Sailing in the Fog (a reblog)

In her small book Mystical Hope: Trusting in the Mercy of God, Cynthia Bourgeault quotes Dom Bede Griffiths as saying that there are three "pathways to the centre" the "innermost ground of our being where we meet and are met by God": near-death experience, falling desperately in love, and meditation. She speaks of the "visceral remembrance of how vivid and abundant life is when the sense of separateness has dropped away”, but goes on to describe meditation as "go[ing] down to the same place, but by a back staircase deep within [our] own being."

Bourgeault, a little further on in her book than the Bede Griffiths quote, mentions the experience of sailing in the fog off the coast of Maine, and realising (as I have myself when I was young and spent time messing about in boats) that in the absence of a clear sight of one's landfall other senses develop: the smell of land, the sound, and the feel beneath one's feet, of the waves' shortening and quickening near the shore. She draws a parallel with the spiritual life:

If egoic thinking [normal, everyday consciousness] is like sailing by reference to where you are not—by what is out there and up ahead—spiritual awareness is like sailing by reference to where you are. It is a way of "thinking" at a much more visceral level of yourself—responding to subtle intimations of presence too delicate to to pick up at your normal level of awareness, but which emerge like a sea swell from the ground of your being once you relax and allow yourself to belong deeply to the picture.

Bourgeault goes on to describe meditation (she is using the word to describe Christian contemplation, whether by centring prayer, the Jesus Prayer, or another similar method) as, once it is driven by "the yearning for truth [having] become… overwhelming in us, and we have the sense that everything done in the ordinary way of consciousness merely ends in lies and disillusionment", wagering everything on the trust that there is this other sense in us, "that knows how to sail in the fog, see in the dark."

We are so used, especially in our goal-oriented society, even among Friends all too often, to knowing, with our surface reasoning, where we are going and why, that sailing in the fog can seem like a fruitless, even foolhardy endeavour. But where we are going, if we truly are "yearning for truth", cannot be found with binoculars, in the sunlight. There are so-called charts, but they are scribbles, like The Cloud of Unknowing, on the backs of envelopes, 'x' marks the spot on a scrap of salt-stained parchment, and in any case the sands have shifted over the long years and their tides. (I was amused to see, on Thesaurus.com, that one the antonyms listed for "reasoning" was "truth"!)

I have been growing used to sailing in the fog, sneaking down the back stairs of my mind. Sometimes I find it hard to start writing prose when I have been drifting like a seabird in the haar. Listen, the waves do change near landfall. Listen, you can smell the trees, the damp earth. But you must be very quiet, and stop straining your eyes in the mist.


[Reblogged, slightly edited, from a post a year ago, on my blog Silent Assemblies]