Tag Archives: desert

Blessedness

In the practice of contemplation, one comes eventually to embrace an apophatic anthropology, letting go of everything one might have imagined as constituting the self—one’s thoughts, one’s desires, all one’s compulsive needs. Joined in the silence of prayer to a God beyond knowing, I no longer have to scramble to sustain a fragile ego, but discern instead the source and ground of my being in the fierce landscape of God alone. One’s self is ever a tenuous thing, discovered only in relinquishment. I recognize it finally as a vast, empty expanse opening out onto the incomparable desert of God.

Belden C Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, p.12

Once you grasp that everything is God/Nature — every rock, every thought, every heartbreak — you can cultivate what Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God. It’s not emotional worship, not kneeling or chanting. It’s a serene joy that comes from seeing yourself as part of the eternal system, understanding necessity, and embracing it.

This love is eternal because it’s rooted not in transient causes but in the recognition of God/Nature itself, which is infinite. When you reach this state, you stop feeling like a victim of circumstances and start feeling like a conscious expression of the whole…

The reward is a state Spinoza calls beatitudo — blessedness. It’s not paradise, not an afterlife, not heavenly reward. It’s here, now, in the clarity of mind that comes from understanding necessity and loving the totality of existence.

Robert Flix, Spinoza in Plain English, pp.35-36

At the end of things – literally – lies no thing: the utterly desert lack of all we had come to know as necessary to the self, to the “soul” as we had been taught to understand it. Even our practice, our dear and familiar sitting, is blown through and shredded by the unrelenting wind of absence.

It is only here, only in this placeless place, that we can grasp – not with thought, not with desire, nor with longing, even, but with the barest love – “what is the breadth and length and height and depth” (Ephesians 3:18) of our unknowing of the boundlessness of that “vast, empty expanse” that opens onto the living ground itself. Only here could we rest – will we, in the end, come to rest.

Freedom!

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Abbot Christopher Jamison writes:

The first Christian monks and nuns were inspired by the example of St Antony. They lived in the deserts of the Middle East in the fourth and fifthccenturies and became known as the desert fathers and mothers, living in loose associations and gradually founding more structured monasteries. The wisest of them acquired the title abba for men and amma for women, meaning father and mother respectively, which later become abbot and abbess… They did not use the language of freedom, a language that has come to dominate modern discourse. Their central concern was purity of heart, which we might describe as freedom of spirit…

The desert fathers compared purity of heart to the target that a javelin thrower aimed at in the ancient games; a small target may be difficult to hit but it can be done and the effort required draws out the best from the thrower. So purity of heart describes the condition of human beings at their best, when the human capacity for love finds complete expression devoid of any selfish thought. To arrive at this state of being is demanding because human beings are continually tempted to behave selfishly, but the example of many saints shows that it can be done.

Finding Happiness: A monk’s guide to life, Christopher Jamison

So freedom of spirit is found in freedom from identifying with the thoughts of the self – in laying down the self as the centre of experience. Heidegger’s sense of “releasement” (Gelassenheit) from our manipulative human wilfulness then leads to contemplative openness to the mystery of Being (Sein).

But so much of the time we do identify with our self-centred patterns of thought – with the “self” on which our thought is centred – and become entangled once again. We miss the target…

Now, in the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” that last word gives pause to many who see it, in the context of too many clumsy sermons, in a narrowly moralistic light. But the Greek – the Jesus Prayer developed among those early desert monastics of whom Abbot Christopher writes, and was first written down and disseminated in Greek – word is αμαρτωλόν (harmartolón), and αμαρτωλόν carries the sense of “to forfeit by missing the mark”. For the Desert Mothers and Fathers, sin was just that, missing the target of purity of heart, of freedom of spirit; it is not in any direct sense somehow “transgressing a list of naughty-things-to-be-avoided”.

We slip so easily into self-identifying thoughts; freedom of spirit consists in freedom from this self-identification. Note, though, that it is not freedom from thoughts themselves. We can do little about those – they seem to be often no more than artifacts that the brain throws off in its everyday functioning – but we can learn not to identify with them, And that is what practice is for.

“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’.

Out of great darkness (a reblog)

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The endurance of darkness is the preparation for great light.

— St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul.

For those finding themselves lost in the darkness right now…

Does a seed know darkness, or miss the light, before it even breaks the surface, to grow and bloom?

Hidden in an empty field — ten thousand unborn flowers.

Is it already growing, reaching for the light, already there, hidden, unseen?

Look for yourself, enquire within, turn your attention away from the world, and to the depths of your very being, and you will find the light, masked by this darkness. It is not gone, it is merely hidden behind a veil of disbelief.

Knowing that this is so, reflect on your own seasons of darkness and light, and how they move you, shift you, and so much more is revealed by them.

Hidden in great darkness — great light.

[This is a straightforward reblog: words and image by Andō]

Having walked through the fire

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The period of early Christianity is one of the key building blocks in my lineage of faith. It’s an overlooked area for much of the Roman Church and its child, Protestantism. With the self-sufficiency and arrogance that has often characterized the West, we have proceeded as if the first centuries of Christianity were unimportant, or not part of the essential Christ mystery. The very things the early Christians emphasized—such as the prayer of quiet, divinization, universal restoration, and the importance of practice—are some of the most neglected parts of the Western Church. 

After the legitimation and, some would say, the co-opting of Christianity by the Roman Empire in the 4th century, many Christians fled to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Cappadocia (Eastern Turkey). We call these men and women the desert fathers and mothers (or abbas and ammas). The desert Christians emphasized lifestyle practice, an alternative to empires and their economies, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of informal gatherings of monastics and functioned much like families. This tradition preceded the emergence of systematic theology and the later Church councils. Since the desert monks often lacked formal education, they told stories, much as Jesus did, to teach about ego, love, virtue, surrender, peace, divine union, and inner freedom. 

Richard Rohr, A Radical Foundation

During the period of pandemic lockdowns, I wrote, in one of the early posts on this blog, of

…my growing sense that the contemplative life is once again moving out from the monasteries and ashrams into a new desert, that of the world, or at least of places set apart within the world…

Time and again contemplatives have broken away from the apparent corruption of state churches on the one hand and religion-inspired revolutionaries on the other, sometimes forming loose communities, and retreated from formal organisation almost altogether. Examples are as diverse as the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Syria around the 4th century [CE], the Pure Land (Shin) schools of Buddhism founded by Honen and Shinran in 12th and 13th century Japan, and the Quakers in 17th century England.

These contemplative movements, often based around simplicity of practice and openness to the Spirit, seem to arise when not only are the religious establishments in a compromised and sometimes corrupt condition, but the state is in flux, sometimes violent flux. [Our present political uncertainties], scoured by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, would seem to provide fertile ground for contemplative change in this way.

It isn’t merely the sociology of religion at stake here, though. There is a fundamental shift in spiritual perspective, I suggest, when we step outside the conventions and hierarchies of organised religion – to say nothing of the inner bindings of doctrine and dogma – into an uncharted space of presence and necessary, rather than mandated, practice. There is no longer any traction for the human instinct for security and status; those things no longer afford an escape or a distraction from the inner work.

Out there in the wild, there was no one to impress, no need to cultivate a reputation. A lot of things didn’t matter anymore out there. The desert fathers and mothers wanted to keep the edges hot and to imitate the life of Jesus…. In short, theirs was a countercultural spirituality carrying a prophetic edge. Some of them had been draft dodgers and tax resistors. In fact, some of the women had fled from being sold into a marriage that would’ve been little better than slavery.

A spiritual resistance movement takes shape among these desert monks, questioning the commodification and militarization of life in the wider culture. They had no use for the ego advancement and social climbing to which even Christians had begun to aspire. You see this in their practice of what they called apatheia, a fierce indifference to unimportant things….

What do you learn to ignore and what do you learn to love? What needs to die in your life and what do you need to affirm unreservedly? These two questions are the heart of desert spirituality. The desert becomes a tomb, said the monks, a place for the demise of the ego. But there’s also an immense joy and release in that, in learning to die before you die. You’re finally set free to live with abandon. No one is freer than those who have looked death in the eye, have walked through the fire, and are able now fearlessly to love.

Belden Lane, quoted in Rohr, ibid.

So once again we have that sense I wrote of recently, that the nearness of death is in itself a gateway to the vast openness from which all things become, the ground of all that is. There is no getting around it: only as we face the ending of all we thought we were are we free at last to see that what we actually are is none other than what actually is.

A Quiet Life

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All through our repeated pandemic precautions and lockdowns, when physically attending corporate worship of any kind has been difficult, not to say inadvisable, and Zoom meetings have remained their distracting and inadequate selves, there has been plenty of time to be quiet, and to allow the assumptions and traditions by which our spiritual lives are usually conditioned to settle out, as it were, like the cloudiness in a newly-established aquarium.

Wikipedia defines religion as “a social-cultural system of designated behaviours and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements.”

Contemplation, however differently it may be defined in different traditions, is at root a kind of inner seeing, an experiential encounter with the ground of being that gives rise to, and sustains, all that is. The many techniques of contemplative practice may in the end give rise to contemplation, but their intention is generally more modest: to train attention and consciousness sufficiently to still the field of awareness, and to recognise the incessant activity of the mind as a process, or bundle of processes, that runs on beneath awareness all by itself, rather than assuming it to be a discrete and permanent self or soul, set over against its perceptions. Of course the outer forms of mediation or contemplative practice are very different, and conditioned by the religious tradition within which they arise, but very broadly something like this seems to be intended by them all.

In this period of quiet settling, separated from the religious atmosphere and bustle of corporate worship, I, as I suspect many of us, have begun to sense that the “social-cultural system” of religion is something quite separate from the “experimental faith” (cf. Quaker faith & practice 19.02) of contemplative practice, and that, crucially, the one does not depend upon the other.

Churches and religious groups seem mostly to be operating on the assumption that once the pandemic is under control, and something approaching normal life is restored, their worshippers will flood back, Catholics to Mass, Quakers to their meetings, everyone to their accustomed place. It may not happen, at least not in the way, or to the extent, that most people appear to expect. The sea change of the pandemic, and the enforced crash course in information and communications technology it has brought, have accelerated a process of secularisation that has been gathering momentum for a long time.

Now, secularisation is a term loaded with assumptions and prejudices on the part of both those espouse it, and those who oppose any such idea. Stephen Batchelor points out (After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age, p.15, Yale University Press, Kindle Edition) that both the word “religious” and the word “secular” are difficult terms in our present time. He writes,

Secular critics commonly dismiss religious institutions and beliefs as outdated, dogmatic, repressive, and so on, forgetting about the deep human concerns that they were originally created to address… “Secular” is a term that presents as many problems as “religious.”… there seems to be no reason why avowedly “secular” people cannot be deeply “religious” in their ultimate concern to come to terms with their brief and poignant life here and now.

I have written elsewhere of my growing sense that the contemplative life is once again moving out from the monasteries and ashrams into a new desert, that of the world, or at least of places set apart within the world. I wrote then:

Time and again contemplatives have broken away from the apparent corruption of state churches on the one hand and religion-inspired revolutionaries on the other, sometimes forming loose communities, and retreated from formal organisation almost altogether. Examples are as diverse as the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Syria around the 4th century AD, the Pure Land (Shin) schools of Buddhism founded by Honen and Shinran in 12th and 13th century Japan, and the Quakers in 17th century England.

These contemplative movements, often based around simplicity of practice and openness to the Spirit, seem to arise when not only are the religious establishments in a compromised and sometimes corrupt condition, but the state is in flux, sometimes violent flux. [Our present political uncertainties], scoured by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, would seem to provide fertile ground for contemplative change in this way.

I have no idea where this is leading, but there is a clarity developing that I had not expected, nor intentionally “worked towards”. The inward solitude of these unusual times is proving strangely fruitful. This is what Martin Laird once called a “pathless path”: as Dave Tomlinson wrote, “Human language is unable to describe the external realities of God with any precision. As we have seen, this does not make language useless; it simply means that we have to accept its limitations… Religious language or talk about God and the spiritual realm is therefore inherently provisional and approximate in nature.”

There is no obvious name for what is happening. It seems not to be “secular” in the way religious people might fear, but it isn’t “religious” either, in the way that secularists might assume. It is not eremitical exactly, certainly not in the traditional sense of hermits as ones living in geographical isolation.

Perhaps it is time that silence and practice are allowed to stand untitled: the ground still, and open. It seems to be so for me.

[Parts of this post were published earlier on The Mercy Blog, but have since been adapted and expanded.]

An Open Ground

Secular contemplative spirituality and practice