Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapters 37-40

In this week's study guide we combine Chapters 37-40 into one consideration because this packet of four short chapters develops a single basic idea: keep your regular workaday prayers short--not more than one or two words.

Before getting to his main point, Anonymous insists that this personal-prayer brevity does not mean we are to avoid liturgical prayers during worship or when doing lectio divina. Anonymous makes a distinction between our most personal prayers and communal praying:

True contemplatives value these community prayers above all others and participate in them as ordained by the Church and its earliest holy fathers. A contemplative's personal prayers, however, rise unrehearsed to God, with no go-betweens or specific ways preparing. (85) 

During communal worship we will want to make intercessions and thanksgivings. After all, we're collecting the concerns of many friends, neighbors, and the needs of many peoples. However, when it comes to our personal prayers, brevity matters. 

Anonymous recommends brevity for a number of reasons. First, because “a short prayer penetrates heaven” (86). Such an observation is precisely the one Jesus makes. Here, as Butcher notes, Anonymous is referring to Jesus’ advice in Matthew 6.7: “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.”

Then too, it’s our common human experience and good common sense that when we most need to say something important, we say it plainly and pointedly. Here Anonymous reminds us three times (in Chapters 37, 38, and 39) what we shout when in the midst of a “fiery catastrophe, someone’s death, or something similar.”  We cry out, “Fire!” or “Help!”  One word does it all. If Anonymous were living in your home today, and you had to make a 911 call, Anonymous would surely say to you as you pull out your cell phone, “This is no time for babbling or big words.  Get to the point!”

So go for brevity. Don’t hesitate to pray with one or two words. When used at the right time, one word is like a train engine, pulling and concentrating forward the energy of a mile-long caravan of human divine realities. Like an engineer

in a powerful locomotive, simply drive your one word/engine forward to God. You won’t find it necessary to analyze all the thoughts (box cars) that may accompany your one big word; simply rev up your prayer engine with one word. One word is enough.

In Chapters 39 and 40, Anonymous recommends two big words: sin and God. Here’s why:

Since every evil is found in sin, either as a consequence or as the sin itself, when we want to pray wholeheartedly to get rid of evil, we should say, think, or mean this little word sin, nothing else. No other words are needed.  On the other hand, if we pray intently to get anything good, we should cry out in word, thought, or longing nothing but this word—God, nothing else. No other words are needed; for God’s very nature is goodness, and he’s the source of everything good. (90)

This is good advice, and here’s how you might apply it. Let’s suppose you manage to get yourself into an argument with someone, perhaps your spouse or a neighbor. Things escalate, and as soon as  you see an opening, as early as possible, you say or think or mean the word sin. You become aware of yourself with one word, and that one word tempers everything. It brings to mind who you are, the nature of egotistical thinking, the reality of self-justification, the intellectual preening that seeks survival and security, esteem and affection, power and control. With one word, you recognize that you’re in a 911 situation. Now you need to dial and say but a single word: God. Here’s how Anonymous puts it:

So feel sin as lump, inscrutable to reason, but none other than who you are. Then cry out in spirit, “Sin, sin, sin; help, help, help!” It’s better for you to learn this spiritual cry from God, by experience, than from my all-too-human words. It’s also best if you can “shout” this word silently, without an actual thought or sound . . . . 

Do the same with the little word God. Saturate your soul with its spiritual meaning without focusing on specifics like which of God’s creations are good, better, or best, physical or spiritual, or on the virtues created by grace: humility, love, patience, abstinence, hope, faith, moderation, chastity, or voluntary poverty. What does any of that matter to contemplatives? They find and experience all virtues in God, in whom everything exists, for he creates all and is in all.  Contemplatives understand that if they have God, they have everything good and need nothing else, so they desire nothing particularly, only the good God. (91-92)

A little story may reinforce what Anonymous is saying. When I first learned about and began practicing Centering 

Jon, Fr. Basil, Andy

Prayer about twenty years ago, in addition to my spiritual director Fr. Basil Penningtohn, I was helped by an old seminarian friend, Jon Kessler. Jon was always near death. His lungs were so seriously damaged that he breathed with only 15% of their capacity. Bound to an oxygen tank for breathing, Jon told me that his two regular moment-by-moment and day-to-day prayer words were “Help!” and “Thank you!” With those two words he penetrated heaven. Ceaselessly.

Importantly, however, Jon did not use those two words during contemplative prayer time. During Centering Prayer he used only his “sacred” word. By making a distinction between his regular “ordinary-time” praying and his “contemplative” praying, Jon observed the distinction that Anonymous describes in Chapter 40: “That during contemplation a person does not meditate on the nature of vice or virtue” (91-92). During Centering Prayer Jon said good-by to the need for help and the desire to give thanks. His desire was simply to “be” with God. When his times for Centering times (of thirty minutes, three times a day) were over, he returned to his regular workaday world and using two words--when washing dishes, driving the car, and standing in the grocery line—silently said, “Help” and “Thank you.”

As you put into practice what Anonymous recommends in Chapters 37-40, you will find, like Jon, his advice extraordinarily helpful, coming as it does from many of Christ’s most trusted spiritual guides.

Some questions to mull over: Does Anonymous' one- or two-word recommendation really make sense to you?  Has your own personal experience confirmed the validity of his recommendation?                         

Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 36

In this short three-paragraph chapter, “Meditations of diligent contemplatives,” Anonymous speaks to those who know what it means to enter “the cloud of unknowing” as a repeated lived experience that has become a habit.

Having described lectio divina for the beginning contemplative in the previous chapter, Anonymous notes that things move beyond lectio divina for those habitually occupied in the contemplative exercises described in The Cloud.  It’s not that they have given up or abandoned lectio divina—indeed not!—but that something is added to their lives:

They don’t have to read or hear Scripture first and meditate on anything special to trigger a sudden, secret awareness of their own sinfulness or of God’s goodness.  Such flashes of insight and simple awareness are better learned from God.  No person can teach them.

The difference is this: whereas beginners often need an inducement to contemplative prayer, those who are steadfast in contemplative prayer do not necessarily need to “prime” their prayer engine with sacred readings or “anything special.” When “flashes of insight and simple awareness” occur, diligent contemplatives find themselves learning more from God than from any teacher.

Moreover, as contemplatives we are surprisingly satisfied with wide generalizations that describe basic truths.  Contemplatives don’t cultivate “clever displays of wit” about the theological profundities of words like sin and God.  For example, we’re not overly preoccupied with the distinctions between various theological positions like Calvinism, conditional election, unlimited atonements and other such matters that scholars worry over.  Contemplatives prefer to focus on simple words like sin and God:

If [you wish to consider the word sin], focus on sin as a lump, inpenetrable to your mind, but none other than yourself. I believe when you’re engaged in this dark, simple awareness of sin as a hard lump (synonymous with you), there could be no more insane creature than you are then—you’ll doubt your ability to live outside a straight jacket.

In other words, if you get yourself tangled up (straight-jacketed) in analyzing what kind of a sinner you are—perverse, stupid, hardened, drifting, struggling, addicted, myopic, incarcerated, clever, whatever!—you are spending too much time trying to figure out how to place yourself on some taxonomic scale. As a contemplative, it's best simply to realize that you are an aggregate, a 145-pound, 5’6” individual who sins. 

As contemplatives and as we shall see in the following chapters, we give the same kind of simplicity to the word God.  We don’t try to figure him or her out.

In short, we keep things at a basic minimum as the respected Baptist minister William Campbell did when he summed things up by saying,

We are all bastards, but God loves us.

When we live this way, people observe that we have a strong inner calm:

No one will even guess you feel this way [that is, unperturbed by arguments and debates] because your exterior will remain calm, and anyone looking at your will think all is well, since none of this inner turmoil is reflection in our face or body language.

When contemplative practice becomes a habit, then “sitting, walking, lying down, leaning, standing, or kneeling, [we] appear fully at ease, unruffled and restful. 

Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 35

This chapter, Anonymous tells us, provides “three skills every contemplative beginner must practice: reading, reflecting, and praying” (81-82), and it’s exceptionally important advice for all who practice contemplative prayer.  As Carmen Butcher makes evident in endnote 1 (251), Anonymous wants us to practice a rhythm of prayer leaning upon a widespread and deep tradition rooted in centuries of Christian experience.

In the second sentence of the chapter, Anonymous spells out “the certain exercises” that help to take us into the fullness of prayer: “These are the lesson, the meditation,

and the orison, better known as reading, reflecting, and prayer” (also known as in Latin as lectio, meditatio, and oratio).  Concerning these exercises, Anonymous says that he “won’t go into great detail” in describing them what because we “can learn more about these three activities in another book where the author explains them better than I can.” As Butcher informs us, Anonymous may be referring either to Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection (Chapter 15) or to Guigo II’s Ladder. Inasmuch as Hilton and Guigo are not easily assessable to today’s readers of The Cloud, those who wish to know more about these three activities that climax in contemplative prayer are invited to visit one or more of the following:

• Guigo II - Lectio Divina (Bishop David Walker talks on the Guigo II method of Lectio Divina. Filmed at the Caroline Chisholm Centre, Pennant Hills, Sydney, Australia).  Highly recommended!

• Father LukeDysinger’s, “How to Practice Lectio Divina: A Step-by-step Guide to Praying the Bible.”

• The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina

• Lectio Divina

• Basil Pennington’s Lectio Divina: Renewingthe Ancient Practice of Praying the Scriptures (New York: Crossroad, 1998)

Study Guide: the Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 34

Lest we imagine that whatever our method of practice in contemplative prayer will generate any number of desired results, Anonymous in this six-paragraph chapter tells us “that God gives the grace for contemplation freely and directly and that it can’t be achieved by any methods.”

In the previous chapter our Teacher has reminded us that contemplative prayer helps us do away with what obstructs our being with God. True enough. But now in the first paragraph of this chapter he does not want us to imagine that it is our purgatorial labor that cleanses us. Indeed not. “Contemplation is God’s work” from beginning to end. As paradoxical as it may seem, it would not ever occur to anyone—never to an angel or saint—to desire contemplative prayer were it not already alive within him or her. So great is God’s grace that Anonymous is of the opinion that “our Lord deliberately chooses lifelong sinner to do this work, perhaps even more often than he selects others who have not grieved him as much” (78). Here one might well imagine that Anonymous is remembering David in the Hebrew Scriptures and Mary Magdalene in the Gospels. Emphasizing the role of God’s grace in every aspect of contemplative prayer is the whole points of this first paragraph—and in all five of the next paragraphs.

Even to feel stirrings for God is the stirring-up work of God’s Spirit within us.  Here Anonymouys echoes what St. Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians 2.1-10:

You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

For contemplatives, every vestige and trace of the ego, especially the ego that takes credit for making important decisions—to pray or not to pray, to love or not to love, to believe or not to believe—opens the door for all sorts of self-congratulatory and self-justifying behaviors.  Yes, we want God, but we are to take no credit for the wanting.  The contemplative fully realizes that God creates the desire to himself.  It’s just as Aslan, the Lion/Christ, says is C. S. Lewis Narnian Chronicle The Silver Cage: “You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you.”

In the second paragraph, Anonymous underscores how our graceful God does all the work so that our personal situation or condition plays no role at all; grace is not given because of our innocence, nor is it withheld because of our  sin.  Choosing his words carefully, Anonymous wants us to see to know that he deliberately uses the verb “withheld” rather than the verb “withdrawn” when he describes how God may occasionally act.  God may “withhold” his grace momentarily (from our point of view), but only so that it may return with our greater acknowledgement.  We are to be careful, therefore, about how we interpret the ups and downs of our lives.  “Guard against error here,” Anonymous says.  If you find yourself disappointed with God and can’t penetrate how his grace is working, then, Anonymous suggests, you should put things aside “until God himself teaches you about it” (79).

Above all, as Anonymous says at the beginning of paragraph three, “beware of pride”:

It blasphemes God in his gifts and makes sinners bold. The truly humble will understand what I’m trying to say. Contemplative prayer is a gift, no strings attached. God gives it to anyone he wants. You can’t earn it. The presence of this gift gives your soul the ability to possess it and feel it. In other words, if you’ve been given the blessing of contemplative prayer, you’ve also been given an aptitude for it. The aptitude doesn’t exist without the gift itself. (79)

So we are not to make any to-do about what we do. “Just keep doing this work, more and more. I ask this of you—always be doing.” Or put another way, don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out who’s doing what.  Just do.

In paragraph four, our Teacher underscores the point again, maybe even more clearly (in what I consider the most beautiful paragraph in all of The Cloud):

In short, let God’s grace do with you what it wants. Let it lead you wherever it wishes. Let is work and you receive. Look on it, watch it, and leave it along. Don’t meddle with it, trying to help, as if you  could assist

grace. Fear that your interference could wreck everything. Instead, be the tree, and let it be the carpenter. Be the house, and let it be the homeowner living there. Become blind during contemplative prayer and cut yourself off from needing to know things. Knowledge hinders, not helps you in contemplation. Be content feeling moved in a delightful, loving way by something mysterious and unknown, leaving you focused entirely on God, with no other thought than of him alone. Let your naked desire rest there. (79)

The two concluding paragraphs of this chapter are almost anticlimactic as once more Anonymous leaves us reassured that all is grace: “know that god is the one who stirs your will and longing, all by himself, with no middle man.” It’s all as St. Paul once said:

What I’m getting at, friends, is that you should simply keep on doing what you’ve done from the beginning. When I was living among you, you lived in responsive obedience. Now that I’m separated from you, keep it up. Better yet, redouble your efforts. Be energetic in your life of salvation, reverent and sensitive before God. That energy is God’s energy, an energy deep within you, God himself willing and working at what will give him the most pleasure. (Philippians 2.12-13, as paragraphed in The Message)

Or as it might be said another way: “We are all like violins that sing when God plays upon us.”