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.