Tag Archives: Martin Laird

A kind of valediction

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Most, if not all, my writing for the foreseeable future will now be back at The Mercy Blog.

I had thought, five years ago, to move my blogging activities entirely to An Open Ground, but things didn’t work out that way. An Open Ground seems to have been a more an account of my own five years’ deconstruction and reconstruction than anything else; it has not really ever done the work I originally sought to do by beginning The Mercy Blog 21 years ago last month. To underline the fact that that work is not finished, not by any means, The Mercy Blog seems to have retained a loyal readership even over the time when the site was lying fallow.

I don’t know yet what the next months will bring – “All our steps are ordered by the LORD; how then can we understand our own ways?” (Proverbs 20:24 NRSV) – but I will try to remain faithful to the original premise of The Mercy Blog, and record there some of my own adventures and misadventures in prayer and contemplation, and more importantly, some of the words I discover from those further along the pathless path (Martin Laird) than I.

The metaphor of the wilderness

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The desire for something deeper in life, for a meaning that seems to be elusive or absent, is a precious opportunity. It is an invitation to discover a purpose and an identity that is more than the stories we have told ourselves.

This is rarely a comfortable place to be. It often starts with a sense of absence and emptiness; of meaninglessness, anxiety or dread. All of this is a gift. This is where desire begins, in the absence of the beloved. The desire for God, the hollowness that cries out to be filled, is already the activity of the Spirit within us, refusing to be satisfied with distractions, and drawing us to itself. It is the Light itself, showing us our condition and planting the seeds of desire within us for a deeper and more expansive life.

When the possibility of a meaningful life feels most distant, when we suffer a sense of isolation from every possibility of goodness in the world, this may be the beginning of a process of inner transformation.

Craig Barnett, Seeking and being found

This less than comfortable place is effectively where I’ve been for the last five years or so, since during the recent pandemic I found myself on what Martin Laird once described as a “pathless path“. It seems to have taken that long for me to recognise the Spirit drawing me to itself.

It seems to be that when we are being drawn to a new layer of the spiritual life we have often – or so I’ve found myself – to be drawn out of the previous layer, into what is often described as the desert, on the far side of a river we had not even known we were about to cross. In the opening chapter of her recent book Sarah Bessey writes,

I’ve loved the metaphor of the wilderness for many years now. It just seems to fit with what I understand of the world and my place in it. If the city is a metaphor for certainty and belonging, then the wilderness is for our questions and our truth.

Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith,  p.3

Clearly for me at least this has proved the only true place to begin. Unless everything is questioned, how can we be open to the breaking in of something we could not have thought of?

But a month ago, on an unexpected visit to Newcastle Cathedral, I stumbled on a celebration of the Eucharist in a side chapel, at the precise moment of the Prayer of Consecration. Looking up at one of the high windows, it took a moment for me to realise where I was; and as I did so, I became aware of what I can only describe as a field of some intense kind of magnetism, as deep and as fundamental as the gravity holding me to the tiled floor. Later in the same book, Sarah Bessey describes an almost analogous experience:

But as I went forward on that evening, while the community was singing, the woman who was offering bread and wine in my corner of the church quietly tucked the bread into my open palm and said to me, “This is the Body of Christ, given to you, Sarah.” I closed my fingers around the hunk of bread and raised it toward the cup that was being held by her partner, who said, “This is the blood of Christ, poured out for you, Sarah.” I dipped the bread into the wine and popped it into my mouth.

The bread, weighted with wine, sat on my tongue. I pressed it against the roof of my mouth and my knees buckled involuntarily. I quickly walked over to my chair in the front row and collapsed into it. I chewed and swallowed, suddenly aware of every taste, every reality of it, tears running down my face.

It felt like the line of time collapsed a bit, as if all that was and is and will be was present there. In that moment of tasting, something in my soul illuminated that I haven’t been able to articulate even now, years later, about the welcome and faithfulness of Love for all of us hungry and thirsty ones.

ibid., pp.212-214

Since then I seem to have arrived, against all expectations, back home. There is no arguing with it. I am simply on the other side of that river I had not expected to cross again, and I am home.

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.”

Hesychia

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The greek word hesychia (ἡσυχία) is commonly translated as quiet or stillness. In Orthodox teaching it is often associated with the idea of nepsis (νῆψις), watchfulness. Grace settles over stillness, as the heart withdraws from its clinging and rejecting and its continual self-comparison. If we can keep still enough, and merely watch, the sediment of self-concern will precipitate out.

Martin Laird writes (An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, p.74):

We can just begin to see how contemplative practice gently loosens the knot of ego and calms the spasms of reactive mind. When we return our attention to our practice as soon as we are aware that our attention has been stolen, ego is less and less the focus of our attention. The television screen in our heads will continue its constant stream of noise and images. The more we watch and listen to it the duller we feel, a dullness we take to be normal. We grow bored with constantly flipping through channels in search of something that might, one of these rounds, land on something that gives us a sense of being alive instead of being deadened by the din of our minds. The practical answer is simple: let the television play. Simply don’t watch it. Gradually (neither in a day nor in a short while) the light of awareness begins to shine through this mental clutter and we begin to realize that the derived identity provided by ego no longer has the ring of truth. “We need to guard,” [Christian] Bobin says, “not only against the world, but against our preoccupation with ourselves, another door by which the world might creep back into us like a prowler into a sleeping house.”

Practice is like this. Regardless of why we thought we began in the first place, only in quiet persistence, rather than in mental heroics and spiritual metrology, can the heart be still enough for grace to break through like sunlight through the overcast.

Behind the hours of practice there is a quiet, luminous stillness; it is always there, has always been there, only we had forgotten it among the “noise and images”. Practice, it seems to me, is perhaps no more than a means – whichever means we have found fits us best – of keeping quiet; for it is only in quiet that we are able to open to the grace of that luminous stillness. This conscious state of illumination (often referred to by Catholic writers as “contemplation” or “infused contemplation” – as opposed to “contemplative practice”) is a gift. It cannot be achieved. It seems to me that intent needs simply to disappear in the practice of contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. But nevertheless the absence of intent, replaced with simple dwelling in stillness, in the presence of what is, now, is the only way I know to becoming vulnerable enough to be available to illumination – to the light of the open ground itself.

Scatter plot

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Practice today was scattered; distracted doesn’t even cover it. One train of thought succeeded another with barely a break for open awareness between them. Trivial, juicy, engrossing – it hardly seemed to matter, just so long as it would take my attention away from the tiny precious instant that is all that is now. The delicious isness of the crisp air, the sounds from outside the window, were scarcely noticed between the pattering dissolution of one obsession and the cramping onset of another.

And yet the rest of the day was gentle, open, clear and attentive. What I did I did. I listened, truly listened, when people spoke. The most ordinary things came as gifts from the blue – and the autumn sky on this oddly warm day was as blue as blue – and even the busy streets were different, suddenly luminous with presence. Nothing seemed to take away this sense of grace and pattern. There was no such thing as irritation or impatience; everything had its own weight, its own benediction to deliver.

So what was going on? I have no idea. This “pathless path”, as Martin Laird describes it somewhere, has many odd sunken lanes to explore and wayside shrines to stumble across – one reason I have so little time in my own life for any idea of a “ladder of ascent” (John Climacus) however helpful others may find such things. Just sitting still is really all that is needed, pointlessly scattered though it may seem at the time. That doesn’t matter, it appears; what it seems to the conscious mind is beside the point. What is given is enough. There is nothing but what is given, anyway.

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.]