Category Archives: prayer

“The zero on which all other numbers depend”

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Faith is not the same as belief. Faith is what Jay Matthews described as staying at the center with God. In my lexicon, God is simply another word for wholeness, awareness, presence, unconditional love, no-thing-ness, openness, totality, the heart of being. What Jay is saying points to an abidance in and as wholeness. Being unconditional love. Seeing as God sees.

In my experience, this means waking up here and now, returning again and again to the openness and the listening presence that is most intimate, the boundless awareness that is always accepting everything and clinging to nothing.

And although this wholeness is never really absent, paradoxically, the realization and embodiment of it generally takes faith and perseverance, falling down and getting up again and again, feeling lost and confused and then once again returning Home. It’s not about believing an ideology. It’s trusting in something that’s not a graspable thing of any kind, something that is not “out there” at a distance. It’s THIS here-now presence that we are and that everything is. It’s closer than close, most intimate, and at the same time, all-inclusive and boundless.

God and faith are religious words, and that’s probably part of why they both resonate here. I’ve always been a religious person. I wasn’t raised in any religion, but religion has always attracted me. I’ve never really fit into any organized religion, although throughout my life, I’ve wandered in and out of various churches and Zen centers, sometimes joining them but eventually always leaving. My path seems to be solitary, nontraditional and eclectic, but my life definitely seems to center on religion—a word I’ve tended to replace with spirituality, as many others have done, but maybe religion is not such a bad word…

God is pure potentiality, the germinal darkness out of which everything emerges, the zero on which all other numbers depend, the very core of our being, the timeless eternal unicity, the sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, that which is subtlest and most intimate. God is a way of seeing, seeing the sacred everywhere, seeing the light in everything, beholding it all from love, from the perspective of wholeness—seeing and being the whole picture. God is unconditional love. Awakening is about opening to God, allowing God, abiding in God, dissolving into God. When I open to God, immediately there is no me and no God; there is only this vast openness. God is at once most intimate, closer than close, and at the same time, transcendent. God is not other than this presence here and now, and yet, God is also a relationship, a dialog of sorts, a way of listening to myself and the whole universe. God is impossible to define or pin down.

Joan Tollifson, Walking on Water

Tollifson quite uncannily puts her finger, here, on my own condition. I always find it quite difficult to write this kind of thing, since I know that I all too often come over as didactic when actually I am merely trying to find my way in the desert places.

I have found it increasingly difficult, despite my periodic protestations, to avoid this word “God”. As Joan Tollifson points out, it encompasses so much “wholeness, awareness, presence, unconditional love, no-thing-ness, openness, totality…” even “the heart of being” itself. In other words, this one little word will stand in for whole stacks of other, quite possibly defensive or political, or merely pompous, assertions and jargon on my part.

Too often we would-be contemplatives find ourselves drawn away into argumentation, activism, restlessness, no matter whether we are caught up in the activities of some religious institution, or in some humanist or secular-spiritual one. A long time ago, Isaac of Nineveh (613-700 CE) had this to say,

And this is the definition of stillness: silence to all things.

If in stillness you are found full of turbulence, and you disturb your body by the work of your hands and your soul with cares, then judge for yourself what sort of stillness you are practising, being concerned over many things in order to please God!

For it is ridiculous for us to speak of achieving stillness if we do not abandon all things and separate ourselves from every care.

Homily 21

For me of course, practice and prayer lie at the heart of it all. It is impossible to touch these realities – reality itself, perhaps – by any other means. And in fact it is not really a means; all we are doing is somehow getting ourselves out of the way of the light. Bishop Kallistos Ware:

The purpose of prayer can be summarized in the phrase, ‘Become what you are’… Become what you are: more exactly, return into yourself; discover him who is yours already, listen to him who never ceases to speak within you; possess him who even now possesses you. Such is God’s message to anyone who wants to pray: ‘You would not seek me unless you had already found me.’

The simple prayers of repetition, like the Jesus Prayer, John Main’s Maranatha, or the Pure Land Buddhist Nembutsu (all of which lead in any case into the silence of objectless awareness) are by their very simplicity and accessibility not reserved for religious professionals, nor are they ones that require training or qualifications, nor do they ask of us any unusual feats of memory. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom wrote of the Jesus Prayer that,

More than any other prayer, the Jesus Prayer aims at bringing us to stand in God’s presence with no other thought but the miracle of our standing there and God with us, because in the use of the Jesus Prayer there is nothing and no one except God and us.

The use of the prayer is dual, it is an act of worship as is every prayer, and on the ascetical level, it is a focus that allows us to keep our attention still in the presence of God.

It is a very companionable prayer, a friendly one, always at hand and very individual in spite of its monotonous repetitions. Whether in joy or in sorrow, it is, when it has become habitual, a quickening of the soul, a response to any call of God. The words of St Symeon, the New Theologian, apply to all its possible effects on us: ‘Do not worry about what will come next, you will discover it when it comes’. 

On prayer

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The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Anam Thubten writes:

It might be wonderful if we all prayed now and then. Prayer is a very powerful method. It is a means of inner liberation. Sometimes prayer is our last resort. If we have been walking the spiritual path, trying to become awakened, there may come a point when we realize that we can’t force ourselves to experience this thing called equal flavor. Then prayer is our last resort. Prayer is an act of surrendering and opening our heart, trusting something that is much greater than our own personality, our ego.

There is a deep impulse in each of us that knows how to pray. We don’t have to recite traditional prayers. We can all compose our own prayers. Did you ever have the experience when you were in trouble or when you were confused, that you naturally started praying? Maybe you didn’t know that you were praying. Maybe you didn’t have any concept of who you were praying to. There are some traditions where you have someone divine or sacred that you pray to. There are other traditions, nontheistic traditions, where you pray but you are not praying to anybody. When we are struggling with anything in our consciousness, we can always pray, remembering that we don’t have to be religious or Buddhist to pray. We can ask the universe, “May I have the readiness to overcome my fear.” Or if we are struggling with resentment, we can pray to the universe to help us overcome that. Praying to the universe is a very safe thing to do. We can ask the universe to bestow a shower of blessings on us and help us to overcome our inner demons of resentment, fear, and anger.

In the act of prayer, you can feel yourself surrendering all your hopes and fears, and you are freed from your resistance to accepting that you have no control in life. You feel true humility, in which you’re no longer trying to be in charge, but letting life itself be in charge. Let yourself recognize that this is the highest freedom you can have. Try to live that freedom every day as much as you can. There will be moments in your life when you will feel that you don’t need that freedom, but as humans we are going through ups and downs, and in some moments freedom will be the only refuge you have. We human beings are extremely resilient and strong—we have the capacity to be openhearted and to surrender in any situation. It is our innate potential. Let’s use it.

Thubten, in writing of prayer as a means of inner liberation and surrender, comes very close to the spirit behind the Nembutsu and the Jesus Prayer.

Prayers of repetition (as opposed to classical mantras) are not intended to carry any magical charge, nor to bring about an altered state of consciousness. They are merely a form of practice based on repeated surrender to, ultimately, the metaphysical ground in which all things – including ourselves – come to be. In a sense, they are a rehearsal for the final surrender of death; and yet they are prayers of radical simplicity, poverty even. Anyone can use them, at any time.

The Jesus Prayer in particular is prayed in the understanding that the words are self-dissolving, tending always to silence. It is important to remember that the words employed in these prayers of repetition are not limited to, or even mainly about, their literal meaning: they are nearer to a kind of spiritual poetry, perhaps. Their power is not in what they say, but in that they are said. In that lies their gift of liberation, the heart’s stillness. Nothing is accomplished; only grace is revealed as itself.

In the way

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In her recent Substack essay, ‘Is Spirituality an Escape?‘, Joan Tollifson writes:

I don’t want to ignore the world or turn away. But I don’t want to be pulled down into the madness of it either. Karl Marx famously wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” I don’t want to offer people false or illusory comfort or an intoxicating or addictive escape from a grim reality. But I have a deep sense of a peace and freedom that is untouched by the world and a way of being “in the world but not of the world” that I feel is perhaps the deepest healing we can offer to the world because it goes to the root of the problems.

So, all of this was swirling around. Round and round goes the mind. The body contracts and tightens. Feelings of anger and judgment arise, and I seem to lose touch with love and joy.

But then, miracle of miracles, I stop and sit quietly and simply feel the open, spacious aliveness and presence of this one bottomless moment here and now. And the whole conundrum disappears. And I know in my heart without a doubt that this openness, this stillness, is the deepest truth. It is where I want to come from, and what I want to communicate, this possibility of peace and unconditional love that is always right here, at once boundless and most intimate.

These are, to say the least, difficult and puzzling times. The merest glance at the headlines will suffice to demonstrate that, and to demonstrate the further fact that the media, almost without exception, have a perfectly understandable commercial interest in keeping our hearts in our mouths. In the face of massively publicised and widespread cruelty and injustice, violence and deceit, it is increasingly hard to avoid the current zeitgeist of taking sides, adopting entrenched positions, and demonising the “opposition”.

This jarring sense of disconnection between the contemplative life and the activist’s “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention!” is something that has troubled me for many years, as it has been troubling Tollifson and so many of her fellow Americans. But it is nothing new, I fear.

Simon Barrington-Ward wrote of St. Silouan:

…he began to recognise that [his sense of darkness and isolation] was in part the oppression of the absence of the sense of God and the alienation from his love over the whole face of the globe. He had been called to undergo this travail himself not on account of his own sin any more, but that he might enter into the darkness of separated humanity and tormented nature and, through his ceaseless prayer, be made by God’s grace alone into a means of bringing that grace to bear on the tragic circumstances of his time. He was praying and living through the time of World War I and the rise of Hitler and the beginnings of all that led to the Holocaust [not to mention the Russian Revolution, and at the very end of his life, Stalin’s Great Purge]. And with all this awareness of pain and sorrow, he was also given a great serenity and peacefulness and goodness about his, which profoundly impressed those who know him.

For all of us in our lesser ways, the Jesus Prayer, as well as bringing us into something of this kind of alternation which St. Silouan so strikingly experienced, also leads us on with him into an ever-deepening peace. You can understand how those who first taught and practiced this kind of prayer were first called “hesychasts”: people of hesychia or stillness…

After all, the whole prayer becomes an intercession. Soon I find that I am no longer praying just for myself, but when I say “on me, a sinner” all the situations of grief and terror, of pain and suffering begin to be drawn into me and I into them. I begin to pray as a fragment of this wounded creation longing for its release into fulfillment… I am in those for whom I would pray and they are in me, as is the whole universe. Every petition of the prayer becomes a bringing of all into the presence and love of God…

(The Jesus Prayer, of which Bishop Simon is writing here, is of course the central practice of hesychasm, the great mystical tradition within Eastern Orthodox Christianity, centred on cultivating inner stillness (Greek: hesychia) and uninterrupted communion with God. It was the central practice, too, of my own Christian contemplative years.)

Again in the Christian tradition, Karen Karper Fredette and Paul Fredette write, in Consider the Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life (p.213):

Anyone taking the eremitic vocation seriously is bound to feel helpless, quite impotent, in fact. Hermits are determined to help, to make a positive difference, but how? What can one person do, hidden and alone? Sometimes, solitaries may feel blameworthy because they live lives which shelter them from much of the suffering that so harshly mars the existence of their brothers and sisters. Love and compassion well up in them … but is it enough? What should one do and how? This is where passionate intercessory prayer and supplication spontaneously arises.

The challenge is to live a life given over to praying for others while accepting that one will seldom, if ever, see any results. No one will be able to ascertain how, or even if, their devoted prayers are efficacious for others. It is a terrible kind of poverty—to live dedicated to helping others, yet never know what good one may be doing. All that hermits can hope is that they are doing no harm. Believers leave all results to the mercy of their God. Others rely on their convictions about the interconnection of all humanity, trusting that what affects one, touches all. This is a form of intercession expressed less by words than by a way of life.

The beauty, it seems to me, of practices such as hesychasm and the Nembutsu is their extreme simplicity, coupled with their explicit renunciation of any sense that it is the practitioner’s hard work that is at stake in the process of awakening. We cannot, either by the force of our own will, or by the eloquence of our pleading, bring about the healing for which we long. And yet, like the Fredettes, and like the hesychasts of Mount Athos during the Second World War, we know beyond words or reasoning that our calling matters – far more, perhaps. than anything else we could do.

In the Tao Te Ching (51) we read:

The way gives them life; Virtue rears them; Things give them shape; Circumstances bring them to maturity. Therefore the myriad creatures all revere the way and honour virtue. Yet the way is revered and virtue honoured not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so.

(It’s important, too, to recognise that, despite all our acceptance of the way, of “other power”, this is not a way of passivity – an accusation often levelled at Christian Quietists from the C12 Beguines right through to William Pollard and Francis Frith among C19 Quakers! To walk in the way may at times be active indeed; the point being to walk in accordance with the way, not to cease walking altogether!)

Outstaring the ghosts

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One of the perennial questions of the contemplative life is, what is it for? What possible use is it? Isn’t it merely a solipsistic, “self-actualising” activity, or some kind of relaxation technique aimed at producing a pleasant, stress-free state of mind, or even a quest for some kind of drug-free psychedelic experience?

Benignus O’Rourke writes:

The psalmist says, ‘You hide those who trust in you in the shelter of your presence.’ For ‘hide’ we might read ‘heal’. To sit with with our buried hurts and pains in the presence of the Lord is to allow ourselves to be healed by him. We no longer become involved in trying to sort them out, nor do we recoil from them. We sit quietly. We are beginning to have the confidence to outstare our ghosts.

Sometimes when people meditate or pray without words they are accused of trying to anaesthetise themselves to deaden their pain. But what we really do in our quiet prayer is to face the pain, engage with it, and transform it into energy for loving.

Benignus O’Rourke, Finding Your Hidden Treasure: The Way of Silent Prayer

and Cynthia Bourgeault tackles the problem head on from a more academic perspective:

What tends to go missing when spiritual practice is secularized… is precisely that rich and multidimensional context in which mindfulness as “present moment awareness” flows seamlessly into mindfulness as authentic spiritual remembrance. In a secular container, mindfulness tends to become privatized, appearing as a set of personal coping skills or personal wellness benefits. But in its original spiritual setting mindfulness is irreducibly relational and ethical. Its fruits are not wellness, personal longevity, or neuroplasticity. They are compassion, equanimity, and love. In contrast to the various secular and scientific models (extensively documented in this article), the spiritual model gives central place to mindfulness as “the awareness of and familiarity with an ethically oriented ultimate reality that makes human wholeness possible.” It is only against this backdrop that notions such as “remembrance” and “unity” make any sense whatsoever…

While reestablishing this wider spiritual context is certainly helpful to a fuller understanding of mindfulness practice, with Centering Prayer I believe it is essential, for apart from its kenotic grounding, the practice remains basically unintelligible. In secular mindfulness there is at least a motivational initial entry gate through which some benefit is to be accrued thereby, be it stress reduction, better attentional skills, or lower blood pressure. But kenosis and self-surrender really have no cultural starting points; apart from a direct apprehension of the great mystical traditions of imitatio and remembrance in which the practice is embedded, Centering Prayer remains stubbornly counterintuitive.

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer

The contemplative life in its inner solitude and hiddenness – for it is hidden from our own discursive intellect within as well as it is hidden outwardly – is in some ways actually lived for others. Our inward life brings us, not always willingly, to confront aspects of being human that many would rather avoid.

Karen Karper Fredette and Paul A. Fredette once wrote,

Suffering is part of the hermit’s vocation. One of the most acute forms is to never know whether one’s chosen lifestyle is worthwhile or has any value for others. Hermits enter into the darkness, the dusky cloud of unknowing, and walk without any light beyond that which is in their own hearts. Often, unbeknownst even to themselves, they have become beacons for others.

The ghosts we outstare are not our own merely; somehow in the silence of our practice we find ourselves confronting the ghosts of those we live amongst, touching the shadows that our present age of fear and division casts across all our lives; touching, as for instance did the monks of Mount Athos during the years of the Stalin’s purges and Hitler’s atrocities, the dark skirts of chaos and cruelty that brush continually against our civilisation. Yet our inwardness does tend always to stillness, to wholeness of mind and spirit and to peace.  It is really that peace we seek for those with whom our lives are inextricably caught up, just by our being the frail, temporary human things we are.

[Parts of this piece have been rewritten from a post of the same title  on a previous blog in 2018]

Weltschmerz?

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One of the main works of contemplation is detaching from the ego, from the self, from impure motivations of success or power, money or control. That will never stop, but it isn’t really that meaningful unless that detachment is accompanied by an attachment.  What do we find after all the months and years we’ve been practicing some form of contemplation or meditation? Do we have an increased attachment, sympathy, empathy, and compassion for what I call in The Tears of Things the suffering of the world? For the women of Gaza, the children of Ukraine, the starving people of Africa, the poorest of the poor, and all those marginalized in the United States and around the world? If the emptiness of “letting go” is not pretty soon filled up by “holding on” to some kind of deep solidarity with the suffering of the world, I don’t know that it’s Christian contemplation or even meaningful contemplation at all. It seems we’re simply back into private spirituality again.  

Richard Rohr, Contemplation: A Path to Compassion

One of the “side effects”, for want of a better phrase, of my nearly 40-year practice of Christian contemplation was for me a sharp increase in my awareness of the pain of the world; a sense expressed perhaps more clearly than anywhere I have read recently in a passage from a murder mystery by Rebecca Tope:

The low, repetitive bawling was a distant throb of distress that Lilah had never grown used to, even though  it happened every time a cow gave birth. Sometimes, at night, it was unbearable, the bereft mother calling and calling for her baby, the embodiment of despair. Sometimes it seemed to Lilah that in her short life she had been party to a fathomless ocean of pain and misery, that all this suffering was there inside her, barely supressed by her flippant ways and habitual optimism. And sometimes she couldn’t stop herself imagining every hurt and cruelty; every experimental laboratory; every horse used in war; every animal ill-used in the service of man; every creature sent terrified to the abattoir. All of it added up to an entire universe of horrifying anguish, and she had to breathe slow and deep to be able to carry on.

This passage (the wider context of the narrative makes it clear that the character’s experience is not confined merely to questions of animal husbandry, but relates equally to her grief at the murder of her father, and to the inhumanity of humankind generally) gives an extraordinarily clear glimpse into the aching hollow of helpless compassion that contemplative practice opens in one’s heart. For me, at any rate, this inescapable pain was the motor of prayer; a prayer of, literally, grieving with – which is the root of the word “compassion” – rather than “praying for” in the sense of asking a favour of a personal deity.

The standard Buddhist answer to this question is probably the practice of either metta or tonglen; but these too beg the question, how does it work? How can prayer, or some kind of directed sympathy, actually make any difference? Are we not merely kidding ourselves? And if so, are we not better off simply caring for ourselves, retreating into a private, if comforting, spirituality, and tuning out the cries of the world?

Simon Barrington-Ward writes, of the Jesus Prayer,

After all, the whole prayer becomes an intercession. Soon I find that I am on longer praying just for myself, but when I say “on me, a sinner” all the situations of grief and terror, of pain and suffering begin to be drawn into me and I into them. I begin to pray as a fragment of this wounded creation longing for its release into fulfillment… I am in those for whom I would pray and they are in me, as is the whole universe. Every petition of the prayer becomes a bringing of all into the presence and love of God…

How can we make sense of this, if we cannot join with Bishop Simon in his avowedly Christian phraseology? Joan Tollifson:

Perhaps this is what the world needs more than anything else—human beings waking up from the powerful hypnotic trance of ideology, division and apparent separation, waking up to the wholeness and the unconditional love that is at the heart of our being. It may seem that we are small and insignificant, and that this kind of devotion to presence can’t possibly affect the world at large. But we’re actually not small. Each and every drop contains and affects the whole.

We, and all whom we love, and for whom we grieve, are frail, temporary creatures; but we exist, if only for a moment. Isness, Eckhart’s Istigkeit, is the only ground of what we are.

The apostle Paul wrote, sounding for a moment almost like a Taoist, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17 NIV) The ground of being is just that: it is no thing at all; and yet it is the ground of all that is. There is nowhere outside this open ground; no end to its beginning, to the love that holds in being all that has come to be in it. Like Indra’s net, each node – each one of us – “contains and affects the whole.”

Sometimes the darkness…

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I know that many people are feeling worried, anxious and unsettled these days. The world can be a scary place, and human beings are fragile organisms, vulnerable to all kinds of pain and painful circumstances. We naturally seek security, comfort and control, and in search of this, we often turn to addictive pleasures, comforting beliefs and obsessive thinking, none of which really deliver the well-being and the certainty for which we long…

Sometimes it eludes us and the darkness overtakes us, but if we stop and allow everything to be just as it is, if we tune in to the stillness at the very heart of our being, our apparently separate self may dissolve into the boundless aware presence that we truly are. We may discover that the “me” who seems to be suffering, or alternately “getting it” and “losing it,” is nothing more than a mirage, and that the darkness has no actual substance…

We can get very lost in trying to figure this all out mentally, trying to understand it, grasp it, get control of it, and so on. But the essence of this so-called awakening is very, very, very simple. It’s not complicated, mysterious or exotic. It doesn’t require years of training and study. It’s not in the future or the past.

It’s right here in the sounds of rain, the taste of tea, the dazzling light sparkling on the still bare branches, the aware presence beholding it all, the openness of being. It’s nothing other than this one bottomless, centerless moment that is what we are, this wholeness that has no outside or inside, this presence that is most intimate, closer than close, and at the same time, boundless and all-inclusive…

Perhaps this is what the world needs more than anything else—human beings waking up from the powerful hypnotic trance of ideology, division and apparent separation, waking up to the wholeness and the unconditional love that is at the heart of our being. It may seem that we are small and insignificant, and that this kind of devotion to presence can’t possibly affect the world at large. But we’re actually not small. Each and every drop contains and affects the whole.

Joan Tollifson, from her Substack

Sometimes the darkness does overtake us, even at the best of times; and this is not the best of times, as the news media delight to remind us. (You can’t blame them: it’s in their perfectly understandable commercial interest to keep our hearts in our mouths.)

Of course the trouble is that one feels so helpless; there is little or nothing one can do, practically, and absent a convincing doctrine of supernatural intervention, it doesn’t seem to make sense to pray – though this may actually be the heart’s instinct, interestingly enough. But practice, once one stops telling oneself that it is useless, is in fact anything but useless, as Tollifson explains. The world’s idea of “useful” ain’t necessarily so. We are told that a president or his sidekick “matter”; a naval rating, a junior librarian, a pensioner in a retirement community, don’t matter at all. It isn’t true.

Each of us is a human being; each of us is a precious and only life; each of us “contains and affects the whole” just as much as any other. There is no such thing as an insignificant person. Waking up from the nightmare sleep of either/or, left/right, right/wrong; waking up to the bright ground of what is, to the inextinguishable love at the very heart of being itself… Maybe, after all, “[m]ore things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of…”* or by something very like contemplative prayer, at any rate.

*Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

The motor of grief

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According to the Buddha [as recorded in the Saṃyutta Nikāya of the Pali Canon] there are seven conditions for Dharma “vicaya”—the investigative quality of mind—to arise

1. Repeatedly questioning, discussing, investigating, observing, and thinking about the nature of the mind.

2. Cleaning our possessions both internal and external. This brings clarity of mind. Clarity of mind is a condition for wisdom to arise. External cleaning means cleaning our bodies and our environment. But what is more important is cleaning the inside, which means cleaning the mind of the three poisons; greed, hatred and delusion.

3. Learning how to balance the five spiritual faculties of confidence, energy, mindfulness, stability of mind and wisdom.

4. Avoiding the company of fools.

5. Associating with the wise.

6. Contemplating wisdom and reflecting deeply.

7. Having the desire to grow in wisdom.

Sayadaw U Tejaniya

We do live in troubled times. To be honest, much of our lives are lived in times like these. My own generation lived through a Cold War that all too often threatened to heat up into nuclear conflict, the energy crisis of the 1970s, the miners’ strike of the 1980s, not to mention the Falklands War – the list goes on. Our parents lived through – and many of them, Susan’s and mine included, fought in – the Second World War. Of that appalling period of history, CS Lewis wrote at the time:

The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes…

Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the [one] who takes [their] long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

Awareness of impermanence, the recognition that our lives are led in a dissolving world of ceaseless change, is not a doctrine of despair but of realism; and in that realism, hope. Somehow our very grief becomes, in extremis, a channel of grace. Sharon Salzberg:

At times, pain can reach such a powerful level that it can be devastating. In spiritual life, we might call it the dark night of the soul. In interpersonal life, we call it grief, and this intense emotional experience does not limit itself to the loss of someone who has died. It can occur as the experience of nearly any kind of deep loss.

To accept the love that is the motor of grief is to accept the role of mourners, of givers-of-thanks for what is being lost, bearers of the unbearable hope. Death always follows life; but new life follows death. Even in Chernobyl, the natural world is thriving as never before.

To accept what is, it is necessary to know what is, now. This means attention, questioning, investigation. It means practice. Human culture is not “an inexcusable frivolity on the part of creatures loaded with such awful responsibilities as we.” (Lewis, ibid.) If we have one job in times like this, it is to be bearers, through our careful grief, of love, of grace, of light even, into this present darkness.

Surrender

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From time to time, it dawns on me that surrender is at the heart of what contemplation has come to mean, at least in my own practice. It’s a state that doesn’t really lend itself to being described dualistically – surrender to anyone or anything – but more a quality of attention that relinquishes any attempt to interpret, let alone direct. It doesn’t take an object, in fact.

Such surrender is easier to conceive of, or at least to describe, in religious terms; but that brings us again to that dualistic “surrender to”, and that is not what I am trying to express. An inner sense of release is more like it: alert and wakeful, but not irritably questing, or looking for words to describe something that might be carried off like a prize back to the world of the transactional.

Of course there is a paradox here – there always is! – but language can only go so far, helpful as it is. Richard Rohr writes:

Reality is paradoxical. If we’re honest, everything is a clash of contradictions, and there is nothing on this created earth that is not a mixture at the same time of good and bad, helpful and unhelpful, endearing and maddening, living and dying. St. Augustine called this the “paschal mystery.”

Western Christianity has tended to objectify paradoxes in dogmatic statements that demand mental agreement instead of any inner experience of the mystery revealed. At least we “worship” these paradoxes in the living collision of opposites we call Jesus…

The easiest thing, so easy that we mostly do it without ever recognising its being done, is to put our own interpretation on spiritual events. If we know what we have experienced, if we can even stand over against it as one who experiences, then we feel we can keep it – and in so doing, it is lost. Or we are; only if we truly admitted that, we might be back on track.

Stillness, then, is at the heart of our – what, prayer? It is more than a mere discipline, this sitting still. What rises in the stillness holds us, as it always has. It is the source and end of all that is, and precedes time itself. Light is possibly as near as we can get…

Faith and mercy

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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

Watts’ distinction between faith and belief has become crucial to me recently. Belief is a willed assent to some proposition. Faith describes an encounter. It happens to one; it is not something one can decide to do. That seems to me to underlie statements like this one of Paul’s: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works…” (Ephesians 2:8-9 NIV)

No thing, the ground of being encountered in the loss of the believed certainties, in the emptiness of the apophasis, is just such a gift. J.P. Williams: “When we talk about divinity, though, we’re not trying to exclude a set of things and point to what’s left over: we’re trying to talk about what is beyond all things. We’re not pointing to anything, really, but to the source of all things.”

It is hard to use words. Emptiness is the expanse of what is, dimensionless, preceding space and time, holding “all that is made” like a nut in the hand of Christ, as Julian of Norwich saw. And yet as I once wrote, “We are creatures of the word, we humans. We know ourselves by our names first of all, and our least thought comes ready dressed in words. And yet it is in silence that we draw close to God, becoming open in the stillness to the presence that is always with us, nearer than our own breathing.”

Prayer, it seems to me – prayer as stillness, openness, not as asking for things – is not quite the same as meditation. There is a reason why centering prayer is so called, though it is so similar in practice to vipassana meditation, and there is a reason why the Jesus Prayer is a prayer and not a mantra; and I think that it is in this surrender to what may come – rather than in an irritable reaching for what is expected – that it is found.

I cannot help myself. If I follow the path of self-emptying honestly, through meditation; or if I follow, to the best of my limited understanding, Alan Lightman’s journey Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, I find myself back here, at the mercy of no thing at all, but the wholly beyond – only to be given just that, mercy.

So when we think of mercy, we should be thinking first and foremost of a bond, an infallible link of love that holds the created and uncreated realms together. The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional–always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being. Just like that little fish swimming desperately in search of water, we too–in the words of Psalm 103–‘swim in mercy as in an endless sea.’ Mercy is God’s innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope