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.
2. MEDITATION
3. SONG
4. NARRATIVE
Mystical Word is a weekly reflection on the Sunday Gospel reading by L.J. Milone, Director of Faith Formation, Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle
The Cloud of Unknowing 1
In this week’s Mystical Word, L.J. Milone starts a reflection on the medieval English gem of mystical literature, "The Cloud of Unknowing."
Deep below the surface of the ocean, so far down that the pressure alone would kill a human almost immediately, life flourishes. Sea creatures living at the bottom of the ocean or near the bottom are some of the most fascinating and odd marine life in the whole world. Light from the surface cannot reach beyond 1000 meters or a little over half a mile. The entire ocean below this point resides in perpetual darkness. Sea creatures at this depth and beyond adapt to living in the blackest night. Therefore, some develop bioluminescence, that is, their bodies can create light. They literally glow in the dark. Others have enormous eyes to capture even the dimmest flicker of light penetrating the depths. Still other creatures cast off vision altogether and use other senses to make up for sight.
Negotiating the Divine Darkness
These amazing ocean creatures adapt to the darkness, frigid cold, and intense pressure of the bottom of the ocean. They are apt images for the way the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing would have us negotiate the divine darkness or what he calls “the cloud of unknowing.” This author believed in divine mystery, which is darkness to our minds. He understood prayer, therefore, as an entrance into the dark mystery of God. He called it contemplation. For the next few weeks, we will delve into the mysticism of this anonymous medieval English contemplative. He offers a fascinating and deeply practical approach to becoming a mystic.
We do not know who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. We do know when, in England in the late fourteenth century, and we can surmise who. The author never gives his name, but most scholars believe it was a Carthusian monk, probably an older monk; The Cloud of Unknowing is addressed to a younger monk. The anonymous author also wrote other, minor, works such as The Book of Privy Counseling, A Letter on Prayer, a translation of a classic called Denis' Hid Divinity, and A Letter of Discernment. In The Cloud of Unknowing, the author speaks plainly. He doesn’t write as a theologian. With common sense and some humor, he uses earthy metaphors, such as clouds. He writes as a spiritual director introducing aspects of the mystical life to a spiritual directee. Like a good spiritual director, he advises readers to read the whole book through before making any judgments. If we don’t understand what he is saying, then he asks us to read it again.
Love: "the only way to reach God"
God, who is love, calls forth love from us through Jesus. For the author, this divine love is central. Intention is central. The Cloud author recognizes that our minds cannot grasp God, but we can still love God. In fact, he is quite absolute about this, for “love is the only way to reach God.” The author describes a method or way of being present to God intentionally, that is, with a simple desire for God. He instructs us on the priority of love: “gently lift up your heart to God with love . . . Direct a naked desire toward God.” Intentional presence to God, seeking only him, is an act of love. Love is what carries us through the contemplative work he is going to teach us. It is, truly, the heart of contemplation. Hence, anyone can do the practice he teaches because it is not a practice based on skill as much as on love. “Everyone who has the desire should devote attention to this exercise.” All we need is a simple, naked, direct, desire for God.
Abiding in the Cloud
The contemplative practice of the treatise is to abide in the “cloud of unknowing,” and this practice is to remain in “the nowhere that is nothing.” The Cloud practice is to rest in the state of nothingness unto unity with God, “the nothing” who is “all.” The soul enters the cloud of unknowing as it releases its grip on everything created in the cloud of forgetting. The soul is nowhere as it abides in the clouds of unknowing and forgetting. But for the author, to be nowhere is to be everywhere spiritually. Mysticism scholar Bernard McGinn reflects, “In the ‘nowhere’ of spiritual freedom the soul finds ‘nothing’ to feed on, ‘nothing’ to support it—and that is precisely the point. Pressing onward into this nothing for God’s sake brings one ever closer to the God who cannot be known: ‘Leave this everywhere and this something in exchange for this nowhere and this nothing.’” For this anonymous author, the practice of loving God beyond the mind is a prayer practice resting on the soul’s encounter with the divine nothing in the nowhere of the cloud of unknowing.
Mystical Word is a weekly reflection on the Sunday Gospel reading by L.J. Milone, Director of Faith Formation, Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle
The Cloud of Unknowing 2
In this Mystical Word, we reflect on the two clouds: the cloud of forgetting and the cloud of unknowing. (Read the first reflection, The Cloud of Unknowing 1)
I went to a Franciscan school, Siena College, in upstate New York. I would regularly pray in the chapel of the friary (the friars’ residence). They had daily morning and evening prayer as well as Mass. I tended to get there early enough to do half an hour of meditation before a prayer service or Mass. Occasionally I would get there so early, the friars weren’t even up yet! One morning a heavy fog settled over the campus. Fr. Dan, the head or Guardian of the friary, let out a big belly laugh when he saw me emerge out of this thick cloud. He gave me a hard slap on my back and said all my prayer had created this “cloud of unknowing.”
Two Clouds
The author uses the title image of the cloud to great effect. He is famous for it. The cloud conveys the darkness and obscurity of loving God beyond thinking. He describes two different clouds with respect to contemplative practice. One cloud is the cloud of forgetting, the other of unknowing. He tells us to let everything go by placing all things, including our thoughts, beneath a cloud of forgetting. He then advises that we attend God alone in the cloud of unknowing.
Forgetting
The cloud of forgetting is his image for letting go of all thinking. Forgetting means abandoning our desire for such thoughts, for thinking about what we want. Thinking, the author frequently repeats, cannot get God; whatever we think about stands between us and God. “To the extent that anything other than God is in your mind, you are that much farther from God.” As we give our attention to thinking and become preoccupied with it, we lose awareness of God. “Let us abandon everything within the scope of our thoughts and determine to love what is beyond comprehension.” He is talking about single-minded attention to God in interior silence. The image of a cloud suggests thinking becomes lost to us as we encounter the One beyond all thinking.
Unknowing
We meet this God of Mystery in a “cloud of unknowing.” He says, “When you begin, you will experience a darkness,a cloud of unknowing . . . None of your efforts will remove the cloud that obscures God from your understanding.” The darkness and unknowing is a kind of blankness in our minds because our thinking is not in use and we are simply being. He tells us we will not feel anything; it is best to accept the dark unknowing and learn to rest in it. The cloud of unknowing never lifts, for it is the cloud of encounter with the Unknowable God. Our minds will never grasp God by thinking.
Prayer beyond Thinking
The whole of The Cloud of Unknowing is about the “work” of contemplation. But the author does not mean willful effort. Rather, this word, work, in his vocabulary refers to practice or method. “Whoever reads or hears the directions given in this book may conclude that I am describing mental effort. But taxing your brain in an attempt to figure ways to achieve this produces nothing.” The practice of contemplation goes beyond the mind. It goes into unknowing. The author is insistent on this point. Our minds cannot grasp God. Therefore, we must pray beyond the thinking mind.
Choosing a Word
The Cloud author recommends forgetting created things and being present to God in the cloud of unknowing. To help be present in the cloud of unknowing, he advises us to choose a short monosyllabic word representing our love for God. “You may wish to reach out to God with one simple word that expresses your desire. A single syllable is better than a word with two or more. ‘God’ and ‘love’ provide excellent examples of such words . . . permanently bind this word to your heart.” The word represents our intention, that is, our naked desire for God alone.
Returning to the Word
The representative word is how we steer ourselves back to God when we get caught up in the thinking mind. Part of the work of contemplative prayer is to return to the word as a gentle thought in one’s mind when thinking gets between the soul and God. The other part of the work of contemplation is to stay in the nothingness or unknowing silence of the prayer. He says, “You are doing nothing. Wonderful! Continue doing that nothing, as long as you are doing it for the love of God. Do not stop. Work hard at it with a powerful desire to be with an unknowable God.” Whenever the mind focuses on anything, it’s not engaged with the unknowable God. The word helps us to return to God and to plumb the depths of nothingness to discover the divine nothingness. According to the author, when our minds are not occupied with material or spiritual things, they are engaged with the very reality of God.
5. MEDITATION
6. SHARING
7. PRAYER AND INTENTIONSHeavenly Father, thank you for inviting me to seek understanding. Your ways are not my ways, and I often struggle with things I don't understand, which can hinder my faith. Please fill me with your grace and the boldness to believe in your direction for my life, even when it makes no earthly sense. Enlighten my mind to understand your ways more deeply and flow from a heart of faith. May I seek to understand you not as a way to combat doubt, but as a road to deeper intimacy and faith. Amen." 8. SONG
