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.