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.

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 Heartland of Prayer

There are two kinds of spiritual darkness: the darkness of the nearness of the presence of God, which is in reality a Light, but one too bright for our endurance; and the darkness of our blemished human nature, hiding from us that Light of the Spirit as it begins to permeate the higher levels of the mind. The first darkness is experienced only by those who are far advanced in holiness, the true saints whose number and identity are known only in heaven. Most of us are so very far from being saints that in our pride we may regard the slow and halting dawn of that Light as our own achievement; so we may think of the second darkness as being at the same time the consequence of sin and the dispensation of a loving Providence; for God in his mercy takes even our sins and uses them to make us humble and obedient. There is a sense in which, having sinned, we may be thankful for our sins. But the primary sin is pride: when this is dead, the soul returns to God. 

Acceptance of darkness, then, is an absolutely necessary condition of learning how to pray. In the darkness of our prayer, when we cannot even know if we are praying at all, our only source of reassurance is our faith; and faith has its dwelling in the heart, beyond the reach of the brain, inaccessible to psychological or neurological research. We cannot feel our faith in God. The Catholic priest and spiritual director, Father Vincent McNabb, arranged to have inscribed upon his coffin an alternative translation of the words addressed to Jesus by Peter on the shores of the Sea of Tiberias after the Resurrection: "Lord, thou knowest if I love thee" (John 21:17).

Lois Lang-Sims, 'The Mind in the Heart' 

The heartland of prayer is silence, which is darkness by another name: the darkness of cognition, the abnegation of "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses." (Oxford Dictionary: cognition) It is only in this darkness, this absence, that we can know God as himself, and this only by means of the "sharp dart of longing love" of The Cloud of Unknowing. But we cannot speak of this, not even to ourselves. We are, like "Prufrock, unable to communicate not the doubting question 'What is it?' but the glorious answer." (Adrian Leak, Church Times)

All our efforts at prayer, in the end, are paths to silence, darkness, from contemplative disciplines to the sound and action of the liturgy, where, as one of my favourite Eucharistic hymns begins, "Let all mortal flesh keep silence/And with fear and trembling stand..."

The greatest of these...

...we can say that while a theory such as deconstructionism cannot tell us that God does not exist, it does enable us to recognise three things about our God-talk:

1. It is impossible to escape from language and objectively say whether what we believe is true or not. Faith cannot be bypassed.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. Religious language or talk about God and the spiritual realm is therefore inherently provisional and approximate in nature.

Dave Tomlinson, The Post Evangelical (emphasis mine) 

Faith is not about certainty, but about trust…  

Any attempt to define or describe God is to distort, to impose our own limitations of time and space. Although we can ascribe to God such qualities as good, true and loving, we have to recognise that these are mere pointers, and we might want to learn to think of God without adjectives. The word "God" itself is a pointer to something beyond our description. 

Not knowing is not the same as doubt (though they may co-exist). We may not know what, how or why, but our not knowing may co-exist with a firm knowledge that! And where does that knowledge come from? It comes from a different kind of knowing. A knowing that comes from experience. 

Jennifer Kavanagh, A Little Book of Unknowing

For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens. 

A Spearing (ed., tr.) The Cloud of Unknowing and other works

Contemplation is an odd way of life. In terms of prayer, it is precisely this unknowability, in linguistic terms, of God made real, touchable. There are times when it can feel like the most foolish endeavour, this sitting in the dark, holding by threads of faith, of love, to a God that only the heart truly knows. And yet - there is a third pillar, hope (1 Corinthians 13.13). But, as Paul the apostle put it, "hope that is seen is not hope at all." (Romans 8.24) The writer of the letter to the Hebrews puts it "Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see." (Hebrews 11.1) "But the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 1.13.13) Only by love, only by love. This might seem a curious, inturned occupation, though. What is it for? If there is all this love, what good does it do? Martin Laird:

The practice of contemplation is good not only for us but also for the entire world. Many testimonies throughout the contemplative tradition bear witness to this. Not least among these is that of the author of The Cloud of Unknowing: "This is the work [the practice of contemplation] of the soul that pleases God most. All the saints and angels rejoice in this work and hasten to help it with all their might... All the people living on earth are marvellously helped by this work, in ways you do not know."...  

Typically the first great motivator on this pathless path is the sense that this appeals strongly to something within us. The other great motivator is despair. There are times in our lives, sometimes lasting rather a long while, when just being silent and still is the least painful thing we can manage right now, when all our effort is crushed into barely surviving, just keeping one nostril above water. After discovering that pain itself has a silent centre and that our own pain is not private to us, however deeply personal it is, something opens us from within, especially if we are too poor to desire any such opening should ever happen (but we cannot make ourselves poor in order to make this happen.) 

What brings us to the practice of contemplation does not matter. What matters is that we give ourselves to this practice at least once a day... 

Contemplation is part of an Easter faith. It cannot be any other way. The stillness of Easter Saturday follows the unimaginable grief of Good Friday, but then again... More often than not, I think, we who pray may not reach the full light of Sunday morning in this life. But it does not matter, really, if love is our meaning. There is no getting past Paul's words to the Corinthians, once again, "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

A longer path...

Being the kind of person I am, I am prone to what I really would wish to call self-doubt; but which is in fact doubt in my calling, and so ultimately, I suppose, doubt in the faithfulness and capacity of the God who calls me. Let me try and explain.

In my better moments – and they are all too often no more than moments – I know perfectly well that what I am called to is contemplative prayer. I don’t mean to “do” contemplative prayer, as one might do yoga or pilates, but to give what I am to it. Despite the incessant stumbling and wandering of my life till now, I may in some dim way have always been aware of this, impossible though I have often found it to believe it, still less to be faithful to it.

The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing has this to say:

If you ask me by what means you are to achieve this work of contemplation, I beseech almighty God of his great grace and his great courtesy to teach you himself. For I would have you know well that I cannot tell you… [W]ithout God’s work, no saint or angel can think of desiring it. And I believe that our Lord will deign to bring about this work to those who have been habitual sinners as particularly and as often – yes, and more particularly and more often – as in others who by comparison… have never caused him much grief… 

Yet he does not grant this grace or bring about this work in any soul that is incapable of it. On the other hand, no soul that lacks this grace is capable of receiving it, no, whether it be the soul of a sinner or of an innocent person… 

You have as much of it as you will and desire, neither more nor less, and yet it is not a will or a desire, but something, you do not know what, that stirs you to will and desire you do not know what… 

Let it do the working, and you will be the material it works upon; just watch it, and let it be… 

And if this is so, then trust firmly that it is God alone, entirely by himself, who stirs your will and your desire, without intermediary, either on his part or on yours.

That I fret, and mistrust myself, is, as I say, more a lack of trust in God than anything else. Certainly it is not anything that could be mistaken for humility, for, as the Cloud author points out, God seems to have a delight in calling to this life those of us who have all too often frequented dubious places in our time; presumably this is something like humour on his part, or else a tendency to demonstrate the unknowability of his will, the sheer giveness of his grace in Christ.

Sister Mary David Totah goes further:

…[W]e have been looking at making action more contemplative, finding a contemplative dimension in our actions. But there is a real sense in which prayer is itself an action, an action whose fruit and extent cannot be measured or assessed; its ways are secret, not only secret from others but also secret from ourselves. The greater part of the fruit of our prayer and contemplation remains hidden with Christ in God… 

Prayer is opening oneself to the effective, invisible power of God. One can never leave the presence of God without being transformed and renewed in his being, for this is what Christ promised. The thing that can only be granted by prayer belongs to God (Luke 11.13). However such a transformation does not take the form of a sudden leap. It takes time. Whoever persists in surrendering himself to God in prayer receives more than he desires or deserves. Whoever lives by prayer gains an immense trust in God, so powerful and certain, it can almost be touched. He comes to perceive God in a most vivid way. Without ever forgetting our weakness, we become something other than we are. 

Mary David Totah OSB, Deepening Prayer: Life Defined by Prayer

To do this sort of surrendering might seem to require a quite remarkable degree of trust in God; but the brilliance of Sister Mary David’s insight here is that it is in surrendering that we are given the degree of trust we need. Someone once said something to the effect that the longest journey begins with a single step; perhaps the journey deeper into what I once described as the saltmarsh of the spirit begins with each day’s step into prayer, into surrender. That tiny glimpse of faithfulness may open the little salt-bleached wicket gate of the heart onto a longer path than we can know.

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]

A New Start

It seems to me to be time to begin posting here regularly again. The blog at Silent Assemblies will continue, but I seem to be coming to the conclusion that I need a space to discuss contemplative prayer in general, and the Jesus Prayer in particular, without feeling the need to put things in a specifically Quaker context.

I sense in any case that I am being led to rediscover, to reaffirm maybe, my roots in the Church with a large 'C', and to explore what that might mean. If I have anything of value to share, it will come out what little faithfulness I can bring to that leading, and to the movement of the Spirit behind and beneath that.

The practice of contemplative prayer, especially that of the Jesus Prayer, is not so much a matter of personal choice as of leading, and, as the Pilgrim found, being faithful to that leading is not always an easy matter. It shouldn't be thought that contemplative prayer is an easy alternative to either action or to verbal prayer. Opening one's heart to God in this way opens it to God's love for our brokenness; allowing Christ to dwell in our hearts by his Spirit involves us in the love of Christ, and its consequences: as Paul once wrote: "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me." (Galatians 2.19b-20a)

The author of The Cloud of Unknowing wrote: "It is not your will or desire that moves you, but something you are completely ignorant of stirring you to will and desire you know not what." It is in simply willing to follow that desire that we are led, like the Cloud author, into the way of contemplation.

For all I have said about the seriousness of the call to contemplative prayer, it really is very simple indeed. Irma Zaleski, in her classic Living the Jesus Prayer, wrote:

The Kind of awareness that the Jesus Prayer may lead us to is very simple. We do not try to imagine that Jesus is there, and even less what he looks like or what he says. We do not engage in any imaginary conversations with him. We simply try to be aware of him and attentive to him in a similar way as we are aware of the presence of someone we love in the next room, or as a mother is attentive to what her children are doing, however busy she is. We believe - we know by faith - that God in Christ is here, with us and in us. Our task is to try and remember him and be attentive to him. It is this attentiveness that is the door to our experience of the presence of God. We cannot summon this experience at will. We cannot grasp it as if it were a possession. It is, like the Prayer itself, a gift. Ours is only a discipline of faith and perseverance...