The Cloud of Unknowing

At the end of chapter 1, I posed the question of how we can consciously "live and move and have our being" within the Trinity.

I can’t say that I found the answer to this question swiftly; it was similar to how cyclists gradually move forward by turning the peddles of a bike. In fact, I can’t chart the course of this growing awareness; I was just led to read The Cloud of Unknowing written by an anonymous mediaeval English writer.

He wrote: ‘God’s grace restores our souls and teaches us how to comprehend him (God) through love. He is incomprehensible to the intellect. Even angels know him by loving him. Nobody’s mind is powerful enough to grasp who God is. We can only know him by experiencing his love’. So we cannot experience God by knowing things about him. There is a great difference between knowing about a person and knowing them personally.

When I know someone personally, a different dynamic takes place to just knowing facts about them. They affect me and I affect them. At our deepest level we long to move from estrangement to loving people. Maybe we keep most people we know at a distance, but as Christians, we are called to love everyone. In fact the first commandment is that we love God first. The second is to love our neighbour as our self. Can I say that I love God?

What the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing points out is that we have to come humbly before God, and that we have to downplay our feelings and our ideas, and just enter the cloud of unknowing. It's hard to set aside emotions and thoughts and images which can never grasp God, and just long for God’. But I tried to do this. What helped me was some advice I had from a priest friend who recommended I read Open Heart Open Mind, by Thomas Keating, which is really helpful.

Open Heart Open Mind

Following Keating’s advice, I began to just sit before God, just seeking a loving encounter on a deeper level than thoughts, feelings and images. I just sought to experience God’s love. The apparent result was a stream of a thousand distractions. I say apparent, because with time I realised that something was happening deep within me. I wasn’t acquiring knowledge of God. I was acquiring knowing. It wasn’t ideas or feelings, but a sense of God within me and an underlying knowing of his love. Occasionally, I was lost in it for a few seconds.

I was encouraged to persevere because I heard Jesus asking me hundreds of times “do you love me?” That kept me focusing on seeking the loving relationship, which he wants so dearly to form with me. In this way, I am building a practice of contemplation, even though many people would think I am mainly swimming in a sea of distractions.

Our spirits

It's like how we learnt to swim. We had to forget our notions of standing and moving on dry land, and acquire the very different skills of moving in water. Deep inside we had that capacity, but we had to launce ourselves into the new world of water. Likewise, each of us has the capacity to know God in our spirit, which is the deepest part of our being, deeper than our feelings and our intellects.

Our feelings are notoriously changeable. Also we can lose our minds, but the core of our person, our spirit, can never die. Original sin has weakened it but Jesus has sent the Holy Spirit to awaken our spirits. That means you and me. But to swim in the love of God we have to wade into the water of the Spirit.

The danger of intellectualism

Please don't think that, because I am a priest, I must have a higher sensitivity to the Holy Spirit - more than you do. In fact priests run the danger of intellectualism. We can be stuck in the mind which is never satisfactory. Jesus blessed the Father "because you have hidden these things from the learned and the clever and revealed them to mere children" (Matthew 12; 25). Clergy can resist becoming little children. It is only when I come to you as a little brother that we can be in a position to learn together the wonders of God.

Do you experience contemplation sometimes, or regularly? Do you find yourself quietly resting in God's love, and have never really thought about it? I am convinced that Jesus wishes us to develop this heart-to-heart with God until we are praying always as he tells us to. I am trying to open up this conversation about what I am learning. Can you share what you are finding? Don't get embarrassed because you don't know much. Let's be like some beggars discussing how to locate the best meal.