Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 36

In this short three-paragraph chapter, “Meditations of diligent contemplatives,” Anonymous speaks to those who know what it means to enter “the cloud of unknowing” as a repeated lived experience that has become a habit.

Having described lectio divina for the beginning contemplative in the previous chapter, Anonymous notes that things move beyond lectio divina for those habitually occupied in the contemplative exercises described in The Cloud.  It’s not that they have given up or abandoned lectio divina—indeed not!—but that something is added to their lives:

They don’t have to read or hear Scripture first and meditate on anything special to trigger a sudden, secret awareness of their own sinfulness or of God’s goodness.  Such flashes of insight and simple awareness are better learned from God.  No person can teach them.

The difference is this: whereas beginners often need an inducement to contemplative prayer, those who are steadfast in contemplative prayer do not necessarily need to “prime” their prayer engine with sacred readings or “anything special.” When “flashes of insight and simple awareness” occur, diligent contemplatives find themselves learning more from God than from any teacher.

Moreover, as contemplatives we are surprisingly satisfied with wide generalizations that describe basic truths.  Contemplatives don’t cultivate “clever displays of wit” about the theological profundities of words like sin and God.  For example, we’re not overly preoccupied with the distinctions between various theological positions like Calvinism, conditional election, unlimited atonements and other such matters that scholars worry over.  Contemplatives prefer to focus on simple words like sin and God:

If [you wish to consider the word sin], focus on sin as a lump, inpenetrable to your mind, but none other than yourself. I believe when you’re engaged in this dark, simple awareness of sin as a hard lump (synonymous with you), there could be no more insane creature than you are then—you’ll doubt your ability to live outside a straight jacket.

In other words, if you get yourself tangled up (straight-jacketed) in analyzing what kind of a sinner you are—perverse, stupid, hardened, drifting, struggling, addicted, myopic, incarcerated, clever, whatever!—you are spending too much time trying to figure out how to place yourself on some taxonomic scale. As a contemplative, it's best simply to realize that you are an aggregate, a 145-pound, 5’6” individual who sins. 

As contemplatives and as we shall see in the following chapters, we give the same kind of simplicity to the word God.  We don’t try to figure him or her out.

In short, we keep things at a basic minimum as the respected Baptist minister William Campbell did when he summed things up by saying,

We are all bastards, but God loves us.

When we live this way, people observe that we have a strong inner calm:

No one will even guess you feel this way [that is, unperturbed by arguments and debates] because your exterior will remain calm, and anyone looking at your will think all is well, since none of this inner turmoil is reflection in our face or body language.

When contemplative practice becomes a habit, then “sitting, walking, lying down, leaning, standing, or kneeling, [we] appear fully at ease, unruffled and restful. 

Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 35

This chapter, Anonymous tells us, provides “three skills every contemplative beginner must practice: reading, reflecting, and praying” (81-82), and it’s exceptionally important advice for all who practice contemplative prayer.  As Carmen Butcher makes evident in endnote 1 (251), Anonymous wants us to practice a rhythm of prayer leaning upon a widespread and deep tradition rooted in centuries of Christian experience.

In the second sentence of the chapter, Anonymous spells out “the certain exercises” that help to take us into the fullness of prayer: “These are the lesson, the meditation,

and the orison, better known as reading, reflecting, and prayer” (also known as in Latin as lectio, meditatio, and oratio).  Concerning these exercises, Anonymous says that he “won’t go into great detail” in describing them what because we “can learn more about these three activities in another book where the author explains them better than I can.” As Butcher informs us, Anonymous may be referring either to Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection (Chapter 15) or to Guigo II’s Ladder. Inasmuch as Hilton and Guigo are not easily assessable to today’s readers of The Cloud, those who wish to know more about these three activities that climax in contemplative prayer are invited to visit one or more of the following:

• Guigo II - Lectio Divina (Bishop David Walker talks on the Guigo II method of Lectio Divina. Filmed at the Caroline Chisholm Centre, Pennant Hills, Sydney, Australia).  Highly recommended!

• Father LukeDysinger’s, “How to Practice Lectio Divina: A Step-by-step Guide to Praying the Bible.”

• The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina

• Lectio Divina

• Basil Pennington’s Lectio Divina: Renewingthe Ancient Practice of Praying the Scriptures (New York: Crossroad, 1998)

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.”

Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 33

Having given us two strategies we might use as beginners when contemplative prayer seems more like a losing battle than an entry into the quietness of God, Anonymous in Chapter 33 continues his instruction: “How contemplative prayer purifies the soul of individual sins and their lingering pain, but there is still no such thing as perfect rest in this life” (76-77).

In addition to pretending that we don’t notice distracting thoughts and even at times surrendering to them, Anonymous intimates that we have more strategies which he won’t discuss at the present moment. He hesitates not only because he hasn’t mastered them himself, but also because he’s quite sure we could teach him a trick or two.

Be that as it may, Anonymous wants us to work hard and “accept the pain if the going gets tough and nothing happens quickly.” We are to look on our contemplative-prayer practice as a form of purgatory, that is, a purging.  

The whole notion of purgatory and purging is a difficult one for lots of Christians, especially if they are Protestants. It’s simply not a part of their vocabulary unless now and then they use the word “purgative” in a medical context where it implies a cathartic medication. Then too they have heard the word “purge” used in a political context; as then a political party eliminates those who are no longer fit to be party members. As for the possibility of there being a “purgatory” to be experienced after death, that is nearly anathema. For most Protestants, it’s either heaven or hell and nothing inbetween. [1]

Be that as it may, Anonymous suggests that contemplative prayer may serve as one’s purgatory; that is, it may work (we use a medical or physiological analogy here) as a laxative, getting rid of much that is wasteful in our lives. In other words, to put it bluntly, contemplative prayer may work to help us get rid of a lot of crap in our lives.

One classic way to distinguish phrases of growth in one’s prayer life is to describe the whole of it as three-fold: beginners start on the “purgative way,” later coming to the “illuminative way” with “affective prayer” [2], and eventually experiencing the “unitive way.” 

In the purgative way, the Christian seriously attempts to leave behind a life of sin and come to an accurate knowledge of one’s self and to a true understanding of God’s call to enter the new life in Christ. Here one leaves behind whatever attachments keep him from a deeper commitment to the Christian life. One deliberately puts on the mind of Christ as she or he engages in the struggle to overcome attitudes and patterns of behavior that tend to draw the individual away from a life of holiness and service.  In this struggle, contemplative prayer plays a critical role.

As a purgative, contemplative prayer is a spiritual laxative helping us get rid of what is unpleasant, obnoxious, and often emotionally painful. And like a laxative, it lessens much emotional, psychological, and spiritual pain we experience. In contemplative prayer we undergo a cleansing of “the suffering that [we] have caused [ourselves]” (76).  This does not mean that we are free from the tragedy of sin. We will indeed have to work hard and beat back temptations “springing up from original sin,” beating them back “with the awesome, s harp, double-edged sword of discernment” (77).

Notes

1. Not all Protestants, of course.  C. S. Lewis, for example, appreciated the possibility of purgatory and professed a belief in purgatory. In Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, he wrote:

I believe in Purgatory.

Mind you, the Reformers had good reasons for throwing doubt on "the Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory" as that Romish doctrine had then become. I don't mean merely the commercial scandal. If you turn from Dante's Purgatorio to the sixteenth century you will be appalled by the degradation. In Thomas More's Supplication of Souls Purgatory is simply temporary Hell. In it the souls are tormented by devils, whose presence is "more horrible and grievous to us than is the pain itself." Worse still, Fisher, in his Sermon on Psalm VI, says the tortures are so intense that the spirit who suffers them cannot, for pain, "remember God as he ought to do." In fact, the very etymology of the word purgatory has dropped out of sight. Its pains do not bring us nearer to God, but make us forget Him. It is a place not of purification but purely of retributive punishment.

The right view returns magnificently in Newman's Dream. There, if I remember it rightly, the saved soul, at the very foot of the throne, begs to be taken away and cleansed. It cannot bear for a moment longer "With its darkness to affront that light." Religion has reclaimed Purgatory.

Our souls demand Purgatory, don't they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, "It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy"? Should we not reply, "With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I'd rather be cleaned first." "It may hurt, you know"--"Even so, sir."

I assume that the process of purification will normally involve suffering. Partly from tradition; partly because most real good that has been done me in this life has involved it. But I don't think suffering is the purpose of the purgation. I can well believe that people neither much worse nor much better than I will suffer less than I or more. "No nonsense about merit." The treatment given will be the one required, whether it hurts little or much.

My favourite image on this matter comes from the dentist's chair. I hope that when the tooth of life is drawn and I am "coming round," a voice will say, "Rinse your mouth out with this." This will be Purgatory. The rinsing may take longer than I can now imagine. The taste of this may be more fiery and astringent than my present sensibility could endure. But More and Fisher shall not persuade me that it will be disgusting and unhallowed. (Chapter 20, paragraphs 7-12)

2.  A kind of prayer in which the emphasis is on making aspirations of love towards God, rather than on formulating petitions or engaging in discursive reflection.

Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 32

In Chapter 31 Anonymous has encouraged anyone beginning contemplative prayer (what today is also known as "centering prayer") to be brave when first entering contemplative practice. Distractions come and must be stomped down with "love's energy," the use of a sacred word as Anonymous will describe the practice later. However, as bravely as the beginner may contend against the assault of ideas, feelings, and memories, she or he may need to use a trick or two up the sleeve to help things along:

When distracting thoughts press down on you, when they stand between you and God and stubbornly demand yours attention, pretend you don't even notice them.  Try looking over their shoulders, as if  you're searching for something else, and yours are.  That something else is God, hidden in a cloud of unknowing.  Do this, and I know the work of contemplation will start getting easier for you.

Using this tactic, beginning contemplatives simply act as though they are unaware that thoughts are pressing down upon them and they look beyond in the direction of God.  Here and elsewhere in this chapter, Anonymous may have been thinking of what he's read in the Letter to the Hebrews where we are encouraged to keep our eyes on Jesus and the finish line:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God. (12.1-2)

The second tactic is an old combat maneuver that has worked for any number of soldiers: simply fall down and give up. They act like a cowards and surrender. By quitting the

fight and giving up, beginners also find that by surrendering to God they paradoxically win a skirmish, even a battle. At times it's the acceptance of one's spiritual poverty, powerlessness, and nothingness that wins the battle. Learning to be supple, we allow  ourselves to melty into water.  We become simply what we are--quite insignificant, very low in the scale of things, "a filthy wretch, worse than nothing," as Anonymous phrases it.

When we accept failure, the good news is that such humility "gets God's attention."  God is like a good earthly father, constantly looking out for his little ones, lost in the woods, whether they are "facing snarling wild boars or raging biting bears." Like a good father, God arrives "to avenge [us] against [our] enemies." In contemplative prayer he swoops in and snatches us up, dries our spiritual eyes, and saves each one of us as "his small child."

A personal note: At times it's my experience that the "snatching up" occurs most frequently near the end of my  time in Centering Prayer. After it becomes apparent that I've come to the end of things, that not another sending out of my sacred word is going to help, somehow I manage to give up and wave the white flag of surrender. I simply let go of trying. I fall down, barely aware of anything and for all intents and purpose, I allow myself to die. Such a surrender often bring peace as God swoops in and picks me up and carries me in his arms. There's no body present expect nearly-dead Andy in God's love.

Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 31

Once again Anonymous gives us a short one-pareagraph chapter: "How the beginner in contemplation must deal with thoughts and sinful impulses."  

Assuming that we've taken steps to cleanse our consciences by repenting and living in forgiveness, Anonymous  suggests that beginners need to begin working with the practice contemplative prayer right away. 

The beginner's first engagement with such prayer requires a good bit of bravery because old memories and new temptations will certainly stir up the mind as one enters what is to be the quieted mind. One may feel as though he

or she is under attack with thoughts and distractions rushing in, pushing and shoving for dominance. The new and inexperienced beginner, using  "love's energy," must be brave and "stomp them down" under foot as he battles what Martin Laird calls "the cocktail party of the mind." Using the sacred word as a shield against the onslaught of thoughts, the novice contemplative must be strong and courageous. 

But sheer determination, Anonymous says, may not be enough. The battle with the onslaught of memories and temptations may be so hard that the beginner may need "a few spiritual tricks and feints and secret stratagems" to make some progress. "Such wisdom is best learned from God through the experience of contemplative prayer [rather] than from any human teacher." In other words, simply resolving to do contemplative praying may well provide the best instruction.  And, as he will tell us in the next chapter, "two spiritual tactics" may also "help the beginner to pray."