The Cloud of Unknowing: Session 3

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

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

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time here together, turning for guidance to the teachings of the Christian mystic, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. In this session, I'm inviting you to join me as we explore chapters 68 and then chapters 38 of The Cloud. These two chapters are especially significant in that they bear witness to the grace transformations that occur within us in our fidelity to this prayer of loving God for God's sake and not for God's gifts, and of anchoring ourself in the word as our defense against being dragged off into our thoughts about this, our thoughts about that, to stay steadfast in this knowledge born of love. And because of the sublime nature of this mystical state, this mystical communion of intimately realizing God's infinite oneness with us as the very reality of ourselves, others and all things in this love union. I think it's very helpful as we listen to this, not to try to figure it out, because it's not figure outable. And therefore it's more helpful to understand it by listening to it, by allowing your soul to kind of sing with the awareness that in some way you recognize what the author of the cloud is talking about. Because in various ways you've tasted it, you've experienced it and you yourself long to abide ever more completely in this oneness, which is why we're drawn to these teachings, which is this path. And what the author of the cloud says, in trying to bear witness and open up this grace communal realization of oneness with God that unfolds within us in this prayer, he begins with chapter 68 by talking about a way to, one way to understand contemplative prayer. He says at the beginning of chapter 68 that another man might tell you to draw all your faculties and senses within yourself and their worship of God. And this is well said and true besides, and no sensible person would deny it. And I'd like to start there. As what we're trying to do is in a clear understanding of the inner landscape of our soul, as we're trying to, this experiential self knowledge that deepens within us in our search for God.

And one way is to understand this contemplative prayer in which this union is realized by allowing the typical thinking self in our day by day consciousness to kind of fall into the background. So that a more contemplative interior beholding consciousness might come into the foreground.

I found this expressed in a very succinct and helpful way by Father LaSalle. And Father LaSalle was a Jesuit priest and a Zen Sensei who taught at Sophia University in Japan. And he was a friend and colleague of the Jesuit priest William Johnson, who was a Zen Sensei, and who translated this translation of The Cloud of Unknowing that we're using. It was his doctoral dissertation, The Theology of the Cloud of Unknowing, Merton wrote the foreword to it. And so Father LaSalle speaks to this way of understanding Contemplative Prayer that the author of The Cloud is referring to by inviting us to notice how it's really true that most of the time our thinking self is in the foreground, thinking about this, thinking about that, in the midst of the situation, and so on. But to know, and well, we should, well, we should be invested that way. Thinking this, thinking things through and guiding our behavior and so forth. Including thinking about the things of God. In our Lectio Divina, we take in the words of Jesus. And then in the Meditatio, see, we reflect, it's like the reflective mind illumined by grace. Well, we should do that.

But notice, Father Losos, that in the background, there is a more contemplative state of a kind of quiet beholding, or you might say, a quiet state of communal presence and one with that which we're in the mystery, we're in the presence of, and this happens to us spontaneously from time to time. We've talked about these moments, like these stirrings, these awakenings, turning to see a flock of birds descending in the arms of the beloved, holding a newborn infant, giving ourselves over to the smell of a rose, listening to the rain, the pause between two lines of a poem, and our quiet prayer. There are certain moments where it's a spontaneous event, we're so interiorly quickened that we move forward in kind of a quiet beholding communion as the thinking cell falls into the background, and it's in that state that we're graced with these touches or these realizations of God's oneness with us beyond thought, beyond what words can say.