Being and doing - 30 September 2011

A person emailed me with the perceptive comment that a lot of this contemplative business and Christian Meditation seems like unknowing, unlearning.

Back in the 14th century an anonymous English mystic wrote an all-time classic of spirituality entitled The Cloud of Unknowing. When we pray, he or she taught, we are sitting between two clouds. That in itself is interesting news for anyone who is expecting clarity, solutions or certainty, reassurance, revelations or miracles. All we see is cloud, opaque. The cloud above us is the Cloud of Unknowing. This cloud tells only of mystery. It is not full of meaningful symbols or instructions or commandments, thoughts for today or helpful hints. Below us, says the writer, is the Cloud of Forgetting, which lies there between us and all our normal worldly business and concerns and all the noise of our lives, including our church lives. In prayer, in stillness and silence, we drop our distractions into the Cloud of Forgetting, and through the Cloud of Unknowing, says the author, we send “little darts of longing love”.

John Main, one of the great teachers, wrote that we are unlearning much that was conditioned by our education and training, and that is now inadequate for mature spiritual life. What we are learning, however … is something too direct and simple for us to understand, except in and through experience. That is to say, by doing it rather than considering and assessing it. We ourselves may be too complex and self-conscious for the experience when we begin. So some teaching, not only by example (the best teaching) but also by words and ideas, is needed to keep us on the way that we are now travelling…

Over the years we attend study groups and seminars, some of them very good. I have taught a lot of these myself, and even some of those ones were passable. I once ran a church seminar for some weeks on issues emerging from Coronation Street for the edification of the faithful. People came to these things eager to understand basic issues better, even solve some of their philosophical or biblical questions. I am a little cynical now, perhaps -- if we felt intellectually stimulated we felt better. I have been speaker at Sea of Faith and other such meetings where furrowed brows were the order of the day, and the inner message of Christmas or Easter seemed far too simplistic.

But it is as though wiser years are simpler, and what matters is not so much to understand God as to encounter and be in the mystery and love where God is. The eyes of your heart, wrote Paul, being open, that you may know…