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.”