Tag Archives: grace

Returning

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We still seek wholeness. It is intrinsic to human identity that, however much we have achieved, we are never satisfied. We hunger and thirst for what lies beyond our grasp and even beyond the horizon of our desire. Religion and spirituality, which are less easy to divorce than we thought – are the elements of culture that deal with this desire beyond desire. Where are they taking us? Where do we have to redefine the old terms by which we try to understand ourselves in this longing for wholeness? …

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, pp.3,9

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

The spiritual life looked at from within resembles not so much a ladder or an ordered progress as it does a rather tatty wheel. It does move, but it moves at least as much round and round as it does forward. It is a process of trial and error – trials and errors. It seems to be more like an organic thing, subject to odd diversions and random mutations, than a neat structure assembled according to a set of plans.

Coinherence is one of those luminous words whose meaning flickers at the edge of comprehension, as though it names something you already half-know in your bones. Charles Williams was fond of using it, but its roots extend far further back than that. If ultimate reality (God, the Way) is in fact process, relational union, rather than an object or a person, then relational living is intrinsic to life itself, and it has profound implications for human behaviour, ethics and purpose. Specifically, it speaks to the contemplative life in ways that make sense of much monastic teaching over the years, right from the Desert Fathers and Mothers to the present day.

Pain and difficulty – what used to be called “tribulation” – are intrinsic to life itself. “Change and decay in all around I see,” wrote Henry Francis Lyle, and an open heart risks breaking daily at the news from across the world, even in supposedly stable and civilised nations. But if we are aware that all that is – not only, if especially, conscious beings – rests in the ground of being just as we do ourselves, then our presence in contemplation becomes much more than a state of mind. We are not “praying for” those for whom our hearts are torn; we are recognising our shared being, recognising an existential bond that exists already. Love is not symbolic, but structural: a circulation of grace, strength and suffering.

The living current of grace that coinheres in all existence is the source of what is – the Tao as the mother of the ten thousand things – and yet it is the heart of our contemplation itself. Only if we sit still can we be present as aerials, signs, receiving stations for that grace. The mist covers the distances, and our vision is not good; but we don’t need to know or to believe: our unknowing is itself our practice and our compassion. Perhaps all we need is love.

This rib cage of failure

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It is simple enough to lose sight of the liberating nature of our failings. They often seem to lead us into some parched, lonely place—a place of dry bones. The problem is not our inadequacies, much less the freight of the failures we carry, but the loss of perspective on what we resent most in ourselves. Light forever shines from within the rib cage of failure. But reactive mind is too cluttered to realize that this is the nature of divine love: flowing waters of mercy for all who are parched—each of us… Nor is reactive mind capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, pp.95-6

Just as death is the inescapable precondition for new life, so failure and error are the necessary spring of change and growth in the spiritual life. Only when we will let ourselves know that, only in the wreckage of our plans and conclusions, only in the defeat of our new beginnings and our fresh initiatives, can we be broken open to the current of grace that will wash us out into the open sea of becoming.

Behind all these metaphors there is a very simple fact, it seems to me: that only when we cease completely from self-justification, when we are prepared without reservation to let go of whatever role we imagined for ourselves – spiritual humanist, say, or secular Buddhist – can we discover what the flow of change – the Way, the leading of the Spirit, call it whatever feels right – is tending towards.

I think this applies both in our own inner lives and in the broader life of humankind. We can see it in the unceasing pattern of evolution (species don’t remain static, however attached we may have become to one or another expression of their diversity) and in the breakdown and reformation of institutions. Sarah Bessey (Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith) sees it in the breakdown of the established churches, and in the tentative shoots of a radical, open faith appearing through the rubble, like fireweed springing up through the rubble of bombed buildings following WW2. (Yes, I am old enough to remember seeing it for myself from the top decks of London buses, riding with my mother looking over the makeshift hoardings that attempted to conceal the broken gaps in the terraces and the rows of shops beginning to struggle back to some sort of normality after the end of hostilities!)

“Everything passes/everything changes/just do what you think you should do,” sang Bob Dylan (‘To Ramona‘). But what Martin Laird calls “reactive mind” is too wrapped up in what it thinks it thinks to know; it is only when we keep still enough in our own awareness that we are “capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.”

The annihilation of difference

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It begins to appear
this is not what prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of difference,
the consciousness of myself in you, of you in me. . .
Circular as our way
is, it leads not back to that snake-haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city
of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.

RS Thomas, from ‘Emerging’, Collected Poems 1945-1990

For most of my life – in fact since about the age of five – my life seems to have been centred on silence, stillness, the presence of something overwhelming but infinitely desirable, unnamable but closer somehow than my own breathing. Of course I didn’t even try, as a young child, to name it – or even really to try and think about it at all. It merely was.

Ever since then, I have been trying to find words. Words to tell others, certainly, but more than that, words to tell myself where I have been. (Words for this kind of thing are never in the present tense – they must refer to something remembered, to some trace in the mind left by the God behind whom the door has already closed.) And words, it seems, bring community. That is perhaps what they are for, after all. But communities own their words, own their people; or so they feel.

I have found myself, of course, borrowing words wholesale from others who have come this way before. But they are others’ words, however sublime they may be, however hallowed by time and tradition. In these late years all I can do is try to speak of what still leaps up in my heart at echoes, snatches of music, phrases from the Psalms, sunlight through high windows. I know RS Thomas’ hard-found annihilation of difference – it is what has haunted me all these years. It lies beneath my sitting every night and morning. It will be waiting for me, softly, after my last breath. I have no other name for it, since it is no thing. Dear, endless, it merely is.

A wider mercy

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Then, for no good reason, you remember.

Oh. Right. This is experience. This is radiant presence. This whole thing is what I am.

And immediately, even if nothing changes on the surface, the weight drains out of the moment. The seriousness falls away. The same pain, the same confusion, now sit inside a wider mercy.

The cosmology could not be simpler.

There is only this field of experience. It is what you are. Everything that seems to be happening is that field showing itself to itself, in this impossible, intimate way.

The story will go on. The interpretation will never stop. The madness will continue, in you and in the world. On that level, nothing is ever finally resolved.

At the same time, the one fact is always quietly in place, before any of it, as all of it…

Rob Barker, from This Radiant Space

Union with God is not something we can or need to acquire. By way of the contemplative skills of engaged receptivity and release, we realize this Union ever more deeply and clearly throughout the course of the days given us. God is too simple to be absent. It is we who, with complicated and cluttered minds, remain unaware that this foundational Light is flowering perpetually in the fertile and unfathomable right now. As St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions: You are “more intimate to me than my inmost self.” Paraphrasing this very line, Meister Eckhart preaches: “The soul takes her being immediately from God: therefore God is nearer to the soul than she is to herself, and therefore God is in the ground of the soul with all His Godhead.” St. Augustine likewise knows this grounding light: “This light itself is one, and all those who see it and love it are one.”

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light, p.24

We are not separated; there is nothing we can do, or need to, to achieve union, nonduality, oneness. We just need to step out of the light – which is why we practice, of course. If we don’t do something regularly, we forget. We forget anyway; but at least our practice gives us something to remind us, a place to look back at when we feel entirely lost.

And feeling lost reminds me of the wider mercy of which Rob Barker writes. The light, the radiant presence, the endless ground is not neutral. It is not abstract. Now, I am not saying – and nor is Rob Barker or Martin Laird – that it is a person. You can’t point to it, and say, “There it is, over there!” If you could, it would not be one. It is no thing, but it is not an abstraction. It is real, far more real than we are, more real even than the solid earth beneath us. We, and all the “ten thousand things”, are only fleeting eddies in its unceasing stream, of which we are already part. The wider mercy is all that is, and it is merciful. In the end, It is our only home.

The freedom of the elbow

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Again and again, I find liberation in the very places I thought it was not—in brokenness and imperfection, disappointment and disillusionment, limitation and death, failure and darkness, unresolvability and uncertainty, groundlessness and everything falling apart. This is “the freedom of the elbow not bending backwards,” as they say in Zen. Of course, the elbow can’t bend backwards without breaking. So this is not the freedom to do what I want, but the freedom to be as I am, and the freedom for everything to be as it is, which is no way and every way, and never the same way twice. This is the freedom of nothing to grasp…

For me, the never-ending, always Now, pathless path of awakening boils down to simply being awake, being present, being truly alive—seeing the beauty in everything, living in gratitude and devotion, enjoying the dance of life, being just this moment, not knowing what anything is, clinging to nothing, recognizing—not in the head, but in the heart—that everything belongs, that nothing persists, that every moment is fresh and new.

Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, pp.262,263

While human actions are completely determined, Spinoza introduces a notion of human freedom that is compatible with determinism:

  • True Freedom is Understanding: Freedom isn’t the ability to choose against causes (free will), but the ability to understand the necessary causes that determine us.
  • Activity vs. Passivity: A person is passive when they are determined by external causes and inadequate ideas (passions).
  • A person becomes active and more free when they act from adequate ideas (reason) and understand that they are part of the necessary order of God/Nature. This intellectual understanding leads to the highest state: the intellectual love of God (Amor Dei Intellectualis).

(Google Gemini, response to user query, October 2025)

The flow of becoming, the stream, the Tao, is what it is. What comes to be in our frail and transient lives is only the result of causes far beyond our understanding, and leads on to effects we cannot know. What we can do is pay attention to the grace of the tiny, beautiful things among which we live: the endless sparkling of the wavelets of the stream.

Freedom is to know, all-of-a-piece, that what we are is nothing other than the stream itself, and that the stream runs in the course of what merely is: the ground itself. But how?

As Joan Tollisfson says, the path of awakening comes down to being awake: just that. The only way I know to be awake is practice; simply watching what happens, watching what becomes as it is becoming, is the only way. It is so simple, so perfectly simple; and yet it is the hardest work I’ve known. To be aware, without choosing an object, is the purest kind of attention; and yet it is like holding a bare wire.

Only sit still, in quiet. Don’t seek anything – watch. Live quietly, in obscurity, as Epicurus advised, and just watch. There is nothing else to do.

A sense of naked inadequacy

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Apophatic spirituality has to start at the point where every other possibility ends. Whether we arrive there by means of a moment of stark extremity in our lives, or (metaphorically) by way of entry into a high desert landscape, the sense of naked inadequacy remains the same. Prayer without words can only begin where loss is reckoned as total.

Belden C Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, p.36

It is no surprise that we humans would deny death’s certain coming, fight it, and seek to avoid the demise of the only self we have ever known. As Kathleen Dowling Singh puts it in her groundbreaking book, The Grace in Dying, “It is the experience of ‘no exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being … it is absurd and monstrous.”

“The Ground of Being,” a commanding phrase that Paul Tillich used, is an excellent metaphor for what most of us would call God (Acts 17:28 [“For in him we live and move and have our being”]). For Singh, it is the source and goal that we both deeply desire and desperately fear. It is the Mysterium Tremendum of Rudolf Otto, which is both alluring and frightful at the same time. Both God and death feel like “engulfment,” as when you first gave yourself totally to another person. It is the very union that will liberate us, yet we resist, retrench, and run…

The path of dying and rising is exactly what any in-depth spiritual teaching must aim for. It alone allows us to say afterward, “What did I ever lose by dying?” It is the letting go of all you think you are, moving into a world without any experienced context, and becoming the person you always were anyway—which you always knew at depth, and yet did not know at all on the surface.

Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond, p.111

I have observed that contemplative practice does not have about it the linear quality we are used to in many other kinds of practice: if you practice a skill, say playing a musical instrument, you will get better at it. As time goes by, if you practice faithfully and intelligently, playing will become almost effortless – you will not have to think at all about where to find a note, or how to finger a certain scale or chord – they will just be there for you, embedded in muscle memory and musical instinct; and over the years it just gets better. But contemplative practice is not like that at all. One is never an expert; things you thought you’d learned months ago suddenly leap out as real difficulties, real terror even. The simplest thing, like keeping a slip of attention on the breath, as an anchor to return to if lost in thought, will unexpectedly appear horribly difficult. One day you hardly notice a thought as you sit, peacefully and still; the next you are plagued with anxieties, fantasies, mundane recollections, until you feel like getting up and doing something useful instead.

What is going on? I think we forget that it is in brokenness, in extremity, that the the way to the bright fields of being opens, not in experiences of bliss or jewelled visions. In fact, not in  experiences at all.

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now p.65

To meditate, year after year, it seems to me, is to find oneself continually in extremis: nothing is achieved – there is no ladder, and in any case half the rungs are missing, and the ones that remain are cracked and treacherous. One only practices this way if every other possibility has failed, if the easy way has turned out to be no way at all. Only this way can we hope to come across the sunlit uplands; and yet even there, the light will skin our littleness like sand in a gale. It is all we come to long for, the only place we will be at home.

Otherness

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In my last post, I mentioned my sense that in situations of what I called transcendent powerlessness we can touch – or be touched by – something electric and quite beyond ourselves. In that post I wrote,

…something may sometimes happen in situations of extreme danger and radical insecurity that may not be unlike finding one’s finger in the spiritual power outlet. Something just as shocking; something with just the same sense of encountering a force from somewhere else…

I sometimes think that the technology of contemplation – the methods of meditation, the years of study and discipleship – are nothing more than means, sometimes elaborate means, of bringing about the very experience of powerlessness I have been describing. Of course, such experience can be misunderstood, can be fled from, rejected in a myriad ways, while its subject retreats either back into everyday life, or into some kind of addiction. But if the tide is taken at its flood, if the powerless moment is embraced as gift, coming in some strange way from elsewhere, then anything can happen.

What is happening here? Throughout the years philosophers, from the ancient Taoists to Spinoza, have found themselves unable to avoid treating the necessity of what could otherwise seem raw causality with something close to personification.

There is something undifferentiated and yet complete.
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Soundless and formless.
It depends on nothing and does not change.
It operates everywhere and is free from danger.
It may be considered the Mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 25 (tr. Chan)

God is the Determiner (but not a Planner): God/Nature is the immanent (indwelling) and necessary cause of all things. God doesn’t stand outside the world creating and planning by free will, like the personal, transcendent God of traditional religion. Instead, the order and regularity of the universe—the natural laws—are God’s nature.

Google Gemini, in conversation with the author on “Spinoza’s Determinism and God”

In contemplative practice one may occasionally find the sense that, in the sheer powerlessness of sitting still, something breaks through that Dzogchen practitioners would call Rigpa, “the ‘pristine awareness’ that is the fundamental ground itself.” (Stephen Batchelor). Somehow this is always unsought – you cannot bring it about, and trying is entirely counterproductive.

Of course the parallel immediately appears here with the traditional Catholic concept of infused contemplation – “…a state that can be prepared for, but cannot in any way be produced by the will or desire of a person through methods or ascetical practices” (Burke & Bartunek).

As I wrote yesterday, there is nothing here but grace. One can go so far in faithful practice, in preparedness and in waiting, but no farther. Even Spinoza wrote of the “intellectual love of God”, his term for the highest spiritual attainment, as intuitive rather than rational. I think we experience the ground of being, especially when encountered unawares, as so profoundly “other” because its immanence and necessity are so far from our own state as one of the “ten thousand things” (Laozi); and yet we are not other. We did not plan our birth: our very existence rests in the ground itself – we are from being itself, and that by sheer grace.

Powerless

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Learning to navigate life’s changing nature from center is one of the gifts of endarkenment (to commit to turning toward rather than away from physical and symbolic darkness and to learn to perceive with the heart—beyond unconscious bias and hierarchical perception). Change invites us to affirm our participation with life beyond the isolating, but seemingly sheltered, visible security. With reverence toward the divine darkness, we can learn to meet our human experience of change with openness rather than fear. We can learn to surrender to rather than resist the groundlessness of change. We can learn to lean into the changing nature of existence, realizing the freedom that arises from not knowing and realizing we do not have to fear the unknown.

Deborah Eden Tull, in an extract from her book Luminous Darkness, published in Tricycle Magazine, August 2025

One of the most striking encounters with powerlessness that many of us have had to navigate was the recent pandemic, Nick Cave: “Suddenly, there was an extraordinary sense of relief, a sort of wave washing through me, a kind of euphoria, but also something more than that – a crazy energy. A sense of potential, maybe? Yes, but true potential. Potential as powerlessness, ironically. Not the potential to do something, but the potential not to do something.”

There are many ways to understand this odd experience. There have been other times in my life, too, when I have lost for a time – for all I knew, forever – the ability to choose my own course. (I think particularly when I suffered what the press describe as a “life-changing accident”, and had to face the prospect of losing my career, my home – a farmhouse that came with the job – and all sense of security in an instant.) And I experienced Nick Cave’s strange sense of immense, electric potential; there was a genuine exhilaration, a quality of being right at the nexus of change. Anything could happen, anything could be lost; and somehow there was nothing to fear, however frightened I was.

Perhaps this sort of thing lies at the root of the old quip about there being no atheists in foxholes. Of course those in imminent danger of death don’t suddenly acquire a full-featured evangelical faith, but something may sometimes happen in situations of extreme danger and radical insecurity that may not be unlike finding one’s finger in the spiritual power outlet. Something just as shocking; something with just the same sense of encountering a force from somewhere else.

We are back with the odd intersection of semantics with experience. A committed Christian at the time, I experienced an immediate sense of the nearness of God; a Buddhist like Deborah Eden Tull might find something different again. The spiritual landscape within which we live, the words that come with the tradition we occupy: these things condition our very experience, and yet the truth of what each of us encounters is the same. It has to be, if it is real.

Perhaps it’s in these extreme situations – pandemics, near-fatal accidents, instants of loss and devastation, that we can suddenly see clearly, if we are open enough, in a way that has at least something in common with the fruit of years of contemplative practice. It was during an intense spiritual and psychological crisis, coming at the climax of years of anxiety and suicidal depression, that Eckhart Tolle had the encounter with terror and surrender that changed in an instant the course of his life, and led him to spend the next few years externally lost and homeless, yet radiant within, trying to work out what had happened to him. (See the Introduction to The Power of Now)

I sometimes think that the technology of contemplation – the methods of meditation, the years of study and discipleship – are nothing more than means, sometimes elaborate means, of bringing about the very experience of powerlessness I have been describing. Of course, such experience can be misunderstood, can be fled from, rejected in a myriad ways, while its subject retreats either back into everyday life, or into some kind of addiction. But if the tide is taken at its flood, if the powerless moment is embraced as gift, coming in some strange way from elsewhere, then anything can happen.

Contemplative practice is a far safer path; and yet, strangely, the apparently uneventful years of faithful practice can crystallise in a moment, providing a cradle of unsought meaning to hold the instant of transcendent powerlessness. In that moment of acceptance, just as in a crisis met with surrender, there is nothing left but grace.

Changes

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Suffering is, by its nature, the primary mechanism of change… It somehow presents us with the opportunity to transform into something else, something different, hopefully something better… This change is not something we necessarily seek out; rather, change is often brought to bear upon us, through a shattering or annihilation of our former selves.

Nick Cave & Seán O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage, p.165

‘Changes’ was a song performed by a long lost band of mine, The Society of the Walking Wounded, and written by our frontman, my best friend Malcolm Long. Malcolm died well over thirty years ago; I still miss him, meet him again in dreams, think of him almost daily.

“Change and decay in all around I see…” in the words of the old hymn. And yet change and ending and decay are necessary for transformation, indispensable for new life. We are frail and temporary creatures, all of us who love, and live. Grief is as inevitable as death itself, and inextricable from love.

The contemplative way is as much a way of understanding this as it is a way of liberation. It is often thought of as liberation from suffering; I would differ. Whatever may be said about the perils of attachment,  truly to love is to know that grieving is as much a part of it as joy; on the contemplative path one learns that not only is it so, but that it is right that it should be so. As Nick Cave points out, suffering is the primary engine of change; life itself is change; suffering is essential to life.

This is not unkind or harsh; the path teaches us that it is not to be fought, or raged against: death is as normal and ultimately beneficial as the fall of leaves in autumn – they are falling fast here now – and in its way as beautiful. The grace of change is being itself, and lies in the hollow of the open ground like a hazel dormouse in her nest of leaves.

Faith and contemplation

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We still seek wholeness. It is intrinsic to human identity that, however much we have achieved, we are never satisfied. We hunger and thirst for what lies beyond our grasp and even beyond the horizon of our desire. Religion and spirituality, which are less easy to divorce than we thought – are the elements of culture that deal with this desire beyond desire. Where are they taking us? Where do we have to redefine the old terms by which we try to understand ourselves in this longing for wholeness? …

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, pp.3,9

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

There’s a kind of hunger that draws one in, further and further. It’s not that present practice is wrong, or inadequate; but that there’s always more, literally infinitely more, and the heart cannot rest – it has to go on, further in and further up. This is, to put it in rather technical words, part of the phenomenology of contemplation – first person experience, in everyday words.

One of the great pitfalls of the spiritual life is to refuse to see, or understand, what is given to us in first person experience, because it does not fit what we have been taught, or have come to believe. Perhaps this is why contemplatives and the contemplative way seem so often deeply threatening to both religious authorities and secular presumptions, and why they so often provoke resistance and even oppression. (One has only to read the biography of St John of the Cross, of Gutoku Shinran, or even of Eihei Dōgen, to see what I mean.)

Faith, in one sense at least, is just this “unreserved opening of the mind” to contemplative experience, and the acceptance of its implications for one’s life, however difficult or unlikely they may seem.

The Sufi scholar Oludamini Ogunnaike, speaking in an interview:

There’s a famous Ḥadīth that says, “God is beautiful and that he loves beauty.” Here beauty is not just a distraction or temptation, but instead a reflection of the Divine, it is the Divine.

But this can mess you up.

The analogy that one of my teachers uses is birds flying into windows. The world is like that, a fun house of mirrors. You see the beautiful face of the Divine reflected everywhere, but if you just run toward it at full tilt, you’re going to keep smacking into it. You’re not going to get to kiss your beloved. So you have to learn to navigate the world of reflections of Divine Beauty. The sweetness we taste in sugar is a reflection or manifestation of Divine Sweetness, but if we just eat sugar all day, we’re going to get very sick. So it’s a process of recognizing and understanding the manifestations of the Real in every phenomenon and treating each with the proper adab or courtesy it demands. You can see God in a crouching tiger, but it’s still usually good adab or manners to give it a wide berth.

Contemplation seems to require patience, and stillness. I know from my own past life the danger of running to kiss reflections! But still the hunger, and the excitement, call us on. To sit still, in silence, in faith, when the tides of yearning are at flood, is perhaps the hardest and most necessary thing we shall have to do.