The paradox of discipline

The classical Disciplines of the spiritual life call us to move beyond surface living into the depths. They invite us to explore the inner caverns of the spiritual realm. They urge us to be the answer to a hollow world. John Woolman counsels, ‘It is good for thee to dwell deep, that thou mayest feel and understand the spirits of people.’

We must not be led to believe that the Disciplines are only for spiritual giants and hence beyond our reach, or only for contemplatives who devote all their time to prayer and meditation. Far from it. God intends the Disciplines of the spiritual life to be for ordinary human beings: people who have jobs, who care for children, who wash dishes and mow lawns. In fact, the Disciplines are best exercised in the midst of our relationships with our husband or wife, our brothers and sisters, our friends and neighbours.

Neither should we think of the Spiritual Disciplines as some dull drudgery aimed at exterminating laughter from the face of the earth. Joy is the keynote of all the Disciplines. The purpose of the Disciplines is liberation from the stifling slavery to self-interest and fear. When the inner spirit is liberated from all that weighs it down, it can hardly be described as dull drudgery.

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, p.1

The regular discipline of some contemplative practice is as necessary a thing to the spiritual life as breathing. (It is no coincidence that so many practices do involve some level of attention to the breath.) 

Many of us may not immediately recognise our favourite practice as either contemplative or classical, but it seems that the patterns of the spiritual life continually recur whether we immediately recognise them or not. The method of prayer and Bible study known as Lectio Divina dates back to the 3rd century BC; yet it is in essence what countless evangelical (and other) Christians practice daily, and refer to as their "Quiet Time". Bare attention to the breath is a contemplative practice that likewise dates back in the Christian tradition at least to the Desert Fathers and Mothers - and in the Buddhist East many centuries further back - but it is in essence the practice used by thousands of followers of various secular programmes of mindfulness, not to mention Centering Prayer and its variations among contemporary Christians.

But the spiritual disciplines are channels of grace and freedom beyond anything that might be expected of things with so unpromising a name. They set us free from the dreary confines of our own impulses and inclinations, from the exigencies of our digestion or sleep patterns. They are habits of prayer and contemplation that will grow, the more we practice them, to be as natural as breathing itself. We can rest in the quiet necessity of habit as in a well-made chair, knowing that it can be relied on to support us however unpromising our feelings at the time. We can trust the the steady pattern of our chosen discipline - actually it is usually more like a calling, a movement of grace, than an choice; but that is a matter for another day, perhaps - when we can't trust our own inclinations. To return to our practice, no matter whether we are tired, or anxious, or distracted, is its own freedom, quite apart from the familiar benefits of the practice itself.

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.