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. 

The metaphor of the wilderness

The  desire for something deeper in life, for a meaning that seems to be elusive or absent, is a precious opportunity. It is an invitation to discover a purpose and an identity that is more than the stories we have told ourselves.

This is rarely a comfortable place to be. It often starts with a sense of absence and emptiness; of meaninglessness, anxiety or dread. All of this is a gift. This is where desire begins, in the absence of the beloved. The desire for God, the hollowness that cries out to be filled, is already the activity of the Spirit within us, refusing to be satisfied with distractions, and drawing us to itself. It is the Light itself, showing us our condition and planting the seeds of desire within us for a deeper and more expansive life.

When the possibility of a meaningful life feels most distant, when we suffer a sense of isolation from every possibility of goodness in the world, this may be the beginning of a process of inner transformation.

Craig Barnett, Seeking and being found

This less than comfortable place is effectively where I’ve been for the last five years or so, since during the recent pandemic I found myself on what Martin Laird once described as a “pathless path“. It seems to have taken that long for me to recognise the Spirit drawing me to itself.

It seems to be that when we are being drawn to a new layer of the spiritual life we have often – or so I’ve found myself – to be drawn out of the previous layer, into what is often described as the desert, on the far side of a river we had not even known we were about to cross. In the opening chapter of her recent book Sarah Bessey writes,

I’ve loved the metaphor of the wilderness for many years now. It just seems to fit with what I understand of the world and my place in it. If the city is a metaphor for certainty and belonging, then the wilderness is for our questions and our truth.

Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith, p.3

Clearly for me at least this has proved the only true place to begin. Unless everything is questioned, how can we be open to the breaking in of something we could not have thought of?

But a month ago, on an unexpected visit to Newcastle Cathedral, I stumbled on a celebration of the Eucharist in a side chapel, at the precise moment of the Prayer of Consecration. Looking up at one of the high windows, it took a moment for me to realise where I was; and as I did so, I became aware of what I can only describe as a field of some intense kind of magnetism, as deep and as fundamental as the gravity holding me to the tiled floor. Later in the same book, Sarah Bessey describes an almost analogous experience:

But as I went forward on that evening, while the community was singing, the woman who was offering bread and wine in my corner of the church quietly tucked the bread into my open palm and said to me, “This is the Body of Christ, given to you, Sarah.” I closed my fingers around the hunk of bread and raised it toward the cup that was being held by her partner, who said, “This is the blood of Christ, poured out for you, Sarah.” I dipped the bread into the wine and popped it into my mouth.

The bread, weighted with wine, sat on my tongue. I pressed it against the roof of my mouth and my knees buckled involuntarily. I quickly walked over to my chair in the front row and collapsed into it. I chewed and swallowed, suddenly aware of every taste, every reality of it, tears running down my face.

It felt like the line of time collapsed a bit, as if all that was and is and will be was present there. In that moment of tasting, something in my soul illuminated that I haven’t been able to articulate even now, years later, about the welcome and faithfulness of Love for all of us hungry and thirsty ones.

ibid., pp.212-214

Since then I seem to have arrived, against all expectations, back home. There is no arguing with it. I am simply on the other side of that river I had not expected to cross again, and I am home.

If we are to speak of God

If we are to speak of God as he is, then, we need to check what we say as often as possible against the touchstone of our experience of living towards holy encounter... God in Godself is beyond not just our language but our minds. We, who stand under God, don’t have the kind of perspective that would allow us to understand God...

In the same way, if you think about individual words and how we know what they mean, you’ll see that they work by dividing reality up into identifiable bits. Definitions enable us to home in on the right bit of reality – so that we can distinguish between a chair and a bed, for example, or between nutritious plants and poisonous ones. Words are a little bit like the machines that slice salami: they cut up reality into digestible chunks. But God isn’t a ‘bit of reality’. God is the source of the whole thing. So it’s not surprising that words won’t quite work properly when it comes to God.

JP Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality (introduction)

We cannot go on referring to God as though God were something we had thought up, an optional extra to a real life lived among real things. God is not like that, not even remotely. God is no thing - no thing at all, but the open ground in which what is comes to be.. God is far beyond things, and in him all things live and move and have their being. (Acts 17:28)

But how does this realisation work? For a long time now I have been skirting the wilderness - since the recent pandemic, really. I have defended myself against the wilderness with too many words; and it is in the wilderness that God waits, and always has done. Sarah Bessey: "There isn’t anywhere you’ve been and there isn’t anywhere you’re going where you’re not at home in God’s love. The wilderness is home to God, even the wilderness inside you. Your life is already a place where God is quite at home." (Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith, p.64)

To stand still in love, not in understanding - I'm coming to realise after all this time that that is the only opening to grace. What we are is too fragile, too malleable to do otherwise. As TS Eliot wrote in 'Burnt Norton', "humankind cannot bear very much reality." It is only in admitting my own unknowing that I can listen intently enough into the silence to hear the approach of grace.

This rib cage of failure

It is simple enough to lose sight of the liberating nature of our failings. They often seem to lead us into some parched, lonely place—a place of dry bones. The problem is not our inadequacies, much less the freight of the failures we carry, but the loss of perspective on what we resent most in ourselves. Light forever shines from within the rib cage of failure. But reactive mind is too cluttered to realize that this is the nature of divine love: flowing waters of mercy for all who are parched—each of us… Nor is reactive mind capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, pp.95-6

Just as death is the inescapable precondition for new life, so failure and error are the necessary spring of change and growth in the spiritual life. Only when we will let ourselves know that, only in the wreckage of our plans and pretensions, only in the defeat of our new beginnings and our fresh initiatives, can we be broken open to the current of grace that will wash us out into the open sea of becoming.

Behind all these metaphors there is a very simple fact, it seems to me: that only when we cease completely from self-justification, when we are prepared without reservation to let go of whatever role we imagined for ourselves in the economy of the inner life can we discover what the flow of change that is the leading of the Spirit is tending towards.

I think this applies both in our own inner lives and in the broader life of humankind. We can see it in the unceasing pattern of evolution (species don’t remain static, however attached we may have become to one or another expression of their diversity) and in the breakdown and reformation of institutions. Sarah Bessey (Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith) sees it in the breakdown of many of the established churches, and in the tentative shoots of a radical, open faith appearing through the rubble, like fireweed springing up through the rubble of bombed buildings following WW2. (Yes, I am old enough to remember seeing it for myself from the top decks of London buses, riding with my mother looking over the makeshift hoardings that tried to conceal the broken gaps in the terraces, and the little rows of shops beginning to struggle back to some sort of normality after the end of hostilities!)

“Everything passes/everything changes/just do what you think you should do,” sang Bob Dylan (‘To Ramona‘). But what Martin Laird calls “reactive mind” is too wrapped up in what it thinks it thinks to know; it is only when we keep still enough in prayer that we are “capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.”

Grace?

Grace? But wouldn’t it be simpler just to call these experiences [of unsought peace and illumination] moments of grace? For that is what they are, aren’t they—times when God suddenly touches our lives with his blessing and renews us from the center of his own bottomless abundance?

Well, yes, that is quite true. Grace and mystical hope are close synonyms, and the outward effects are virtually identical. A person under the sway of grace and a person connected to the flow of mystical hope will display the same qualities of joy, gratitude, and a lightness and fullness of being even in the face of apparent reversal and defeat. Outwardly, they are dead ringers for each other, and even inwardly I believe they resonate with the same experience.

But words also have connotations, and this is why I make the distinction between grace and hope. For over the theological centuries calling an experience “grace”… has come to connote something extraordinary and uncharacteristic: an infusion of divine sustenance into our lives as a special gift from God, given with God’s own timing and discretion. Such a notion is consistent with the traditional theological viewpoint, where it seems that the first priority has always been to affirm the sovereign freedom of God and God’s role as sole initiator. Using the term “grace” tends to lock us back into those traditional categories and allows us to go sailing right by the distinction I really want to highlight.

For in overemphasizing this divine freedom it is all too easy to understate and miss that hope is not intended to be an extraordinary infusion, but an abiding state of being. We lose sight of the invitation—and in fact, our responsibility, as stewards of creation—to develop a conscious and permanent connection to this wellspring. We miss the call to become a vessel, to become a chalice into which this divine energy can pour; a lamp through which it can shine.

But what if we are intended to become this vessel, this body of hope? What if, in fact, this effervescent, “lightness-of-being” energy is the fuel that drives our human life toward its divine fulfillment? What if our insistence on treating it as a rare and exceptional phenomenon is a way of ducking the invitation that was permanently extended [John 4:1-42] at the Samarian well that blazing midday?

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope, p.16

I have often stumbled over this word grace myself. There is so undeniable a sense of givenness about so much of the inner life that it is hard to evade the expression. We may practice faithfully for weeks, years, and yet illumination comes unsought, unexpected, often at what on the face of it might seem to be the most unpropitious of times. We may be overwhelmed with loss, with grief and regret, and suddenly the sky will open and we are flooded with peace and acceptance like a shaft of unimaginable sunlight.

What is happening here? Of course it is tempting on the one hand to turn to theories of the bicameral mind, or of the collective unconscious, or on the other to conventional theological formulations of “[s]aving grace [as] the free and unmerited operation of God’s person and presence… initiat[ing] the spiritual life of God’s people” (The Gospel Coalition). But neither extreme seems even to begin to reflect the wonderful lightness of being, the openness and clarity, the sheer sense of gift that comes so unexpectedly, so seemingly undeservedly. There is a profound mystery here, in the true sense of the term.

You may have noticed that [these] experiences have one thing in common: they all catapult us out of ego-centered consciousness. Those who come back from a near-death experience bring with them a visceral remembrance of how vivid and abundant life is when the sense of separateness has dropped away. Those who fall profoundly in love experience a dying into the other that melts every shred of their own identity, self-definition, caution, and boundaries, until finally there is no “I” anymore—only “you.” Those who meditate go down to the same place, but by a back staircase deep within their own being.

Ibid. p.47

One thing that all Bourgeault’s examples have in common with my own is this inherent quality of wordlessness. Of course in order to know something conceptually we must use words, if only to ourselves, and so these experiences of grace are clouded over with unknowing. And yet it is only in surrendering to not knowing that we can receive them – which may be why they are so often received in extremis. “Ego-centered consciousness” is mediated by thought, and thought by words; defeat words, and thought drops away from itself. What is left is silence.

I think this wordless silence is itself the back staircase; and there is an argument to be made that all forms of contemplative practice – and, phenomenologically, such things as near death experiences – are no more, at the very bottom, than means of silence. The heart yearns for silence, especially in the depths of its passions; at the end of all things there is silence, and it is out of silence that all things come to be. Silence is the utter want of naming, of distinctions; it is no thing, but it is given to us as our only home at the end of all we know.

What we really are

We pay attention to our own true nature and by becoming fully conscious of the union of our nature with Christ, we become fully ourselves.

John Main, Word into Silence, p.18

 

The idea of time has many expressions, from chronological to biological, emotional to cosmic. We sometimes feel we have lived a lifetime in a moment. We can feel time as a crucifixion or as a resurrection. The vast figures measuring cosmic time in an expanding universe can seem overwhelming but the few years of a human life can seem more significant and precious. Time and mortality live out the drama of birth and death and the painful mystery of separation. In the light of faith we come by stages to see the all-pervading mystery of union…

This consummation of union, whether it is called nirvana, liberation from rebirth, enlightenment, moksha or heaven is part of the common ground of all religious wisdom when we understand religion in its mystical dimension. It refers to the experience of oneness, the transcendence of the ego’s centre of consciousness, the transformation of the dualistic mind, the movement from the mind’s self-mirroring complexities into the simplicity and pure vision of the heart, the non-duality of the spirit. With a silent passion deeper than their words and differences, all religions point to this. If they do indeed teach this way and not just pay lip service to it, religion offers our often sad and battered humanity a reasonable and empowering hope.

We both lose and find ourselves in the otherness of ultimate reality. This is easy to say but it is a hard paradox to wrestle with. It demands a deepening faith commitment. When the master class of life has taught us enough, commitment meets detachment and solitude, the recognition and acceptance of our uniqueness becomes more attractive and even easier. We gradually withdraw from unnecessary activity and distraction. We become freer from compulsions and addictions.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, p.76-77

What we really are is this. We are not what we think we are, frail isolated intelligences trapped in a zero-sum game of mere survival, creatures of allegiances and enmities, just barely hanging on. We belong. We are part of it all, wavelets on a limitless ocean of grace.

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.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

Faith is no more, perhaps, than this radical open-heartedness, this helpless surrender to what is, in David Jones’ words, “actually loved and known”. All our practice, all our patience and all our prayers come down to this simple oneness. What we used to be is dispersed, patched and rotted through with light. None of the old certainties can hold. They don’t need to: this trackless brightness beyond the memory of shorelines is the waking heart itself, nothing more.

Further along the path of disenchantment

Our age is more dominated by scientific theory than was Spinoza’s; but only a fond illusion persuades us that it is more guided by the truth. We have seen superstition triumph on a scale that would have startled Spinoza, and which has been possible only because superstition has cloaked itself in the mantle of science. If the heresies of our day are, like Nazism and communism, the declared enemies of religion, this merely confirms, for the student of Spinoza, their superstitious character, and confirms, too, Spinoza’s insight that scientific objectivity and divine worship are the forms of intellectual freedom. Spinoza, like Pascal, saw that the new science must inevitably ‘disenchant’ the world. By following truth as our standard, we chase from their ancient abodes the miraculous, the sacred and the saintly. The danger, however, is not that we follow this standard – for we have no other – but that we follow it only so far as to lose our faith, and not so far as to regain it. We rid the world of useful superstitions, without seeing it as a whole. Oppressed by its meaninglessness, we succumb then to new and less useful illusions – superstitions born of disenchantment, which are all the more dangerous for taking man, rather than God, as their object.

The remedy, Spinoza reminds us, is not to retreat into the pre-scientific world-view, but to go further along the path of disenchantment; losing both the old superstitions and the new, we discover at last a meaning in truth itself. By the very thinking that disenchants the world we come to a new enchantment, recognizing God in everything, and loving his works in the very act of knowing them.

Roger Scruton, The Great Philosophers: Spinoza, pp.45-46

The longer I sit with the consequences of deconstruction – in other words the radical openness that refuses all dogma, and so escapes the grasp of doctrine and its “rulers and authorities” (Ephesians 6:12) – the more clearly I see that deconstruction isn’t a destination but a process: not something to achieve but something to live. It doesn’t stop at the point when we feel we have shrugged off the shackles; we may find it is now a lifelong principle for living.

To understand, as Benedictus Spinoza did, that necessity is freedom itself, is to live within the grace of belonging: to stop running from necessity, and to know that final acceptance as inescapable joy.

Spinoza’s final joke on us is that this bleak, austere worldview ends up offering a kind of salvation. Not the salvation of prayers answered or sins forgiven, but the salvation of peace in a world that doesn’t owe you anything — and doesn’t need to.

Robert Flix, Spinoza in Plain English: Understanding Determinism, Freedom, and Joy, p.49

Otium

 In A Simplified Life, her beautiful account of being a contemporary hermit, Verena Schiller writes:

…I eschew any attempt at repetitive words of prayer while walking or working out of doors, though some find this helpful. Even after years of praxis, learning to do just one thing at a time does not come easily. ‘When you are walking just walk; when you are digging just dig; whatever you are intent on give it your whole attention. Whatever you are doing, do it with the whole of your being and as though it were the only thing to do and as though there was all the time in the world’, a counsel of perfection given me by Bishop John V. Taylor at the very beginning of my solitary exploration, echoing the wisdom of countless others all down the centuries. Rarely can this be even a remote possibility in most women’s lives. For me it is and, in a sense, carries a double responsibility: to practise this single-pointedness not only to deepen my own attentiveness but also on behalf of others caught up in unrelenting multitasking. Life and the work in hand is the prayer or, put the other way about, the prayer is the work. We live in a world characterized by extreme activism, restlessness and rush, yet a hallmark of this solitary life needs to be otium. (pp.112-113)

Gradually the contemplative life seems to take over the “rest” of one’s life; the simplest of tasks become luminous – almost at times numinous – with presence. Even simple conversations can become exercises in something akin to receiving spiritual direction… in the midst of discussing vegetables, perhaps!

Of course, as Schiller points out herself, this is a counsel of perfection; with the best will in the world too many jobs are done thoughtlessly, too many conversations slip by in mere chatter. But even so – to look back in less time each time, and see the gaps in attention, becomes its own often humorous discipline. (The Pure Land Buddhists have a lovely word, bombu, for just this kind of spiritual hamfistedness!)

Otium. It’s not a common word in most people’s vocabulary; but it means, at least in a contemplative context, a kind of holy leisure. Schiller (op cit., p.36)

In early monasticism, leisure or otium was not only an essential mark of the life of a monk, it was integral to the life itself. Leisure, otium, is how the monastic life was described in the early Middle Ages (a life free from negotium, of busyness and business). Few of us would recognize this as a description of contemporary monasticism, and even St Bernard, that great reformer and founder of the Cistercian Order, who had hoped to reduce busyness and business to a minimum in the life of a monk, was soon to amend this adage wryly to that of a negotissimum otium, a very busy leisure indeed.

The retired life can be otium per excellentiam, if we will only let it be. Practice need not be confined to the daily spells alone in one’s room: it can be allowed to spill out, just like the hermit’s, into walking, cooking, housework, even being together. It becomes a portable grace, a lovely thing that brightens all that it touches, even pain and concern, even the most mundane or dreadful things. It has begun to become an open channel to the hidden boundless grace that holds all things in becoming.

Process and coinherence

Prehension is not perception in the ordinary sense, and it is not causation as traditionally imagined. It is the way an event takes account of the world it inherits. Without it, the past would be dead, the present spontaneous, and continuity impossible. To prehend something is to include it in one’s own becoming. This inclusion need not be conscious, deliberate, or even noticeable. It simply means that what has happened contributes to what is happening.

Every actual occasion prehends its predecessors. It does not choose whether to do so. Prehension is mandatory. What is optional is how it prehends…

The past does not act on the present by pushing, transmitting force, or occupying the same space. Instead, the present appropriates the past. Influence travels forward because it is taken up, not because it is imposed.

This replaces external causation with internal relation.

Robert Flix, [AN] Whitehead in Plain English, p.62

Contemplation is an entering, in profoundly open awareness, into the process of prehension. This isn’t a passive reception, an observation only; it is a deliberate participation in, a strengthening of, the relational web between occasions, between things, events and their relations.

This seems to me why contemplatives have so often, especially those practicing within the traditions of a religion, connected the idea of contemplation with intercession, whether in the developed theology of hesychasm, or in Buddhist conceptions of metta or tonglen. Looked at like this, contemplative prayer in its intercessory dimension is not superstition but metaphysics; the practitioner, through their inevitable coinherence with the suffering inherent in existence, prehends the brokenness of things, holding them in the light of unbroken awareness. In effect, the practitioner enters into the suffering as the suffering enters into them: acting as a lightning-rod between what merely is and the ground of being itself – God, in fact.

In A Little Book of Unknowing, Jennifer Kavanagh writes:

…Faith is not about certainty, but about trust…

We have seen that there is little about which we can be certain. Certainty may be undermined by limitations of the current state of knowledge; the subjective nature of experience; the fluid quality of the material world; or the intervention of unforeseen events. But beyond these aspects of the world about which we often assume knowledge, there is a dimension of life to which rational explanation simply doesn’t apply. Most people would admit that there is much that we cannot apprehend through reason or through the senses. We might know a fact with our brains, but not be able to understand what it means, to fully experience its reality – the age of a star or the trillions of connections within the human brain – some things are too big, too complex, for us to conceive. Einstein, who knew a thing or two about factual knowledge, felt that “imagination is more important than knowledge”. There is a dimension which co-exists with the material, rationally grounded world, is not in opposition to it or threatened by scientific development but happily stands alone in the context of everything else.

Reading Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics seems at last to be providing me with a framework within which I can begin to understand what has always been a deep instinct in my own practice: that it wasn’t merely a solipsistic exercise in self-improvement, but a real work of weight and consequence beyond my own narrow concerns. In a sense, it doesn’t matter of course whether I can explain it to my own or anyone else’s satisfaction; what matters is that it does work, is actual work, in some obscure corner of the healing of things.

Returning

We still seek wholeness. It is intrinsic to human identity that, however much we have achieved, we are never satisfied. We hunger and thirst for what lies beyond our grasp and even beyond the horizon of our desire. Religion and spirituality, which are less easy to divorce than we thought – are the elements of culture that deal with this desire beyond desire. Where are they taking us? Where do we have to redefine the old terms by which we try to understand ourselves in this longing for wholeness? …

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, pp.3,9

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.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

The spiritual life looked at from within resembles not so much a ladder or an ordered progress as it does a rather tatty wheel. It does move, but it moves at least as much round and round as it does forward. It is a process of trial and error – trials and errors. It seems to be more like an organic thing, subject to odd diversions and random mutations, than a neat structure assembled according to a set of plans.

Coinherence is one of those luminous words whose meaning flickers at the edge of comprehension, as though it names something you already half-know in your bones. Charles Williams was fond of using it, but its roots extend far further back than that. If ultimate reality (God, the Way) is in fact process, relational union, rather than an object or a person, then relational living is intrinsic to life itself, and it has profound implications for human behaviour, ethics and purpose. Specifically, it speaks to the contemplative life in ways that make sense of much monastic teaching over the years, right from the Desert Fathers and Mothers to the present day.

Pain and difficulty – what used to be called “tribulation” – are intrinsic to life itself. “Change and decay in all around I see,” wrote Henry Francis Lyle, and an open heart risks breaking daily at the news from across the world, even in supposedly stable and civilised nations. But if we are aware that all that is – not only, if especially, conscious beings – rests in the ground of being just as we do ourselves, then our presence in contemplation becomes much more than a state of mind. We are not “praying for” those for whom our hearts are torn; we are recognising our shared being, recognising an existential bond that exists already. Love is not symbolic, but structural: a circulation of grace, strength and suffering.

The living current of grace that coinheres in all existence is the source of what is – the Tao as the mother of the ten thousand things – and yet it is the heart of our contemplation itself. Only if we sit still can we be present as aerials, signs, receiving stations for that grace. The mist covers the distances, and our vision is not good; but we don’t need to know or to believe: our unknowing is itself our practice and our compassion. Perhaps all we need is love.