Powerlessness (at the top of the flume)

The way of pure faith is to persevere in contemplative practice without worrying about where we are on the journey, and without comparing ourselves with others or judging others’ gifts as better than ours. We can be spared all this nonsense if we surrender ourselves to the divine action, whatever the psychological content of our prayer may be. In pure faith, the results are often hidden even from those who are growing the most.

Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love, p.139

It would be all too easy to misunderstand Keating here as writing of belief: faith in the sense of a church’s “statement of faith” to which members are required to assent. I don’t think that’s the kind of thing he is referring to at all. Alan Watts writes:

I do not, at this point, wish to seem mysterious or to be making claims to “secret knowledge.” The reality which corresponds to “God” and “eternal life” is honest, above-board, plain, and open for all to see. But the seeing requires a correction of mind, just as clear vision sometimes requires a correction of the eyes.

The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must here 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…

The Wisdom of Insecurity, p.22

“Faith lets go” – it is in the letting go that pure faith, in Keating’s sense, consists. That willingness to “plunge into the unknown” whatever the intellectual, or even existential, risk is what lies at the heart of the contemplative adventure. In one sense, it is a willing embrace of the condition to which, willing or not, we shall all be heir in death. As the apostle Paul wrote, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” (Colossians 3:2-4 NRSV)

Many years ago I used to swim in a large city pool that had a huge and seemingly flimsy device called a flume: you sat at the top of a long, curving tube just large enough for a human body, with a stream of water running down it, holding onto two handles. Once you let go, that was it – you hurtled many meters down the twisty tube at ever increasing speed – your friction negated by the cushion of water under your bottom – until you popped out and fell the last meter or so into a deep pool, with a great splash. There was no stopping, no going back, no practical possibility of even slowing down; and the real thrill was in that moment as the top, just before you let go…

To live, consciously, at the top of the flume is one of the insights of the contemplative life. We are not safe – no life is – and the glory is in embracing that to the extent that the distinction – it’s only an illusion anyway – between our little selves and that limitless ground of being itself, in which we – and all that is – rest breaks down. Faith is merely to trust that, implicitly. Thomas Keating again:

Powerlessness is our greatest treasure. Don’t try to get rid of it. Everything in us wants to get rid of it. “Grace is sufficient for you,” but not something you can understand. To be in too big a hurry to get over our difficulties is a mistake because we don’t know how valuable they are from God’s perspective. Without them we might never be transformed as deeply and as thoroughly. If everything else fails, the dying process is the place where we will have no choice but to go through the transformation process because everything is in fact taken away. The spiritual journey is the commitment to allow everything we possess to be taken away before the dying process begins. This makes us of enormous value to ourselves and to others because we have anticipated death, and death is not the end but the beginning of the fullness of transformation. If we were born, we’ve already been through a facsimile of death and our body is well prepared for the final translation, or transition as some prefer to call it. We can’t see God without going through death…

Reflections on the Unknowable, p.156

Walking cheerfully over the world…

The Truth is one and the same always, and though ages and generations pass away, and one generation goes and another comes, yet the word and power and spirit of the living God endures for ever, and is the same and never changes.

Margaret Fell – Quaker Faith & Practice 19.61

Your word, Lord, is eternal;
    it stands firm in the heavens.
Your faithfulness continues through all generations;
    you established the earth, and it endures.
Your laws endure to this day,
    for all things serve you.
If your law had not been my delight,
    I would have perished in my affliction.
I will never forget your precepts,
    for by them you have preserved my life.

(Psalm 119.89-93)

I take immense comfort in this knowledge of God’s permanence, his being eternal. All things change, and decay; God is not a thing, but the ground of all thing-ness. He (for my purposes, the pronoun will do as well as another – none of them is really up the task) seems to hold isness itself like a cup; in traditional metaphor, in the palm of his hand.

This God who, self-existent, is the source of all being, is not distant. Were it not for his intimacy with the universe of things, I don’t suppose there would be a way for them to be. But there is “that of God in everyone” – the same Spirit is the light in the eyes of each of us, it seems to me, human and animal, all that lives.

Once something like this comes to be a part of us, nothing can be the same again. Once we live our own lives out of this source – out of the same source as matter, energy, stars and the contents of intergalactic space – “then [we shall] come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.” (George Fox, Quaker Faith & Practice 19.32)

Photo: The Banjo Pier, Swanage, in winter – Mike Farley

Asleep in the Mercy…

Very often the word “awakening” is used to describe the ways of God in the heart of his people (e.g. Timothy Jones’ Awake my Soul or Cynthia Bourgeault’s Centring Prayer and Inner Awakening) and of course in many ways this is a good image. God does, by his grace, wake us from the half-conscious life we live in the world, caught among images and the desire for images, living in a reality that is far from real, but a kind of user interface with reality—for, as Eliot said, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”

In a recent article in Church Times, Tony Horsfall (the quote is from his recent book Rhythms of Grace: Finding Intimacy with God) wrote, “We live in a God-bathed world. There is no place where God is not, although sometimes we may be asleep in his presence.” I know what he means, and of course we have all known times like this, when we realise we have spent the entire space of the Eucharistic prayer at Mass thinking about HTML5, or the need to weed the garden. But truly being asleep, sound asleep, in the presence of God, falling asleep in the conscious presence of God, consciously longing for the mercy of Christ, and letting oneself slip into sleep as into that mercy—that is something different, and I would want to be clear about the distinction…

I seem to be collecting a little cache of writings about this, and I don’t want to repeat myself here, so do start with this Lent’s post The Shores of Perception, which links back to the earlier posts—or else just click “dreams” in the tag cloud in the sidebar. There is so much more to explore here, and yet by its very essence it is hard to capture, sitting here at a keyboard. But I will try, over the next few weeks I will try as best I can…