Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 24

If you have ever wondered how a contemplative experiences love, Anonymous does his best to tell you with this chapter heading: “What love is, and how it is mysteriously and perfectly contained in the contemplative work of this book.”

In the first sentence, Anonymous says that our contemplative practice is simply a “little blind love tap beating against that dark cloud of unknowing” so that “all things are patted down, and all cares forgotten.” That tap, of course, is our tiny sacred word. Or as our Teacher says in the second paragraph, the wee sign of our “naked intent,” our “simple reaching out to God for himself.” In the third and last paragraph, we are reminded that while engaged in such  tapping, our contemplative reaching out in Centering Prayer,

Andrew P. Buglass
Self-Portrait

the mature contemplative has no special relationship with anyone in particular, whether family or stranger, friend or enemy, because everyone is family and no one is a stranger, and everyone is friend and no one is an enemy. The genuine love r of God takes this love even further. Those who cause contemplative pain or stress are considered their special friends, and contemplatives wish them every good thing, just as they do their closest friends.

In contemplative prayer we empty ourselves to be entirely and only with God.  While being with God in the cloud of unknowing, we are also at one with everyone whom God loves—all of his creation.  It is just as St. Paul describes such a reality in Colossians 3:

⁹You have taken off your old self with its practices ¹⁰and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator (NIV). ¹¹Words like Jewish and non-Jewish, religious and irreligious, insider and outsider, uncivilized and uncouth, slave and free, mean nothing. From now on everyone is defined by Christ, everyone is included in Christ (The Message).

In Centering Prayer there is no more seeing the world with intellectual, cultural, theological, political, religious, ethnic, or family filters. In contemplative prayer, we come to "see" as God sees us.