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

And now with this posting, we’ll read and discuss the second part of Chapter 4, paragraphs 8-14 (pages 16-18) as  they are listed in our previous posting.

In paragraphs 1-7, our Teacher told us that contemplative time , such a wee tiny time, measured in fractions of seconds, is actually our best use of time.

Paragraph 8 begins with the bright Middle English interjection “Loo!” which Butcher translates as “See” with a question mark as though Anonymous is asking us if we’re catching on to the brevity of contemplative time.  Other translations put an exclamation point after “Loo” as did Anonymous in the original text and so render it “Look!”  James Walsh combines both “look” and “see” to have us read Anonymous this way: “Look and see what comfort there is here.” However we understand this “Lo and behold,” it’s important to realize that we are moving toward new considerations in the second half of this chapter. “Loo!” works as a pivot word, a turning point.  Something new is being introduced.

Having emphasized the wee-ness of contemplative time, we are ready to see what a difference contemplative prayer will make in our lives.  Importantly, such prayer will often come “like a spark from a burning coal.”  The image here, as Butcher notes, is one that comes from the writings of Dionysius, whom Butcher mentioned earlier in her Introduction:

Dionysius the Areopagite

[He was] an anonymous monk and mystic . . . thought to have lived in Syria in the later fifth to early sixth century.  He took the pseudonym (pen name) of St. Paul’s Athenian convert—“Dionysius the Areopagite” (Acts 17.34)—to give his writing more authority.  It worked.  In the Middle Ages, from East to West, his writings were viewed with a quasi-apostolic authority. (xix)

Our desires to be with God come like sparks from a lump of coal; they are gifts from God himself, gifts we receive as openings to contemplative prayer.  Such sparkings occur often in our lives, for some frequently on a daily basis.  Yes, we extinguish them, but then they return as the next spark or scintilla of desire “rises up again as fast as it did before.

The sparks, impulses, and heartfelt flarings to be with God are certainly not like daydreams, delusions, superstitious thoughts, mental machinations, or “queynte (quaint) opinion[s]” as Anonymous distinguishes the latter from the contemplative giftings.  God-given sparks come from the “humble blind stirrings of love” as spiritual gifts.  As such, any flying-ups to God are not to be analyzed under our mental microscopes.  “The self-important, hyper-analytical intellect,” Anonymous tells us, “must always and in every way be squashed,” stomped under foot if ever we want “to do the work of contemplative prayer with integrity.”

Contemplative prayer is thus not an activity of the mind.   Anyone who thinks contemplative prayer has something to with analytical thinking is off-base and dangerously misled--so misled, Anonymous asserts, that he or she may experience forms of spiritual madness.  Such people will require nothing less than the miraculous counsel of other contemplatives if they ever  are to be healed of their delusions.  Anonymous’ warning against equating contemplative prayer with thinking is emphatic:

So, for the love of God, be careful in this work.  Don’t in any way approach contemplation with your intellect or your imagination. I’m telling you the truth—those won’t help you.  Leave them be and don’t try to do the work of contemplation with them.

Indeed, we are not even to take Anonymous’ own word-work as something of a platform for linguistic or empirical analysis.  Even his use of words like “darkness” and “cloud” are not to be thought of in any literal sense.  Moreover, we are to avoid them as mental pictures and imaginative metaphors.  In The Cloud the word “darkness” is simply a brief pointing toward “the absence of knowing.”  “Whatever you don’t know and whatever you’ve forgotten are ‘dark’ to you.”  Any mention of a “cloud” simply indicates “a cloud of unknowing between you and God. Within contemplative prayer we do not find it necessary to pursue the meaning of words and images.  All semantics, epistemological conundrums, lexical wanderings, and everything to do with language and the visual arts is unlearned and undone.  Contemplations moves us toward the darkness of unknowing.

There will be more of this unknowing, especially in Chapters 51-61.

How is it then—ironically? paradoxically?-- that the employment of a single sacred word, used when needed in Centering Prayer, can help us enter the absence of the knowing?“

Centering Prayer at St. Jane House
www.visitationmonasteryminneapolis.org