Tag Archives: Julian of Norwich

Contemplation and language

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As I have mentioned before on this blog, writing in secular terms about the contemplative life, even thinking about it (as opposed simply to living it), is all but impossible without engaging with the religious language in which it has been clothed for most of its recorded existence. It is hard to write about the interior life without a framework of what is, effectively, myth, no matter which religion’s terminology is used the describe, even to think, about it. After all, it is so much easier to use a ready-mixed religious language, in which various shades of meaning may be taken more or less for granted without having to struggle actually to describe them. But as AC Grayling wrote:

There are people of sincere piety for whom the religious life is a source of deep and powerful meaning. For them and for others, a spiritual response to the beauty of the world, the vastness of the universe, and the love that can bind one human heart to another, feels as natural and necessary as breathing. Some of the art and music that has been inspired by faith counts among the loveliest and most moving expressions of human creativity. It is indeed impossible to understand either history or art without an understanding of what people believed, feared and hoped through their religious conceptions of the world and human destiny. Religion is a pervasive fact of history, and has to be addressed as such…

To move from the Babel of religions and their claims, and from the too often appalling effects of religious belief and practice on humankind, to the life-enhancing insights of the humanist tradition which most of the world’s educated and creative minds have embraced, is like escaping from a furnace to cool waters and green groves…

[W]hat alternative can the non-religious offer to religion as the focus for expression of those spiritual yearnings, that nostalgia for the absolute, the profound bass-note of emotion that underlies the best and deepest parts of ourselves? Often this question is asked rhetorically, as if there is no answer to it, the assumption being that by default religion is the only thing that speaks to these aspects of human experience, even if religion is false and merely symbolic. The symbolism, some views have it, is enough to do the work.

The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, pp.1,7

Contemplation is not about escaping the world; it’s more about seeing the threads that connect it to all that is. It’s not a matter of reconciling the world to some imagined deity; it’s a matter of discovering that the world is not other than its metaphysical ground. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” “Where I place my attention shapes what I become. To attend to the suffering of others, the beauty of the world, or the silence within is to participate in the creation of meaning—not because a god demands it, but because the world needs it.” (Mistral Le Chat, in response to user query)

To express the not-other-ness of each other, of “all that is made” (Julian of Norwich), is more often the work of poetry – see Mary Oliver, or JH Prynne – than of philosophy; and when philosophy does take up the challenge, the result is famously difficult – Martin Heidegger, AN Whitehead, even Benedictus Spinoza, for instance. A few, RS Thomas occurs to me, manage to write poetry that is as difficult to read as the metaphysicians. So who am I to complain that I don’t find this blog easy to write?

The only approach that seems to offer a glimmer of hope here is, perhaps oddly, unknowing.

Much has been made of the difference, indeed the opposition, of religion and science. But the more we hear of modern scientific research, especially in physics, the closer they seem to be. Contrary to popular belief, science is not about establishing indisputable facts, it is about positing and attempting to prove (or disprove) hypotheses, with the understanding that any discovery may be superseded in the future. Science is about a spirit of enquiry. The unknown is accepted, even welcomed as a challenge for future research. As biologist Stuart Firestein said, “What we don’t know is our job. It’s much more interesting to think about what we don’t know than what we do know.” That too is the mystic position.

But, whereas scientists may see this place as a challenge to learn more and to eradicate more areas of uncertainty, for mystics or spiritual seekers, the challenge may be about embracing that uncertainty, about accepting that for some questions there will be no answers – and that it doesn’t matter. Not only that it doesn’t matter but that the unforeseen may contain riches that go beyond what in our habitual ways of thinking and in our workaday lives we are capable of imagining. In giving the unforeseen more of a chance, we are opening up opportunities for our creative selves, for spontaneity, for the part of us that goes beyond the routine certainties of everyday life.

If we recognise that it is the unforeseen that might have the most importance in our lives, we may allow ourselves to welcome uncertainty…

Jennifer Kavanagh, A Little Book of Unknowing, p.15

Objectless

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In those deeper waters of Centering Prayer—in those nanoseconds (at first) between the thoughts, when your attention is not running out ahead to grab the next object to alight upon, you taste those first precious drops of an entirely different quality of selfhood… There is a deeper current of living awareness, a deeper and more intimate sense of belonging, which flows beneath the surface waters of your being and grows stronger and steadier as your attention is able to maintain itself as a unified field of objectless awareness.

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice, p.134

The state Cynthia Bourgeault mentions here is of course that which is often referred to, by writers as diverse as Tara Brach and Jiddu Krishnamurti, as “choiceless awareness”, and by Eckhart Tolle as “awareness of Being”. But there is a subtle resonance in Bourgeault’s phrase that I don’t find elsewhere. She goes on (ibid. p.138):

In the classic language of the Christian contemplative tradition, we are practicing moving from a cataphatic way of knowing (i.e., with an object-focused awareness) to an apophatic, or “formless” (i.e., objectless) awareness, emanating from a deeper capacity of the human soul in God.

God, known as the ground of being, Istigkeit, is no thing, and consequently can never be the object of our attention. As the Old Testament story of Moses on the mountain puts it, “you cannot see [God’s] face.” (Exodus 33:20)

In the same way, if you think about individual words and how we know what they mean, you’ll see that they work by dividing reality up into identifiable bits. Definitions enable us to home in on the right bit of reality – so that we can distinguish between a chair and a bed, for example, or between nutritious plants and poisonous ones. Words are a little bit like the machines that slice salami: they cut up reality into digestible chunks. But God isn’t a ‘bit of reality’. God is the source of the whole thing. So it’s not surprising that words won’t quite work properly when it comes to God.

J.P. Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality, (Introduction)

All that we are, all that is, rests in the open ground as the hazelnut rested in the love of God in Julian’s vision:

And in this vision he [Christ] also showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball, as it seemed to me. I looked at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came to me in a general way, like this, ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for it seemed to me so small that it might have disintegrated suddenly into nothingness. And I was answered in my understanding, ‘It lasts, and always will, because God loves it; and in the same way everything has its being through the love of God.’

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Oxford World Classics, p.6

Only an awareness that, still and intransitive, does not take an object can open itself to reality that can never be its object. Only in silence can we touch that reflecting quiet, the still pool beneath unending light.

Impermanence

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I realised not long ago that I have tended for most of my life – albeit unconsciously – to reckon the worth of things by how long they are likely to last; and this despite the fact that so many things I love and whose presence gives meaning to my own life – small plants, lively insects, the changing skies, the seasons of the year – are ephemeral by their very nature, and they last only moments, days or weeks or months, before reaching an end implicit in their merely being what they are. I love humans, too, I realised, for who they are not for what they might achieve; and humans don’t last long compared with trees, or with the rock formations that are such striking and ancient companions of ours in this part of the country.

The worth of something, as I had unthinkingly valued it, is its essence: the thing that exists, persists, being the thing itself. It is an illusion: phenomena, any phenomena, are empty, surely, of any such essence. They are merely what they are, and that in relation to all else that is, to the shifting patterns on the bright skin of the stream, “the ever-transforming patterns of the cosmos as a whole.” (Reninger) It’s clinging to this idea of essence that gives rise to our constant craving, our helpless longing for permanence that is the growth-point for the whole tragic enterprise of human pride – the error of Ozymandias.

We are frail, and temporary, and lovely; we are precious as all life is precious, and our loveliness, like the loveliness of all that lives, is in our fleetingness. The points of light on the sparkling water last an instant – their beauty is in that. Death is implicit in being born; life would not be possible without it, and it is a loyal friend to the living. All we need is to sit still, and watch the emptiness of separate things; the delicious freshness of impermanence itself will come by like the scent of flowers through an open window in summer. Death will come and sit on the end of our bed, and fill his pipe, and talk to us of life; and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Onyng

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If the ground of being is no thing, literally not an object – as it must be, being the source and beginning of all that comes to be – then in our closeness to it we find we cannot speak of it, really. JP Williams writes: “Aside from the fact that the Creator of all cannot be any kind of ‘object’, the divine activity of ‘onyng’ [Julian of Norwich] finally removes the ground from under any duality. The soul’s ‘solitude’ is not necessarily a denial of divine presence; when it is united with God, there are not two beings to count. Peace and holiness are ‘held at no remove’, as John [of the Cross] says. In so far as the soul speaks at all there, it stammers, tripping itself up, disrupting its own saying.”

In the ground itself there is no separation, no “God” and “soul”; there is only being. There is no “life” and “death”, as if these were separated, states or places to transition between; there is only isness, beyond time or ending. What we think of as self (which is only a convenient fiction, anyway) is entirely subsumed in light. It is nothing: it has found no thing.