In Chapter 22, only two paragraphs long, Anonymous has
written one of my favorite chapters in all of The
Cloud. He gave it this chapter heading:
Christ’s wonderful love for Mary, who represents
all sinners truly converted and called
to the grace of contemplation.
In Middle English the name for Mary is Mari, and perhaps you have noticed in previous chapters, that Anonymous tends to imagine the Bible's various Maris as one woman, moving back and forth among what we
know as three Biblical Marys. Yes, from our point of view, it looks as though
Anonymous gets them a little mixed up, talking about one Biblical Mary and then slipping
over in the next sentence to talk about another Biblical Mary as though they are one person. But as Butcher explains in
endnote 3 on page 249, Anonymous is
simply following the common understanding and practice of his time:
Throughout this chapter, the author has presented
the traditionally accepted composite Mary: the unidentified sinner with the
alabaster jar of ointment in Luke 7:37; Mary Magdalen in Luke 8:2; and Mary of
Bethany in John 11:1-12.
As Anonymous envisions the relationship between Jesus and “Mari,” he's
aware that he's on potentially dangerous ground when he notes that “the love between
our Lord and Mary Magdalene had for each other was sweet”--or as the Middle English
text declares: Moche [much] love had sche
to Hym; moche more had He to hir. It’s for this reason that Anonymous
says what took place between them surely “isn’t gossip.” Our Teacher says that we need only
to “study” the story to see “the looks that took place between them” and know
the truth about their relationship. It was not superficial; what went on
between them was deeply experienced, an intensely realized “exceptional love” (58).
The love of Mary for Jesus models the love that we contemplatives have
for Jesus. And the love of Jesus for Mary models “the love he has for all of
us ordinary sinners who genuinely repent and are called byu grace to the
contemplative life” (58). With Jesus we are like Mary. And we who
practice Centering Prayer know that at its deepest level prayer is, first of
all, a profound relationship. In Centering Prayer we experience God’s presence within
us, closer than any thinking about God, closer than consciousness and self-awareness itself. Centering Prayer is not meant to replace
other kinds of prayer. Rather, it adds
depth of meaning to all prayer and facilitates movement from many active modes of
prayer—verbal, sung, mental, liturgical, or emotional—into receptive prayer of resting unitively in God. Centering Prayer emphasizes prayer as a deep personal relationship with God as a movement beyond conversation with God
to communion with Him. In Centering Prayer God gives us the gift of gazing at the One we love as He, in turn, gazes at us. Or as Meister Eckhart so famously said, "The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God see me. My eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowledge and one love" (Sermon 16, in Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings, trans. and ed. O Davies (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1994), 179).
As best you can, remind yourself and others how we express and experience, like all the Biblical Maries, both our love for God and God's love for us when we enter contemplative (centering) prayer.
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