Study Guide: Chapter 4, “Contemplation’s brevity, and why knowledge and imagination can’t acquire it” (13-18).

With this posting, we will read and discuss the first part of Chapter 4.  

And inasmuch as I will be off-line from September 29 to October 5 for a personal retreat of sorts, I am posting a longer-than-usual study guide that will, I hope, carry everyone through two weeks of discussion. This means that the next study guide for the second half of Chapter 4 will be posted on October 10, 2013.

Entering Chapter 4, we do find ourselves in a chapter substantially longer than the first three.  And as you might imagine, Butcher gives us a longer set of endnotes (eight of them) to help us understand the text.  Counting text and endnotes together, we have about nine pages in Chapter 4 to study, ponder, and discuss.

Here’s my suggestion: let’s not try to do all of Chapter 4 in one week’s study and discussion.  Let’s do approximately the first half of the chapter this week and do the second half next week.  Chapter 4 contains 14 paragraphs.  If you will number each one consecutively 1 through 14, we’ll be able to refer to them as follows:

1.     SO YOU WON’T GO  DOWN  . . .

2.    He measures us . . .

3.    Look.

4.    If you were changed enough . . .

5.    So take good care of your time.

6.    I can hear you complaining . . .

7.    It is good that you said . . .

8.    See?

9.    Start practicing . . .

10.  See how it works?

11.   A person hearing this book . . .

12.  So, for the love of God . . .

13.   Also, don’t get the wrong idea

14.   When I say “darkness” . . .

For this week, let’s read and discuss the first seven paragraphs.

We begin with the first sentence and Butcher’s first note (page 237): 

So you won’t go down the wrong path in this work, thinking contemplation is something it’s not, I’ll tell you more about it.

As Butcher indicates, Anonymous in Middle English (ME) wrote that sentence like this:  But forth that thou shalt not erre in this worching, . . . .”  Her commentary on the verb erre/err is most helpful because erren (as you would find it in a ME dictionary) is loaded with meaning, among them:

·      to wander, to deviate, to sin, to make a mistake

·      to make a person angry

Anonymous is concerned here that we don’t blunder our way into mistaken notions about contemplation and perhaps become morally suspect.  He wants to “prevent [us] from getting any wrong ideas that would scare [our] soul[s] for life and for eternity.”  Moreover, he wants any suggestion of anger we may experience in our contemplative lives to be “purified into spiritual peace.” (note 1, 237).

Anonymous insists that we not think of our contemplative practice as time-consuming, and he spends no less than five full paragraphs helping you get beyond that misconception.  He does it in several ways.  First, he asks us to

imagine our contemplative time in terms of a single atom. As a ME word, an attome in Middle English signified a very small amount of something—either of time or space.  As a temporal notion, it was the smallest unit of time, conceived as 22,560 `atoms' within an hour—or as Butcher does the calculation, “15/94^th of a second” (n 2, 238). The point is that whenever we engage in our contemplative practice we are not wasting lots of time, not frittering away our minutes, not mismanaging our hours.  We are simply taking a wee bit of time to do a whole lot of work.

This means that when we manage our days, nights, mornings and evenings, the few minutes we spend in contemplative prayer are never a waste of anything.  Contemplative prayer, however you name it—Centering Prayer, Prayer of the Heart, Entering the Silence—is time well spent, the best use of time one can make.

Here are some questions you might ask of yourself and perhaps discuss with others:

• What wee times—those “atoms” within the hour—do you spend in the spiritual peace? 

• If you’ve not done so already, how might you arrange your days—mornings and evenings perhaps—so that you allow yourself “atoms” of time for contemplative prayer?

A second misconception to be avoided is that we can somehow be one with God by concentrating our mental activity in him, by thinking about him, by cogitating on him, by using lots of words. Such a limited understanding of being with God opens the door to

a lot of misconceptions.  After all, Anonymous tells us, God is “incomprehensible to the intellect.”  This statement, of course, may surprise a lot of people who have been taught otherwise on Sunday mornings. They (with their pastors, priests, teachers, imams, rectors, and ministers) sit with books, study guides (like this one!), and hymnals, using them to read, listen, sing, repent, praise, and worship God.  That’s all well and good as Anonymous will say over and over again.  But such behaviors and activities don’t take us nearly far enough along, usher us into, nor allow us to be “one” with God himself.  Butcher’s note 5 is important here as she points out that Anonymous is aware of what St. Paul says in Ephesians 3.18-20:

So that you, together with all God's people, may have the power to understand how broad and long, how high and deep, is Christ's love. Yes, may you come to know his love—although it can never be fully known—and so be completely filled with the very nature of God. To him who by means of his power working in us is able to do so much more than we can ever ask for, or even think of: to God be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus for all time, forever and ever! Amen. (Good News Translation)

“To be completely filled with the very nature of God” requires that we go beyond cogitating, using words and images, cerebrating, chewing the cud over, conceptualizing, envisioning, imagining, mulling over, pondering, reasoning about, reflecting on, ruminating and speculating about God—good as all that is.  All such work is simply bridge-work.  We start with words but move on as the ancient practice of lectio divina teaches us.  Moving beyond words, ideas, and images, in contemplation, we cross the bridge and enter an eventual letting-go of such spiritual material into the silent mystery of God’s divine presence. 

Anonymous says that what takes us across the bridge from cogitating to contemplation is not some technique but love. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them,” says St. John in his First Letter (4.16).  Such loving oneness with God is “a taste of eternal sweetness”  (14). 

Tasting is a frequent image used in medieval Western spirituality to convey the loving comprehension of God in contemplation.  InThe Cloud our Teacher will often compare contemplation with tasting and eating. The gist of the analogy is this: if we simply look at and think about what’s on a menu, we will never “taste” any delicious food.  Somehow you tell the server what you want to eat and then you eat dinner.  Merely reading the Bible (the menu) is fine, but actually tasting and eating the dinner of God’s incomprehensible presence is so much better, the best that God serves—Himself.

Realizing how often we students of Anonymous fail to taste and eat our contemplative meals, our Teacher says he hears us “complaining” (15).  After we express disappointments in paragraph 6, we beg Anonymous to “tell [us] what to do.”  We end our cry for help with words like “help [us] now, for the love of Jesus!”

How happy Anonymous is to hear us mention the love of Jesus! That’s where, he says, we’ll “find our help” because “love is so powerful that it shares everything.  So love Jesus, and everything he has will be yours.”  As next week we read and study the second half of this chapter, Anonymous will spell out more clearly how the “humble blind stirring of love” (paragraph 10) works its way mysteriously within contemplative practice.

In summary so far, Anonymous has urged us not to think of our contemplative practice as time-consuming; actually, he says, it’s all as quick as a split second in the run of time.  After that somewhat extended discussion (paragraphs 1-5), he begins to emphasize the importance of contemplative love in our relationship with God. 

One extended note about being united with others 

In paragraph 7, our Teacher says that in contemplation we not only experience the loving friendship of Jesus, but also that of “his friends,” especially “our Lady, St. Mary, who was full of grace and made the most of her time,” along with the angels and saints in heaven and on earth.  Here Anonymous takes us to that part of the traditional Eucharistic liturgy where many today hear their presiding minister say, 

Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name . . . .

By mentioning “Our Lady,” along with the angels and saints in heaven and on earth, Anonymous emphasizes that contemplative prayer is a uniting experience wherein we are in the “One-ing” (to use Julian of Norwich’s expression) given to us by God’s grace.

As you might well expect, Anonymous and his friends did not personally know any contemplatives other than those in their own Christian tradition.  While he knew that Our Lady was with him, he had no intellectual knowledge that someone like a Buddhist or a Hindu monk might also be in God's wideness with him.

Today many contemplatives have come to the conclusion that within the Great Sanctuary of the Holy, we have many contemplatives from all over the world.  Inasmuch as we all live and move and have our being in One God, when  “One-ing” in contemplative prayer, we are united spiritually with God’s “everyone.”  We transcend boundaries in the “One-ing,” so much so that when Thomas Merton responded to a request from Aziz Abdul, a Pakistani Muslim Sufi, to share his prayer life, Merton wrote:

Strictly speaking I have a very simple way of prayer. It is centered entirely on attention to the presence of God and to His will and His love. That is to say that it is centered on faiths by which alone we can know the presence of God. One might say this gives my meditation the character described by the Prophet as “being before God as if you saw Him.” Yet it does not mean imagining anything or conceiving a precise image of God, for to my mind this would be a kind of idolatry. On the contrary, it is a matter of adoring Him as invisible and infinitely beyond our comprehension, and realizing Him as all. My prayer tends very much toward what you call fana [‘annihilation’].[1]  There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the nothingness of all that is not God. My prayer is then a kind of praise rising up and out of the center of Nothing and Silence. If I am still present ‘myself’ this I recognize as an obstacle about which I can do nothing unless He Himself removes the obstacle. If He wills, He can then make the Nothingness into a total clarity. If He does not will, then the Nothingness seems to itself to be an object and remains an obstacle. Such is my ordinary way of prayer, or meditation. It is not ‘thinking about’ anything, but a direct seeking of the Face of the Invisible, which cannot be found unless we become lost in Him who is Invisible.

For Merton, contemplative prayer is uniting prayer, breaking the boundaries which words and images necessarily impose on us by language, in paintings, sculpture, and other human creations.  As a teacher, Merton lived within the mystical Oneness uniting Sufism and the Christianity. To his monastic listeners, Merton suggested an ancient linking of Sufism with Syriac Christianity, which must have come up in his voluminous reading.  He had, no doubt, come across the fact that the Prophet Muhammad had received his first religious instruction from a Nestorian Christian monk in the course of his commercial journeys into Syria long before his revelation.  Merton then turns to the great late medieval mystics of the Netherlands and the Rhineland, notably Ruysbroeck and Meister Eckhart, who he says “are like the Sufis,” continuing on to state approvingly: “That’s why they are good,” and, furthermore, “That’s also why they get into trouble.”[2]

As both Thomas Merton and our Teacher Anonymous remind us, we are indeed united with all those center their lives in God. Yes, the experience of contemplative prayer may surprise those who pray primarily with red, blue, and green prayer books (good as they are!).  In our contemplative practice, we do indeed appreciate such gifts; they are from God.  But we also lay them aside and periodically let go of them when we enter our Christian fana, our letting go.  In whatever state we live, we allow ourselves to be like Merton who once said, "I am the biggest Sufi in Kentucky though I admit there is not much competition."  

When others in our faith community don’t understand and experience such One-ing with God and other contemplatives, it’s best we follow Merton’s example and become lovingly discreet about our realizations so as not to offend our sisters and brothers in the faith.  After all, as our Teacher reminded us, in Chapter 2, “Never think you’re holier or better than anyone else” (9).  There’s not need to argue or feel superior. When we move along the contemplative path, we “lift up the foot of love and walk in kindness toward purity” (8), as our Teacher suggested in Chapter 1.

A note on this note:  

If you’re interested in following up on how and where interfaith dialogue is doing, you may wish to visit The Society of Christian-Buddhist Studies  [link here], Christian Insight Meditation’s Resources for Ecumenical Spirituality [link here], and The Empty Bell [link here], among others.

As always, if you wish, let us know where you found something difficult in the text to understand.  And then too, let us know where you read something that made very good sense.  More than anything, come back next week ready for a good discussion, one you will enjoy.

[1]  Fana (Arabic: فناء‎ fanāʾ ) is the Sufi term for "dissolution" or "annihilation" (of the self). It means to dissolve the ego self, while remaining physically alive. Persons having entered this enlightenment state obtain awareness of the intrinsic unity (Tawhid) between Allah and all that exists.

 [2]  Sadiq M. Alam, “Thomas Merton's letter to Sufis and views on Sufism,” available at Technology of the Heart. See also Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love; Letters (William H. Shannon, ed.; New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985), 66-67; Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin), 433.