Tag Archives: grace

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It seems to me that the most insidious difficulty facing our practice is complexity. Ritual, elaboration of any kind, stages and visualisations, devotions and liturgies are at best distractions from what is at root a most perfectly simple thing: returning to what we essentially are.

Andrew Harvey:

The Direct Path is the Path to God without dogma or priests or gurus, the Path of direct self-empowerment and self-awakening in and under God in the heart of life. You do not have to go anywhere or take a new name or sign up for expensive intensives to begin it; whether you yet know it or not, you have been on this path since the day you were born.

When you discover for yourself how real the Direct Path is and how it can transform you faster, and more completely and integratedly than any other, your whole life will change and you will discover with wonder and delight why you are here and what you are here for. You will start to become free from all the political, social, and religious systems that constrain you, with the freedom that is yours by right of being a child of God, the freedom of your divine nature and your divine truth, and this freedom and this truth will make you increasingly an empowered agent of change in every arena in the world.

The Direct Path, p.12

Caryll Houselander saw this too:

Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life. It is not the foolish sinner like myself, running about the world with reprobates and feeling magnanimous, who comes closest to them and brings them healing; it is the contemplative in her cell who has never set eyes on them, but in whom Christ fasts and prays for them—or it may be a charwoman in whom Christ makes Himself a servant again, or a king whose crown of gold hides a crown of thorns. Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.

Caryll Houselander (quoted in Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ)

We do not need continually to be seeking things: all that we are, all that is, is right here in this present moment, as itself. Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, the open ground itself, is here, within each breath, within each phrase of birdsong from the open window. All we need is to be entirely present to what is here, now, always. “…[F]or only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitatis“ (David Jones)

Peter Russell:

In asking the question “Who am I?” we tacitly assume an individual self does indeed exist. As such, the question can mislead us, setting us up to look in the wrong direction — looking for ways to define ourselves. It can be more insightful to drop the “Who” from the question, and ask simply, “Am I?” The answer nearly always comes as a simple “Yes, I am.” Not “I am this or that.” Just pure “I am.” “I am” is the first-person form of the verb “to be.” It is our direct personal knowing of being. Not to be anything or anyone; simply to be, to exist — that sense of presence at the heart of every experience.

How to Meditate Without Even Trying, pp.95-96

Getting nowhere

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Wakefulness has been real and accessible for all human beings at all times and in all cultures. People from all cultures have been able to touch into it and explore its rich and radiant experiential landscape. They have simply interpreted and conceptualized it in slightly different ways, due to the different beliefs and conventions of their cultures. In Buddhism, perhaps because of Indian culture’s belief in rebirth, wakefulness is partly conceived as a state in which a person no longer generates karma and no longer needs to be reborn. But when expressed through the more dynamic and world-embracing attitudes of early Chinese culture, wakefulness is partly conceived as a process of becoming attuned to the Dao and living in harmony with it. On the other hand, people who live in monotheistic cultures — Jewish, Sufi, and Christian cultures — see wakefulness in more transcendent terms. To them, it’s natural to interpret the all-pervading spirit-force (which the Chinese conceive as the Dao and the Indians as brahman) in terms of God. They see it as divine energy, the being of God, and they conceive the goal of their development to be union with God.

In some respects, modern-day spiritual seekers are in a better position. In our secular culture we’re less obliged to interpret wakefulness through the prism of religious or metaphysical frameworks. It’s naive to think that there’s such a thing as pure experience — some degree of interpretation will always take place. No phenomenon exists outside the culture in which it develops, and no phenomenon is free from cultural influence. But there are degrees of interpretation. When we look at wakefulness outside spiritual traditions, we’re surely looking at it in a purer form, before added layers of interpretation. You could say that we’re looking at the raw materials, before they go through the filtering and manufacturing processes of spiritual and religious traditions.

Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening, pp.235-236

It is impossible, it seems to me, to write – or even to speak – about the contemplative life without to some extent interpreting and conceptualising it according to the conventions of our own culture. Even the language of radical nonduality – the writings of Tony Parsons or Darryl Bailey , for instance – borrows not only from Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, but from our contemporary scientific understanding of the neuroscience of consciousness, from philosophy more generally. I do myself, continually.

Yet we can to a large extent evade the worst of “the filtering and manufacturing processes of spiritual and religious traditions”. We may in many ways live in difficult times, yet most of us do have the freedom to think, even to speak and write, outside tradition. We can explore – and to a great extent we have the internet to thank for this – widely and deeply among contemplative thinkers and practitioners, and we can find encouragement to think for ourselves and to develop our own contemplative path,

No amount of reading, though, will open for us the door of what Steve Taylor refers to as wakefulness. Nor, I can’t resist saying, will making retreats, training for Zen ordination or attending Centering Prayer sessions at our local Catholic church. Wakefulness arrives of itself, in its own time. In Centering Prayer it would simply be referred to as grace, the gift of God. We cannot make wakefulness happen: it is not an achievement, a goal we could work towards. It is not something else, something different from where we are now, or what we are now. Wakefulness appears – it was never absent – when we stop trying to name and control what is.

The radical nondualists are in a sense right: practice cannot create wakefulness, and wakefulness can appear without a settled practice at all. No words can give it to us, unless perhaps we are on the brink of it ourselves anyway.

I’m often reminded of my frustration when first reading Jiddu Krishnamurti in my twenties: his words were wonderful, hinting at the very opening I’d been longing for, but there was no practice, no method, not even the suggestion of a pill one might take.

What Krishnamurti was writing about was what he called choiceless awareness, the quality of openness to what is, just as it is, in the instant that it is perceived. Taylor’s wakefulness. Wes Nisker:

Choiceless awareness allows the meditator to see how our experience creates itself; how sense impressions, thoughts, and feelings arise without our willing them; how they interact and influence each other. By engaging the quality of choiceless awareness, we can extract ourselves from the contents of what we think and feel and start to explore how we think and feel.

Choiceless awareness, wakefulness: the state appears when the mind ceases grasping after things, even spiritual things. And practice, while not the only way to refrain from grasping after spiritual goals and achievements, is for me at least the most reliable way.

That’s why I think shikantaza, or its near Christian relative Centering Prayer, is such a good practice. Nearly free from ritual and tradition in its native Zen form, shikantaza at least can be practiced without religious assumptions.

Just sitting, there is nothing to do, nothing for the mind to cling onto. There is only now: the sensation of breathing, the feel of whatever we are sitting on, the sounds from outside the room; nothing more. Even thoughts are no more than the flicker of shadows across a curtain in the sun. This condition is in itself perfectly free. It can’t be a means to anything. It is itself what all this is about; nothing more.

Otium

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In A Simplified Life, her beautiful account of being a contemporary hermit, Verena Schiller writes:

…I eschew any attempt at repetitive words of prayer while walking or working out of doors, though some find this helpful. Even after years of praxis, learning to do just one thing at a time does not come easily. ‘When you are walking just walk; when you are digging just dig; whatever you are intent on give it your whole attention. Whatever you are doing, do it with the whole of your being and as though it were the only thing to do and as though there was all the time in the world’, a counsel of perfection given me by Bishop John V. Taylor at the very beginning of my solitary exploration, echoing the wisdom of countless others all down the centuries. Rarely can this be even a remote possibility in most women’s lives. For me it is and, in a sense, carries a double responsibility: to practise this single-pointedness not only to deepen my own attentiveness but also on behalf of others caught up in unrelenting multitasking. Life and the work in hand is the prayer or, put the other way about, the prayer is the work. We live in a world characterized by extreme activism, restlessness and rush, yet a hallmark of this solitary life needs to be otium. [pp.112-113]

Gradually the contemplative life seems to take over the “rest” of one’s life; the simplest of tasks become luminous – almost at times numinous – with presence. Even simple conversations can become exercises in something akin to receiving spiritual direction… in the midst of discussing vegetables, perhaps!

Of course, as Schiller points out herself, this is a counsel of perfection; with the best will in the world too many jobs are done thoughtlessly, too many conversations slip by in mere chatter. But even so – to look back in less time each time, and see the gaps in attention, becomes its own often humorous discipline. (The Pure Land Buddhists have a lovely word, bombu, for just this kind of spiritual hamfistedness!)

Otium. It’s not a common word in most people’s vocabulary; but it means, at least in a contemplative context, a kind of holy leisure. Schiller (op cit., p.36):

In early monasticism, leisure or otium was not only an essential mark of the life of a monk, it was integral to the life itself. Leisure, otium, is how the monastic life was described in the early Middle Ages (a life free from negotium, of busyness and business). Few of us would recognize this as a description of contemporary monasticism, and even St Bernard, that great reformer and founder of the Cistercian Order, who had hoped to reduce busyness and business to a minimum in the life of a monk, was soon to amend this adage wryly to that of a negotissimum otium, a very busy leisure indeed.

The retired life can be otium per excellentiam, if we will only let it be. Practice need not be confined to the daily spells alone in one’s room: it can be allowed to spill out, just like the hermit’s, into walking, cooking, housework, even being together. It becomes a portable grace, a lovely thing that brightens all that it touches, even pain and concern, even the most mundane or dreadful things. It has begun to become an open channel to the hidden boundless grace that holds all things in becoming.

Troubled times

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We live in troubled times, more troubled than many of us can remember. To be honest, though, a great deal 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 Viet Nam War, the UK miners’ strike (and its brutal repression) of the 1980s, the Falklands War, 9/11 – 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, reminiscent in so many ways of our own, 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.

The Weight of Glory, pp.48, 61

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 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.

When we feel separate, small and encapsulated, the ungraspable nature of the living reality makes us feel insecure and out of control. And because reality sometimes contains enormous pain and suffering, we are easily prone to adopting ideas and beliefs that seem to provide security, control, explanations and so on. But belief is always shadowed by doubt. And the truth is, we are clueless. We cannot see the whole.

But we don’t need to! When trying to get a grip falls away, it is actually a huge relief!

Joan Tollifson, The Essentials (Substack)

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.

Tariki

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It seems to me that we are not so much human beings as human becomings. And it doesn’t apply merely to humans: there are feline becomings and bovine becomings, cephalopod becomings and fungal becomings. It’s becomings all the way down.

To speak of a “being” implies an object, a static substance that acts and is acted upon; a thing embedded like a rock in a stream called time. But this isn’t what we are. Even our cells are replaced on a regular basis, some every few days; we change and evolve, each of us, throughout our lives, and we are different people in different eras of our life, very often with different interests and abilities. This applies perhaps more strongly to some people than to others, but by and large it is true: a person in later life is quite different than the “same person” in their teens, or as the parent of a young family.

Our thoughts too shift and flicker moment by moment, despite any effort we may make to concentrate on even one stream of them. Even the most elementary contemplative practice will show us this in the first few minutes!

But it isn’t just the ephemeral creatures of earth that are becoming, moment by moment and aeon by aeon. Our planet itself is changing and remoulding itself – if you doubt that you’ve never lived through an earthquake – and even our own lovely Milky Way is a finely balanced eddy of gas and dust and stars sailing 630 km/sec along the Hubble Flow.

Nothing is static. There are no objects, except by convention. All is change and becoming. As Spinoza saw, there is no substance but God (or Nature): everything – ourselves included – is merely a mode of that infinite becoming. The ten thousand things are no more than sparkles on the broad river of the Tao.

Literally, no thing is the ground of becoming.

So if this is how it is, what of our vaunted human will? The slipstream of a passing gnat disperses it. But becoming is movement, an ontological wind over the ocean of what is. There is no need to lean, brows knitted, on the imagined oars of the will. Sit still; the sail is raised of itself, and fills.

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.

An Open Ground

Contemplative spirituality and practice

Tag Archives: grace

If we are to speak of God

Grace?

You do not have to go anywhere

Getting nowhere

Otium

Troubled times

Tariki

Returning

This rib cage of failure

The annihilation of difference