It seems to me that our practice is in a sense no more than a phenomenological user interface (UI) for the metaphysics of the contemplative life. What we are, beneath the structures of our frail and temporary selves, is no more than the open ground itself. We are appearances, wavelets that come and go, and flicker for a moment in the brief light of our human consciousness; but wavelets are water. They are the stream itself, waving for an instant here, and then there.

Our fellow creatures, human and otherwise, are likewise ripples on the same measureless stream. Whatever we each of us does disturbs the surface minutely, or substantially. Perhaps to do so intentionally and with love has more effect than we dream, even. At least it cannot fail to change things, somehow, in the direction of good. Charles Williams called it coinherence.

But it is hard to sit and take account of these things. Thought is merely about, not of. Human beings, all through recorded history – and undoubtedly before as well – have tried to engage directly with the vast space before things, and they have taken stories, images, songs from the culture in which they were born, teaching them to their children and their children’s children, until churches and ashrams and synagogues grew from the ache within the heart of each of them.

What are we to do, here on the edge of something we cannot understand? We need a user interface, a phenomenological UI of some sort. It is no good our carefully deconstructing the religion of our forefathers unless we have a way to understand – no, to stand under – the endless becoming that is the ground of all that is. One cannot interact with raw code; there must be some interface there – which was the genius of the uncountable generations before us, with their psalms and their parables, their songs and their stories.

We must, I think, learn to listen to our hearts. To sit still and listen is in many ways the hardest thing, and yet it must be the truest way. When a spirituality undergoes deconstruction, we often think we have to throw away our entire old user interface because we no longer believe in the literalist, dogmatic theology it was originally built for. Perhaps we don’t actually need to change the interface; perhaps we merely need to understand what its elements – buttons, widgets, liturgies, prayers – are actually for. In the silence, if we are patient, their names may appear. Only be still…