Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapters 50-56

First, let's consider Chapters 50 and 51 together as Anonymous gives each the following chapter headings:

Chapter 50:  “What pure love is, and how some contemplatives rarely experience tangible consolations, while others feel them often” (114-115). 

Chapter 51: “That we must be careful not to interpret literally something meant spiritually, especially the words in and up” (116-117).

You’ll remember that in Chapter 49, Anonymous urges us to “bow eagerly to love.”  We are to “follow its humble stirrings” in our heart and let it guide us “in this life, and it will bring [us] safely to eternal bliss in the next.” After all, “love is the essence of all goodness” (112).  Because love is always superior to knowledge, that is why Anonymous gives it the most important role in our relationship with God.  Loved by God who dwells within, we are most blessed when responding in kind, being to Being, as blessed St. John says, “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” Love is the bridge, the clasping, the hyphen, the bonding, the transit that unites us to God, Godself embracing us, our self responding in kind.  “We love because He first loved us” (I John 4.19).

         

As we enter Chapter 50 Anonymous hopes that by now we “see why it’s important [for us to] focus our attention wholly on this humble stirring of love” within us” when we want to be with God.  Such a love affair with God surely undoes any special need for to require physical delights, pleasant sensations, or “spiritual” gifts when are intimately in love wity God.  If pleasures come, that’s fine.  Simply welcome them, Anonymous says, but do not make a big to-do about them.  After all, you may find yourself substituting the gift (for healing or teaching perhaps) for God himself.  When that happens, then “your love is not pure or perfect.”  Mature lovers of God simply love God.  They don’t grumble when the gifts somehow disappear.  If they do come, mature lovers of God simply accept them without attaching a great deal of importance to them. 

         

Contemplative undergo a whole range of experiences as they love God.  What comes and/or does not come is “entirely up to God.”  Some contemplative receive many consolations.  They may be so “spiritually fragile and tenderhearted that they must be reassured by pleasant feelings.”  Other contemplative people “have such frail bodies that they can’t endure rigorous physical acts of [self discipline] for cleansing, but our Lord is gracious and purifies them through feelings of sweet consolation and tears.”  At the other end of the spectrum, some contemplatives “are so strong in spirit that they gather all the comforts they need inside their souls as they offer up this heartfelt, humble stirring of love with an obedient will.”  Now as to which way is better of “holier,” Anonymous does haven’t a clue.  Only God knows.

As the artist says,"This is not a pipe."

In Chapter 51, Anonymous wants to make sure that we don’t take too literally many of the words we use to describe contemplative prayer.  He’s especially concerned that we don’t pounce on the literal meanings of in and up when discussing spiritual movement.  Sometimes people get terribly messed up when they take words like in and up too literally.

Aware that words can trap us into ways of thinking that are to be avoided, Anonymous urges to understand words figuratively when talking about spiritual realities.  Beginners at contemplative prayer are especially prone to literalism.  When, for example, they hear it said that the contemplatives “must climb up, rising above self,” they somehow imagine that they’re on an arduous climbing expedition, and they make extraordinary efforts to stride upwards toward some height.  And when his or her spiritual director says, “No, that’s not what’s involved,” then they disagree, leave, and look for another spiritual director, complaining “Nobody understands me.”

         

Such beginners are arrogant and overconfident as to what they can do spiritually.  Their contemplative striving becomes “freakish,” characterized with a lot of self-importance, lots of posturing, and not a little self-promotion.  “Worst of all,” says Anonymous, “its practitioners don’t know that.”  If one wants to see such behaviors working today, one only needs to read numerous Facebook postings wherein so-called “real” Christians and so-called spiritual guides brag about their spirituality, telling others, for example, in no uncertain terms that they are “imitators” of Jesus.  They let everyone know they are obsessed with God.  “They believe,” Anonymous says, that “their contemplative mission is clear and are resolved to think on nothing but God.” 

         

To grasp what Anonymous is saying, it may be helpful to see a prayer of a mature contemplative who knows his place in the order of things.  Take a look at this prayer written in his journal by Thomas Merton:

Thomas Merton

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.   I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you and I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.

And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road although I may know nothing about it.  Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Here there is no arrogance and overconfidence.  The prayer is nearly void of any ego-centric self-posturing.  It is the prayer of a mature contemplative.

To make sure that you discern the difference between the self-preening person of prayer who looks for attention, praise, and emulation, Anonymous gives us a sustained five-chapter digression (Chapter 52-56) in which he alerts us to the often revealing mannerisms of spiritual hucksters who try to present themselves as models of Christian life.  And, by yet contrast in Chapter 54, he describes the kind of contemplative person whom you may trust.  

Chez Moi
Port au Prince, Haiti

Next week will be especially busy for me because I'll be preparing for a visit to Chez Moi (French for "My Home," also known as Grace Orphanage for Girls) a residence for 18 parentless girls that Centering Prayer contemplatives in St. Augustine, FL, and in Griffin, GA, support in union with Grace Missions, Inc. When in Haiti, I'll be sending you jottings and notes as to how things are going along.

I'll be going down with my son Kirk, Karen Rider from Servants of Christ Lutheran Church in Indianapolis, IN, and Delette Matheus from Fort Lauderdale, FL. So for our work in the next week or two, I'd like to ask that everyone read Chapters 52-56 as a single unit. As you do so, create a list of the observations that Anonymous makes about teachers whom one should avoid because their spirituality is phony, arrogant, and manipulative; then, paying special attention to Chapter 54, make another list of those traits and characteristics which suggest a spiritual guide may be trusted. Your discussion while I'm in Haiti will be based on the observations that we make in creating these two lists.

Characteristics of a spiritual teacher not to be trusted

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Characteristics of a spiritual teacher to be trusted

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Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 49

As you remember, Anonymous has told us that if we want a balanced and centered life, we'll find it best where Christ is—within us. We don’t have to get an emotional high to find Jesus. The church doesn’t have to produce special effects with technology, hypnotic music, self-preening pastoral preaching, or congregations in high excitement. Such goings-on may dangerous because they are openings to egoistic posturing, self-praise, and pride in what we do and are.  We do well to be and do otherwise—to find Christ within. Looking at a typical Icon of Christ, we note that

behind the head of Christ is often a nimbus or halo bearing within it a Cross, which is inscribed with the Greek words "I AM." That is the mysterious name of God revealed in Exodus 3:14, "I AM WHO I AM." The name of God, now revealed in Christ, tells us who He is.  He is Being, the One who in the mystery of his Being is beyond our descriptive capacity. Some say it this way: if we must use the word “God” for Being, then perhaps it’s best to say that what we mean is “God beyond [the word] ‘God’.” God is beyond the three-letter-word-in-the-dictionary with whom we have relationship in contemplative prayer. In Centering Prayer we have a relationship with the great I AM within us, none other than the Christ-within-us.

Now we come to Chapter 49, “That the essence of all perfection is nothing but a good will, and how every possible comfort in this life is non-essential” (112-113).

Finding Christ within, the One who first loves us, we respond to his presence with love.  For this reason,

Anonymous begins Chapter 49 this way: “So I encourage you—bow eagerly to love. Follow its humble stirrings in your heart. Let it guide you in this life, and it will bring you safely to eternal bliss in the next. Love is the essence of all goodness” (112). As Anonymous has said many times, God can certainly be loved but not thought; that is, God can be taken and held by love but not by our thinking about him.  So in Chapter 8, he writes,

No matter how sacred, no thought can ever promise to help you in the work of contemplative prayer, because only love—not knowledge—can help us reach God. As long as you are a soul living in a mortal body, your intellect, no matter how sharp and spiritually discerning, never sees God clearly.  The mind is always distorted in some way, warping our work; and at its worst, our intellect can lead us only to great error (28-29).

Love is always superior to knowledge, and that is why Anonymous gives it the dominant role in our relationship with God. Loved by God who dwells within, we are most blessed when responding in kind, being to Being, as blessed St. John says,

^13-16 This is how we know we’re living steadily and deeply in him, and he in us: He’s given us life from his life, from his very own Spirit. Also, we’ve seen for ourselves and continue to state openly that the Father sent his Son as Savior of the world. Everyone who confesses that Jesus is God’s Son participates continuously in an intimate relationship with God. We know it so well, we’ve embraced it heart and soul, this love that comes from God. (The Message, I John 4.13-16)

The New King James Version translates that last verse even more declaratively: “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” Love is the bridge, the clasping, the hyphen, the bonding, the transit that unites us to God, Godself embracing us, our self responding in kind.  “We love because He first loved us” (I John 4.19). 

In contemplative prayer we give expression to this love for God by letting God know that we love Him, or as Anonymous says, “Simply put, love is a good will in harmony with God.  When you have [such good will], you get supreme satisfaction creates such profound joy that “the delights and consolations of body and soul, no matter how holy, are incidental to this good will and dependent on it.”

With these words Anonymous wants to help us realize what happens when we respond to God’s grace in love. He wishes for us to realize what happens when we go aside for our fifteen or twenty minutes of loving God in contemplative prayer. We enter a Happening, in the best possible, in which the purpose for which we were created—union with God--unfolds. United to God, we are united with all creation, with God who fills the whole world with his presence. Nothing is separated from us or foreign to us.  The past, the present, and future are one. In loving God, we love all that God loves—strangers, acquaintances, friends, enemies, all and everyone. We enter the Eternal Now and the One Where.


Nothing compares to this union. You will remember that in earlier chapters, Anonymous emphasized how the Scriptures present Mary in love with Jesus. [1] Our Teacher reminds us that Jesus told Martha that there was only one thing necessary, and that Mary had chosen the better part, and he could not take it from her. Commenting on this forty-ninth chapter, William A. Meninger, one of the early Trappist advocates for Centering Prayer, writes:

My friend, when we give ourselves to this love, we lack nothing here or hereafter. “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has mind conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (I Cor. 2.9). In this union with God, as we give ourselves to it more and more, we reach a complete harmony with God’s will. We want only what God wants. Like Jesus we become the “Amen” to the Father, seeking and desiring onoly to fulfill God’s will in all things.[2]

A little aside for my Lutheran friends. As Lutherans we are often reminded that our relationship with God is one of made authentic by faith, trust, and confidence in saving mercies of God. We don’t hear much in our Lutheran communities about what it means to love God. Sometimes Luther when reading the sermons of German contemplatives (his favorite was Johanness Tauler (c. 1300 in Strasbourg – 15 June 1361), would draw a line under or through Tauler’s word for “love” and in the margins write the word “faith.”  For Luther it was the leap of faith into the arms of God that meant so much to him and gave his life meaning. Good for Luther. But among the “trinity”—faith, hope, and love, St. Paul reminds us that the greatest of these for us is love.  Yes, faith is important, but even beyond our faith is the gift of love, love for God and for all people. It does not surprise us, therefore, St. Paul, in the midst of one of his letters, makes this prayer for all of us: "May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ."  (2 Thess. 3.5)

[1] You will remember that for our medieval Anonymous, the three Mary’s that we now recognize as distinct individuals were for him one “traditionally accepted composite Mary” (249, note 3).

[2] The Loving Search for God: Contemplative Prayer and The Cloud of Unknowing (New York: Continuum, 1998), 74.

Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 48

Chapter 48, “How God wants you to serve him physically and spiritually, how he rewards both, and how he helps you discern between good and evil spiritual delights during contemplation” (107-108)

In Chapter 47, Anonymous urged us to hide our desire for God when it becomes the least bit of an opportunity to show off our contemplative or pious self; any such self-pointing preening comes dangerously close to subtle egotistical posturing. Rather than making a show of your spirituality (by singing, for example, “O, How I Love Jesus!”), it’s better to play hide-and-seek with God, better to hide one’s self and let God seek and find you as He loves to do. Anonymous, of course, is aware that this sounds a bit silly, as though he’s “lacking in sense,” but he has his reasons. 

Here it will help if we once more remember what Anonymous has observed before we move to the Chapter 48. You may wish to hide yourself for three reasons. First, when you hide your longing for God (from others), God finds you all the more quickly.  “He sees the yearning you hide more clearly than what you bare, and your desire is fulfilled more quickly” (107). Second, when you “conceal what you wish,” then you learn how to “wean yourself from a dependence on your fragile, fickle human emotions and deepen the purity of your spiritual awareness.” 

         

Here’s the sort of thing that Anonymous is talking about.  I remember, on Sunday morning in a Miami hotel, turning on

the television before going to a neighborhood church for the Eucharist. It was a “religious” program conducted by a popular televangelist.  All the standard props were used: a large choir electronically enhanced, a stage filled with flowers, attractive women modestly but expensively clothed, and an overenthusiastic preacher who strode back and forth across the stage waving his Bible. I quickly became absorbed in the theatrics and found myself emotionally responding to the enthusiasm of the preacher and his audience. It took a few minutes before the horror of his message penetrated through to my critical understanding. With all the panoply of “popular” religion, choir, Bibles, church robes, and the like, the man was extolling the amassing of money and material goods as a sign of God’s favor and promising them to his audience in great abundance, if they would donate heavily into his ministry. I was momentarily lost in the externals. My emotions were responding, but not my mind.  Many were and are taken in by this kind of ersatz religion. 

Unless they get an emotional charge from such choreographed worship, they feel let down. God has disappointed them. But if they get charged up, then God is there, and they can tell others how terrific the choir was, how powerful the preacher was, how terrific the music was. It was a great experience. But God is not an experience, just as he is not one of our thoughts, nor one of our emotional responses. 

[A wee aside for those of us who worship in liturgical communities: always remember that liturgical churches--Lutheran, Episcopal, Roman Catholic, Orthodox--are also prone to providing us with spectacularly lovely and emotionally delightful experiences. There is nothing inherently "wrong" with beautiful liturgical worship; nevertheless contemplatives keep themselves aware that the liturgical in some churches may be a source of subtle pride. Thomas Merton, as he notes in The Inner Experience often found monastic worship an embarrassment.] 

When you become aware of emotional attachments and avoid them because they are spiritually dangerous, then God “helps you tied the spiritual knot of burning love between you and God in a mystical oneness of wills.”

         

Here’s the third reason: God bonds himself with you more deeply than any of your five senses—taste, touch, feeling, hearing, and seeing—can make way or provide access for him. After all, God and you are capable of deeply profound spiritually union. 

         

That having been said, we are ready for Chapter 48 wherein our teacher, always seeking balance and centeredness, says that he’s “not trying to discourage [us] from praying aloud.  And I don’t want [anyone] to feel that [she or he] can’t burst into words when your spirit fills to overflowing and you’re moved to talk to God as you would to a friend, saying things like, ‘Good Jesus!  Lovely Jesus!  Sweet Jesus!’ and others.” Anonymous has no intention of separating body and spirit. God can indeed “set [our] senses on fire, not just once or twice in this life, but sometimes quite often, whenever he wishes.” What’s important is to know how the fire is started. If the flames arrive from blowtorches “you can’t identify,” watch out. If you are being manipulated, watch out. Welcome the sources of your comfort when they are “devout stirring[s] of love making [their] home in the pure heart, created by the hand of almighty God, without any intermediary. 

         

Anonymous closes down this chapter by suggesting that, if you have trouble making discernments as to the origins of your stirrings, you may wish to consult “another man’s book, where it’s described a thousand times better than I ever could” (110). As Carmen Butcher notes, Anonymous is most like referring to The Scale of Perfection by Walter Hilton, a fourteenth-century colleague who practiced and taught contemplative prayer. Here is an excerpt from Book I, 47, of The Scale that reinforces what Anonymous teaches:

If you seek wisdom (who is Jesus) as silver and gold, and delve deep after it, you shall find it. You will have to delve deep in your heart—for there it is hidden—and thoroughly turn out all the loves and pleasures,  sorrows and fears of all earthly things: and so you will find wisdom—Jesus.

In other words, go into yourself where Jesus is. All of which is what Richard Rohr once said:

One of the major problems in the spiritual life is our attachment to our own self-image—either positively or negatively created. We confuse this idea of ourselves with who we actually are in God. Our ideas about things are not the things in themselves. Concepts of themselves are not immediate contact with reality.

Who we are, and forever will be, in God, is a much more enduring and solid foundation. As Paul says, in my paraphrase, I no longer live as a mere “I,” but Christ lives in me and I live in Christ (Galatians 2:20). God always sees his son, Jesus, in me, and cannot not love him (see John 17:22-23). What the Gospel promises us is that we are objectively and inherently children of God (see 1 John 3:2).

This is not a moral worthiness that we attain; it is ontological,[1] metaphysical, and substantial worthiness, and cannot be gained or lost. When this given God-image becomes our self-image, we are home free, and the Gospel is just about the best good news that we can hope for!  (Adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, pp. 43-44)

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[1]   The word “ontological” comes from the Greek word for “being” or the “isness” of something or someone.  In the Christ Icon, behind the head of Christ is a nimbus or halo bearing within it a Cross, which is inscribed with the Greek words "I AM." That is the mysterious name of God revealed in Exodus 3:14, "I AM WHO I AM." The name of God tells us who He is.  He is Being, beyond our words for things.  Some say it this way: if we must use the word “God” for Being, then perhaps it’s best to say that what we mean “God beyond the word ‘God’.” It’s the God beyond God with whom we have relationship in contemplative prayer. In Centering Prayer we have a relationship with the great I AM within us, none other than the Christ-within-me.