, that we keep finding as our contemplative way unwinds. Language doesn't desert is so much as it self-deconstructs as soon as we begin to use it of God. We can write of the mystical life - people have been doing it for thousands of years, one way or another; but their words come to bits, always. Hence koans; hence the strange antinomies of the Psalms. 

Solitude is inevitable. What matters most is unspeakable, in any normal language. Even to those we love and trust the most we can't say where we have been. The attempt leaves us floundering in the seashells and spindrift along the shores of speaking, where the waves of Presence have washed us up, breathless and flattened in the sea wind.

The trouble is that we can't really even think of God, not in any normal way, since discursive thought, like the language it uses to explain itself to itself, slices things up. That may not be too bad when it comes to things (though it can too easily divide what is indivisible) but it fails spectacularly with God, who is no thing. That's why the author of The Cloud of Unknowing wrote, "Therefore I will leave on one side everything I can think, and choose for my love that thing which I cannot think! Why? Because he may well be loved, but not thought. By love he can be caught and held, but by thinking never."

God, who is no thing, is not a being: 'he' is the very ground of being itself, isness (Istigkeit) before anything is. Only in incarnation can he be touched by us frail things of flesh.