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?