During this time when physically attending corporate worship of any kind is difficult, not to say inadvisable, and Zoom meetings have remained their distracting and inadequate selves, there has been plenty of time to be quiet, and to allow the assumptions and traditions by which our spiritual lives are usually conditioned to settle out, as it were, like the cloudiness in a newly-established aquarium.
Wikipedia defines religion as "a social-cultural system of designated behaviours and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements."
Contemplation, however differently it may be defined in different traditions, is at root a kind of inner seeing, an experiential encounter with the ground of being that gives rise to, and sustains, all that is. The many techniques of contemplative practice may in the end give rise to contemplation, but their intention is much more modest: to train attention and consciousness sufficiently to still the field of awareness. Of course the outer forms of mediation or contemplative practice are very different, and conditioned by the religious tradition within which they arise, but very broadly something like this seems to be intended by them all.
In this period of quiet settling, separated from the religious atmosphere and bustle of corporate worship, I have begun to sense that the "social-cultural system" of religion is something quite separate from the "experimental faith" (cf. Quaker faith & practice 19.02) of contemplative practice, and crucially, the one does not depend upon the other.
Where this is leading I am not at present certain, but there is a clarity developing that I had not expected, nor intentionally "worked towards". The inward solitude of these unusual times is proving strangely fruitful. This is what Martin Laird once called a "pathless path": as Dave Tomlinson wrote, "Human language is unable to describe the external realities of God with any precision. As we have seen, this does not make language useless; it simply means that we have to accept its limitations... Religious language or talk about God and the spiritual realm is therefore inherently provisional and approximate in nature."
Perhaps it is time that silence and practice are allowed to stand without language: the field still, and open. It seems to be so for me.
2 comments:
Mike, hello!
It's a joy to be reading a fresh post from The Mercy Blog. And as you mention Quaker practice. I hope to learn a lot more about the Society of Friends in the coming year or so.
Silence and practice without language. Yes, to make time each day for what you describe, leaving "the field still, and open."
Since the pandemic, my community, and my ideas about community have changed, have "morphed" (as we might say in current American vernacular) considerably. As inadequate as online services are, I can be fortified by what I find and by what I've participated in. I'm currently a reader in an Episcopal (Anglican) parish in Cambridge, Mass. (all services virtual, of course). The priest-in-charge even asked me and several others to contribute poems to the weekly liturgies!
So there is joy in the words by which we ratify our unity and togetherness. But I wholeheartedly and wholesouledly agree that the Compassionate God whom we seek and who seeks us exists in a realm beyond words.
Thank you so much for your characteristically thoughtful reflection!
Peace and light.
Thank you, Thomas - and a belated Happy New Year to you!
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