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.