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.

Silence and language

Even in silence, the linguistic apparatus of our brain continues in the background wash of thought. Even when we avoid the incessant temptation to follow, to identify with thoughts as they arise, we know they are there, spinning their webs of language in the corners of our awareness like spiders in the corners of the window frame.

We can attend to our breathing, to our proprioception, to the sensations of our body resting where it rests; but the thoughts with their language continue as before. What if we were to use the linguistic yearnings of our mind in our contemplative practice itself?

Stephanie Paulsell: “Contemplation… [i]t’s not a capacity we possess; it’s a gift from outside of us—from God… There are these things… reading, meditation, prayer… you can do to make yourself vulnerable and available to the experience, but contemplation is a form of wordless prayer that’s a gift…”

And then there are the prayers of repetition, acting almost as a semantic container for presence, a way of using the mind’s own hunger for language as a route to silence.

True contemplative silence is no more than resting in the objectless awareness that lies at the end of words. And Stephanie Paulsell is right – it is a gift – one that no intention, no act of will can secure. But we can remain still; it seems that, for me at least, stillness is the central thing “you can do to make yourself vulnerable and available”.

All of practice comes down to stillness in the end; and it is only in stillness that words can finally settle out like sediment in the troubled pond of thought, to leave the steady light of what is in the unobscured clarity of awareness.

Freedom!

Abbot Christopher Jamison writes:

The first Christian monks and nuns were inspired by the example of St Antony. They lived in the deserts of the Middle East in the fourth and fifthccenturies and became known as the desert fathers and mothers, living in loose associations and gradually founding more structured monasteries. The wisest of them acquired the title abba for men and amma for women, meaning father and mother respectively, which later become abbot and abbess… They did not use the language of freedom, a language that has come to dominate modern discourse. Their central concern was purity of heart, which we might describe as freedom of spirit…

The desert fathers compared purity of heart to the target that a javelin thrower aimed at in the ancient games; a small target may be difficult to hit but it can be done and the effort required draws out the best from the thrower. So purity of heart describes the condition of human beings at their best, when the human capacity for love finds complete expression devoid of any selfish thought. To arrive at this state of being is demanding because human beings are continually tempted to behave selfishly, but the example of many saints shows that it can be done.

Finding Happiness: A monk’s guide to life, Christopher Jamison

So freedom of spirit is found in freedom from identifying with the thoughts of the self – in laying down the self as the centre of experience. Heidegger’s sense of “releasement” (Gelassenheit) from our manipulative human wilfulness then leads to contemplative openness to the mystery of Being (Sein).

But so much of the time we do identify with our self-centred patterns of thought – with the “self” on which our thought is centred – and become entangled once again. We miss the target…

Now, in the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” that last word gives pause to many who see it, in the context of too many clumsy sermons, in a narrowly moralistic light. But the Greek – the Jesus Prayer developed among those early desert monastics of whom Abbot Christopher writes, and was first written down and disseminated in Greek – word is αμαρτωλόν (harmartolón), and αμαρτωλόν carries the sense of “to forfeit by missing the mark”. For the Desert Mothers and Fathers, sin was just that, missing the target of purity of heart, of freedom of spirit; it is not in any direct sense somehow “transgressing a list of naughty-things-to-be-avoided”.

We slip so easily into self-identifying thoughts; freedom of spirit consists in freedom from this self-identification. Note, though, that it is not freedom from thoughts themselves. We can do little about those – they seem to be often no more than artifacts that the brain throws off in its everyday functioning – but we can learn not to identify with them, And that is what practice is for.

"The zero on which all other numbers depend"

Faith is not the same as belief. Faith is what Jay Matthews described as staying at the center with God. In my lexicon, God is simply another word for wholeness, awareness, presence, unconditional love, no-thing-ness, openness, totality, the heart of being. What Jay is saying points to an abidance in and as wholeness. Being unconditional love. Seeing as God sees.

In my experience, this means waking up here and now, returning again and again to the openness and the listening presence that is most intimate, the boundless awareness that is always accepting everything and clinging to nothing.

And although this wholeness is never really absent, paradoxically, the realization and embodiment of it generally takes faith and perseverance, falling down and getting up again and again, feeling lost and confused and then once again returning Home. It’s not about believing an ideology. It’s trusting in something that’s not a graspable thing of any kind, something that is not “out there” at a distance. It’s THIS here-now presence that we are and that everything is. It’s closer than close, most intimate, and at the same time, all-inclusive and boundless.

God and faith are religious words, and that’s probably part of why they both resonate here. I’ve always been a religious person. I wasn’t raised in any religion, but religion has always attracted me. I’ve never really fit into any organized religion, although throughout my life, I’ve wandered in and out of various churches and Zen centers, sometimes joining them but eventually always leaving. My path seems to be solitary, nontraditional and eclectic, but my life definitely seems to center on religion—a word I’ve tended to replace with spirituality, as many others have done, but maybe religion is not such a bad word...

God is pure potentiality, the germinal darkness out of which everything emerges, the zero on which all other numbers depend, the very core of our being, the timeless eternal unicity, the sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, that which is subtlest and most intimate. God is a way of seeing, seeing the sacred everywhere, seeing the light in everything, beholding it all from love, from the perspective of wholeness—seeing and being the whole picture. God is unconditional love. Awakening is about opening to God, allowing God, abiding in God, dissolving into God. When I open to God, immediately there is no me and no God; there is only this vast openness. God is at once most intimate, closer than close, and at the same time, transcendent. God is not other than this presence here and now, and yet, God is also a relationship, a dialog of sorts, a way of listening to myself and the whole universe. God is impossible to define or pin down.

Joan Tollifson, Walking on Water

Tollifson quite uncannily puts her finger, here, on my own condition. I always find it quite difficult to write this kind of thing, since I know that I all too often come over as didactic when actually I am merely trying to find my way in the desert places.

I have found it increasingly difficult, despite my periodic protestations, to avoid this word "God". As Joan Tollifson points out, it encompasses so much "wholeness, awareness, presence, unconditional love, no-thing-ness, openness, totality…" even "the heart of being" itself. In other words, this one little word will stand in for whole stacks of other, quite possibly defensive or political, or merely pompous, assertions and jargon on my part.

Too often we would-be contemplatives find ourselves drawn away into argumentation, activism, restlessness, no matter whether we are caught up in the activities of some religious institution, or in some humanist or secular-spiritual one. A long time ago, Isaac of Nineveh (613-700 CE) had this to say,

And this is the definition of stillness: silence to all things.

If in stillness you are found full of turbulence, and you disturb your body by the work of your hands and your soul with cares, then judge for yourself what sort of stillness you are practising, being concerned over many things in order to please God!

For it is ridiculous for us to speak of achieving stillness

if we do not abandon all things and separate ourselves from every care.

Homily 21

For me of course, practice and prayer lie at the heart of it all. It is impossible to touch these realities - reality itself, perhaps - by any other means. And in fact it is not really a means; all we are doing is somehow getting ourselves out of the way of the light. Bishop Kallistos Ware:

The purpose of prayer can be summarized in the phrase, 'Become what you are'... Become what you are: more exactly, return into yourself; discover him who is yours already, listen to him who never ceases to speak within you; possess him who even now possesses you. Such is God’s message to anyone who wants to pray: 'You would not seek me unless you had already found me.'

The simple prayers of repetition, like the Jesus Prayer, John Main's Maranatha, or the Pure Land Buddhist Nembutsu (all of which lead in any case into the silence of objectless awareness) are by their very simplicity and accessibility not reserved for religious professionals, nor are they ones that require training or qualifications, nor do they ask of us any unusual feats of memory. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom wrote of the Jesus Prayer that,

More than any other prayer, the Jesus Prayer aims at bringing us to stand in God's presence with no other thought but the miracle of our standing there and God with us, because in the use of the Jesus Prayer there is nothing and no one except God and us.

The use of the prayer is dual, it is an act of worship as is every prayer, and on the ascetical level, it is a focus that allows us to keep our attention still in the presence of God.

It is a very companionable prayer, a friendly one, always at hand and very individual in spite of its monotonous repetitions. Whether in joy or in sorrow, it is, when it has become habitual, a quickening of the soul, a response to any call of God. The words of St Symeon, the New Theologian, apply to all its possible effects on us: 'Do not worry about what will come next, you will discover it when it comes'. 

On prayer

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Anam Thubten writes:

It might be wonderful if we all prayed now and then. Prayer is a very powerful method. It is a means of inner liberation. Sometimes prayer is our last resort. If we have been walking the spiritual path, trying to become awakened, there may come a point when we realize that we can’t force ourselves to experience this thing called equal flavor. Then prayer is our last resort. Prayer is an act of surrendering and opening our heart, trusting something that is much greater than our own personality, our ego.

There is a deep impulse in each of us that knows how to pray. We don’t have to recite traditional prayers. We can all compose our own prayers. Did you ever have the experience when you were in trouble or when you were confused, that you naturally started praying? Maybe you didn’t know that you were praying. Maybe you didn’t have any concept of who you were praying to. There are some traditions where you have someone divine or sacred that you pray to. There are other traditions, nontheistic traditions, where you pray but you are not praying to anybody. When we are struggling with anything in our consciousness, we can always pray, remembering that we don’t have to be religious or Buddhist to pray. We can ask the universe, “May I have the readiness to overcome my fear.” Or if we are struggling with resentment, we can pray to the universe to help us overcome that. Praying to the universe is a very safe thing to do. We can ask the universe to bestow a shower of blessings on us and help us to overcome our inner demons of resentment, fear, and anger.

In the act of prayer, you can feel yourself surrendering all your hopes and fears, and you are freed from your resistance to accepting that you have no control in life. You feel true humility, in which you’re no longer trying to be in charge, but letting life itself be in charge. Let yourself recognize that this is the highest freedom you can have. Try to live that freedom every day as much as you can. There will be moments in your life when you will feel that you don’t need that freedom, but as humans we are going through ups and downs, and in some moments freedom will be the only refuge you have. We human beings are extremely resilient and strong—we have the capacity to be openhearted and to surrender in any situation. It is our innate potential. Let’s use it.

Thubten, in writing of prayer as a means of inner liberation and surrender, comes very close to the spirit behind the Nembutsu and the Jesus Prayer.

Prayers of repetition (as opposed to classical mantras) are not intended to carry any magical charge, nor to bring about an altered state of consciousness. They are merely a form of practice based on repeated surrender to, ultimately, the metaphysical ground in which all things – including ourselves – come to be. In a sense, they are a rehearsal for the final surrender of death; and yet they are prayers of radical simplicity, poverty even. Anyone can use them, at any time.

The Jesus Prayer in particular is prayed in the understanding that the words are self-dissolving, tending always to silence. It is important to remember that the words employed in these prayers of repetition are not limited to, or even mainly about, their literal meaning: they are nearer to a kind of spiritual poetry, perhaps. Their power is not in what they say, but in that they are said. In that lies their gift of liberation, the heart’s stillness. Nothing is accomplished; only grace is revealed as itself.

Objectless

In those deeper waters of Centering Prayer—in those nanoseconds (at first) between the thoughts, when your attention is not running out ahead to grab the next object to alight upon, you taste those first precious drops of an entirely different quality of selfhood… There is a deeper current of living awareness, a deeper and more intimate sense of belonging, which flows beneath the surface waters of your being and grows stronger and steadier as your attention is able to maintain itself as a unified field of objectless awareness.

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice, p.134

The state Cynthia Bourgeault mentions here is of course that which is often referred to, by writers as diverse as Tara Brach and Jiddu Krishnamurti, as “choiceless awareness”, and by Eckhart Tolle as “awareness of Being”. But there is a subtle resonance in Bourgeault’s phrase that I don’t find elsewhere. She goes on (ibid. p.138):

In the classic language of the Christian contemplative tradition, we are practicing moving from a cataphatic way of knowing (i.e., with an object-focused awareness) to an apophatic, or “formless” (i.e., objectless) awareness, emanating from a deeper capacity of the human soul in God.

God, known as the ground of being, Istigkeit, is no thing, and consequently can never be the object of our attention. As the Old Testament story of Moses on the mountain puts it, “you cannot see [God’s] face.” (Exodus 33:20)

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.

J.P. Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality, (Introduction)

All that we are, all that is, rests in the open ground as the hazelnut rested in the love of God in Julian’s vision:

And in this vision he [Christ] also showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball, as it seemed to me. I looked at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came to me in a general way, like this, ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for it seemed to me so small that it might have disintegrated suddenly into nothingness. And I was answered in my understanding, ‘It lasts, and always will, because God loves it; and in the same way everything has its being through the love of God.’

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Oxford World Classics, p.6

Only an awareness that, still and intransitive, does not take an object can open itself to reality that can never be its object. Only in silence can we touch that reflecting quiet, the still pool beneath unending light.

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

Set and Setting

 Reply

I have recently come to realise that many of the problems so often encountered by lone contemplative practitioners – spiritual crises, phenomenological dislocations of one kind of another – may all too often simply be due a lack of understanding of the contemplative equivalent of what the the psychonauts of the psychedelic community refer to as "set and setting".

In their original context, set and setting were used to refer to a psychedelic drug user’s mindset and their physical and social setting at the time of their embarking on a trip. In the sense in which I am borrowing them, I mean the practitioner’s own personal beliefs, past experiences, unconscious biases and expectations (“set”) and their broader cultural, social and spiritual environment (“setting”). We in the West cannot escape our own culture – two thousand years of Christian spiritual tradition, and two hundred years of post-Enlightenment liberal thought – any more than we can escape what C.G, Jung called our "collective unconscious": the psychological weight of symbols, myths and practices we have all inherited by virtue of our birth and upbringing.

I’ve been wondering what all this might mean for a contemplative living and practicing outside of a religious – monastic or otherwise – community. Perhaps tradition tends to act like a homing beacon, helping the practitioner locate their inner experience within a context shaped by centuries, millennia, of practice and its inherited understanding; and without which, the contemplative life can come to be experienced as unguided, adrift, destabilised. However much we try to find this sense of location within the philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology or whatever, the resonant frequency of that beacon is missing. What we are is not theoretical: we are living beings, beautiful creatures with stars’ iron in our veins; the causes and effects that brought us to birth are shared with those among whom we live.

Finding correlates within the existing Christian non-dual tradition seems to be the beacon I have, with my eyes on the charts rather than on the sea, been missing. Reading Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault, David Frenette or Martin Laird, I can see that I am not alone out on the waves.

The all that is nothing is the effulgent ground of being from which all things are birthed. Union with Christ means oneness with the unseen and hidden ground of everything, a union that unites every separate thing. But because humans are so focused on single, visible separate things we tend to miss out on the unseen and secret source of everything. Jesus invites us to remember the source of everything when he says, "I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). The all of God is nothing because it is no one thing. The all of God is everything, or, better said, every separate thing comes from God.

David Frenette, The Path of Centering Prayer, p.102

What actually is

This “close but not identical” affinity between Western unitive and Eastern nondual suggests that we look a little more closely at the phenomenological aspects of this transition—or in other words, what the structures of perception are actually doing beneath all the metaphysics and devotion. Clearly there is a big shift in perception that takes place between “dualistic” and “nondualistic” levels of consciousness, resulting in these signature experiences of oneness and an unboundaried, flowing sense of selfhood. But what if this shift is not primarily about what one sees but how one sees? That it betokens not so much a new level of conscious attainment as a permanent shift in the structure of consciousness itself—as it were, a rewiring of the “operating system”?

…I find [this approach] useful because it lifts the discussion beyond the traditional interior and subjective (read “fuzzy”) criteria used to measure nondual attainment (“How do you know if you’re enlightened yet?”) and brings it into direct dialogue with some objective, quantifiable markers increasingly verifiable in the emerging field of neuroscience. It allows us to look at the concept/experience of nonduality not through the lens of personal spiritual attainment but through the lens of the continuing evolution of consciousness.

Cynthia Bourgeault

We humans appear, for better or worse, to be people who understand the world, and each other, in terms of language and symbol; we are semiotic creatures. This understanding underlies the “user illusion” paradigm used by Donald Hoffman and Daniel Dennett, where human awareness is compared to the user interface of a computer system (whether a desktop workstation or a smartphone or anything in between); the underlying reality, whether in terms of molecular science or computer code, being approached through representations, rather than directly, since the latter would be far too complex to interact with moment by moment, even supposing the user understood it on its own terms. But as Cynthia Bourgeault points out, some such image applies equally to questions of metaphysics and devotion!

And yet, just as the interface elements on this tablet allow me to manipulate them in ways that cause real events at the level of machine code, and hence enable me to write this blog post, and later to post it online, so the way we understand contemplative experience truly affects the phenomenology of our spirituality, and hence the nature and effect of our practice. It actually does matter immensely to us how we tell ourselves about the ineffable; and yet for all our tall tales, the ineffable remains what it is.

The ground of being remains the reality of all that is; without it, nothing could have come to be, and nothing can be lost from it. What we call life and death are merely the crests and troughs of wavelets; the stream goes on. Whether we call it God, or Being, or describe it in terms of mathematical physics, it is the bright isness, Eckhart’s Istigkeit, that no-thing from which all things have their being; which we touch in the unknown interior of our practice. Our part is simply to trust the grace, however named, that opens our hearts to what actually is.

Eastering *

Jesus was not the lone exemplar. Jesus was not the standalone symbol for the pattern of the universe. Resurrection is just the way things work! When we say hallelujah to our own lives, to where they’re going, to what we believe in, and hope for. 

Reality rolls through cycles of death and resurrection, death and resurrection, death and resurrection. In the raising up of Jesus, we’re assured that this is the pattern for everything—that we, and anybody who is suffering—is also going to be raised up. This is what God does for a suffering reality. What we crucify, what reality crucifies, God transforms. I don’t think it’s naive to say hallelujah. We have every reason, especially now, since biology and science are also saying this seems to be the shape of everything. It just keeps changing form, meaning, focus or direction, but nothing totally goes away. 

Of course, it’s an act of faith on our side. In our experience, our most cherished people, pets, and even places, fade away—but Jesus is the archetype of the shape of the universe. To believe in Jesus is to believe that all of this is going somewhere and that God is going to make it so. All we have to do is stay on the train, stay on the wave, trusting that by our crucifixions, we would be allowed to fail, fumble and die, and be transformed by grace and by God.

Richard Rohr

[Jesus] left us a method for practicing this path ourselves, the method he himself modeled to perfection in the garden of Gethsemane. When surrounded by fear, contradiction, betrayal; when the “fight or flight” alarm bells are going off in your head and everything inside you wants to brace and defend itself, the infallible way to extricate yourself and reclaim your home in that sheltering kingdom is simply to freely release whatever you are holding onto—including, if it comes to this, life itself. The method of full, voluntary self-donation reconnects you instantly to the wellspring; in fact, it is the wellspring. The most daring gamble of Jesus’ trajectory of pure love may just be to show us that self-emptying is not the means to something else; the act is itself the full expression of its meaning and instantly brings into being “a new creation”: the integral wholeness of Love manifested in the particularity of a human heart…

As Paul so profoundly realized, “up” and “down” do not ultimately matter, for in kenosis consciousness reclaims dominion over energy. The pathway to freedom, to the realized unity of our being, lies in and in fact is coextensive with the sacramental act of giving it all away, making “self-giving” the core gesture through which all the meaning, purpose, and nobility of our human life is ultimately conveyed.

Cynthia Bourgeault

The intuition that death is not the end, that the way to light is through the darkness of entire surrender, is fundamental to the contemplative life in all traditions. Easter is only one expression of it, though it is certainly the most powerful expression available to us in the West. Where we so often go wrong is in assuming that “life” somehow implies the survival of something like an ego. Ego is precisely what must be surrendered, in contemplative practice just as, ultimately, in death. Personhood, whether imagined as human or as divine, is not what we think it is. As Buddhism so clearly sees, there is actually no such individual self – it only looks that way; and that illusion ends with surrender, with death. Life cannot fall out of the ground of being; the ground is life; life is being.

I am gradually coming to realise that language and culture are inescapable; I can no more escape my native English, and Englishness, than I can change my own genes. No wonder the language of the Christian contemplative life has so strong a resonance for me; it is simply the way that I perceive things, left to myself. That, after all, is how the Gospels came to be peppered with imagery that looks as though it has been borrowed from its contemporary pagan surroundings almost as much as from its native Jewish culture; that is simply how language turned out for the New Testament writers when they tried to find words for a reality beyond words.

My innate Einzelgänger-ishness remains, of course. But maybe I can embrace, rather than struggle with, my native contemplative heritage. The sense of homecoming I felt at Willen Priory was perhaps not illusory after all, but a real intuition; not a homecoming to a place so much as to a language, to a way of understanding that which is beyond language.

*Eastering, as a verb, seems to have originated with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland‘.