The Cloud of Unknowing: Session 1

James Finley (0:00)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone. And welcome to our time here together, turning to guidance to the teachings of the Christian mystic, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. In our first introductory session with Kirsten, we saw how in the first chapter, the author of The Cloud kind of marks out the territory that we'll be exploring here as four stages or four phases of living the Christian life. Each of these phases is kind of the quality or the degree of our experience and response to God's presence in our life. So in the common way of life, our faith is seen as a source of moral guidance. It's seen as a feeling of belonging to a community of people, or perhaps to one's own lineage, or one's own heritage, or one's own faith tradition. Also a community devoted to service to the world and so on.

And the special way of life is where God becomes personally real to you, or to follow Christ in all things becomes personal to you. It's heartfelt, this life of devotional sincerity. And you seek to live it with your friends, as you seek to gather with like-minded people who's also been interiorly awakened through Bible study or prayer, or service and so on.

All this efficacious unto holiness is how we walk our walk through our passage through time, and in the midst of God and our way to God. The singular way of life, we said, was through the Cloud where he starts to focus, because he's saying that this person who's coming to him for spiritual direction, that he feels that he discerns that she's come to this singular place. And likewise, he also has in mind all of us. He's clearly writing this with a contemplative spiritual direction of discerning, as we listen to what the author is saying, to the extent that we have come to the singular way. And what is the singular way? It's that in the last paragraph of the foreword, where he speaks of a blind stirring of love, that we're going along living our life in prayer and life. And there's a stirring of God's spirit within us. Not stirring in our reflective ego illumined by faith, it's a consolation. We're not stirring in our finite mind as an insight into God as revealed in scripture and so on. But it's innermost. It's a stirring in the hidden center of yourself. And the reverberations of that stirring, you're moved by it in a moment of unexplainable communion with God. It might be very intense, it's very often extremely subtle, but there is this taste, this sense of oneness.

And you're seeing that what the singular way of life is, it isn't just that these fleeting moments of the stirring, that they kind of illumine and energize the special way of life. They give vibrancy to your devotional sincerity and to your life. But within your heart is a growing desire to abide in the depths so feedingly glimpsed. You long to live in an habituated state of this stirring which is perpetually going on within you all the time. But you long to abide in conscious communion with that stirring of God's love with you and for you forever and ever like this.

And he said, it's not, it isn't just that you, it's true you don't feel this stirring as he said, as experienced contemplatives do. We assume you're the author of The Cloud. We sense that he is such an experienced contemplative. In other words, there are people who have come to this habituated state of the divinity of every breath and heartbeat. And sensing that's true in this person, we turn to this person for guidance so that what happened to them, to the grace of God, might happen to us. See, how do we help me with this? And so the author of The Cloud then says that what the thing is to realize at the singular state then is to realize you've come to this place of a certain longing that you don't understand.

For a oneness with God, you don't understand, but you know it's real because you fleetingly experienced it. And so how can you then consummate, how can I consummate, you consummate, the desire to consummate that longing by abiding in that union, an underlying habitual state as we go through our day. And this is the guidance then, this is what you are to do. This is chapter three.

This is what you are to do. Lift your heart up to the Lord with a gentle stirring of love, desiring him for his own sake and not for his gifts. Center all your attention and desire on him and let this be the sole concern of your mind and heart. Do all in your power to forget everything else, keeping your thoughts and desires free from involvement with any of God's creatures or their affairs, whether in general or in particular. Perhaps this will seem like an irresponsible attitude, but I tell you, let them all be. Pay no attention to them.