The Cloud of Unknowing: Session 2

James Finley (0:00)

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

Greetings, everyone. Welcome to our time here together, turning for guidance to the teachings of the Christian mystic, the anonymous author, The Cloud of Unknowing.

We've left off in our session so far, exploring the author's guidelines for a way to practice contemplative prayer, which is the basis for chapter three. And these guidelines are very simple in a way, the author says. To sit in this act, to be in this, to practice this contemplative prayer, 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. Let this be the sole concern of your mind and the 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. What we saw in order to understand these guidelines, we have to understand what the author, The Cloud, is helping us to understand the phase of living the Christian life in which this way to pray finds its meaning.

And what is this phase of the Christian life? That we've gone beyond the common way in which our faith in Christ, our involvement in this following Christ is based upon the psychological gifts that it gives us to the moral guidelines that it gives us to belonging to a sense of community, how motivates us to serve the community and so forth. All good aspirations. It also found that this way, this phase of life, how it has evolved or become enriched in the special way in which God becomes personal to us. God becomes personally real to us in our heart. And that Christ becomes real to us in our heart. And that we sincerely seek to follow Christ in all things in devotional sincerity to live the life of love that Christ calls us to live.

And then we saw it was in the midst of this special way, devotional sincerity, live day by day. And the last paragraph of the foreword, where he speaks of from time to time were grace with blind stirrings of love. The spirit in the inmost center of our being stirring us to love. The stirring he speaks of, it's not where we experience God's stirring in reflective consciousness, illumined by faith. It is just not the stirring of the special way in which we're moved with devotional sincerity, with a sense of the consolation of God's presence, or the solace of God's presence. There is the gift of that, there is the grace of that. We're grateful for that. But the stirring of what he speaks is innermost. That is, it's the spirit of God stirring in the innermost hidden center of our own soul that we cannot see with our finite eyes, this hidden place where God's eminence within us is sustaining us breath by breath, breath by breath. And this stirring of the spirit in God, not as God is in us in our ideas of God and the gifts of God, but it's a stirring of how God is in God, intimately stirring in the depths of ourself. Another way to say it, there are moments where we're kind of quietly amazed to find ourselves unexplainably in the presence of God, the unexpected nearness of God, and how it can overtake us unexpectedly, sometimes very intensely, often very subtle, but it's a kind of a homecoming, and we rest in this communal presence of God, all about us and within us, as St. Augustine says, closer to us than we are to ourselves. The next phase of this understanding or this next way of moving into this worldview, helping us to understand ourselves, this kind of classical contemplative Christian way to understand these things.

Scripture tells us that in God, we live and move and have our being, that we're living our lives in the vast interiority of God, that when we die, when the moment of our death finally comes, and we pass through the veil of death, we don't go anywhere. We don't go somewhere else. For all the angels are here. All the saints are here. All the souls of the faithful departed. All the dead are, they're all here with us all together. We're all living our life in the vast interiority of God. The difference is that those, in passing through the veil of death, those that are living in God are living in glory. They're living in the full light of God as God. That is, that the life of the blessed is a life of knowing God with God's knowledge of God, which is Christ, loving God with God's love of God, which is the Holy Spirit, is being as much God as God is God in our eternal nothingness without God. It's a divinization in the order of grace and love that is our eternal destiny.