Form and mystery

Your consent to God in [contemplative practice] is something of a paradox. You consent to both sides of God—form and mystery. The mystery of God is beyond concepts, forms, and images, yet concepts, forms, and images emerge out of this transcendent mystery to lead you deeper. Where are you led? Deeper into mystery…

David Frenette, The Path of Centering Prayer

All contemplative practice is, it seems to me, rooted in stillness and quiet. Our silence is the anchorhold of all our being present, the place where what we are drops away into what is.

Frenette goes on (ibid.) “The life that you are given by God, the life you are given by God’s breathing, is beyond symbols, concepts, and anything that is normally called psychological. God’s presence is more ontological—rooted in the nature of being itself.” It is this “nature of being” that is the nature of silence itself (1 Kings 19:12 NRSV).

Ground level

The ground of being is simply what is, at its deepest level: Eckhart’s istigkeit. All that is rests in the ground by its own nature, and that includes us. But we are conscious; more than that, self-aware. In being aware of our own being, becoming truly aware in silence of our own isness as not separate from what is, we realise that the ground of our own self is not other than the ground of all that is.

Cynthia Bourgeault writes, “Mystical hope would simply be what happens when we touch this innermost ground and it floods forth into our being as strength and joy. Hope would be the Mercy-divine love itself-coursing coursing through our being like lightning finding a clear path to the ground.”

She goes on,

You may have noticed that those three experiences Bede Griffiths mentioned as “pathways to the center” have one thing in common: they all catapult us out of ego-centered consciousness. Those who come hack from a near-death experience bring with them a visceral remembrance of how vivid and abundant life is when the sense of separateness has dropped away. Those who fall profoundly in love experience a dying into the other that melts every shred of their own identity, self-definition, caution, and boundaries, until finally there is no “I” anymore-only “you.” Those who meditate go down to the same place, but by a back staircase deep within their own being.

This realisation of our own identity with the ground (it reminds me of the Buddhist concept of Śūnyatā) seems to me to be precisely Bourgeault’s “back staircase.” It is only in the total poverty of silence and stillness that we can find it, but it is our only home.

I do not know

The apophatic denial – I do not know – humbles us and leaves us vulnerable, certainly. At the same time, it can be a tool of resistance and subversion.” (JP Williams)

To understand that we do not understand doesn’t just call into question what we think we know, but all that we have been told. The old names will not do; the familiar roles will not play out any more. And yet even to say this sort of thing contains its own risk: Kipling’s The Cat That Walked by Himself can seem a romantic figure, and can draw attention to what he seems to be, rather than what he is not.

So Williams’ “resistance and subversion” are not merely to tradition and dogma, but to ourselves: to what we think ourselves to be, certainly; but also to what we would like to be. The ground of being is no thing; to be still enough to hear its silence (1 Kings 19:12 NRSV) we must become what we are, empty of self. Not knowing, without substance, no things ourselves. I suppose all this fuss about practice, and wayfaring, is no more than that.

Listening for the Light in the silence

The Quaker way of making decisions, through a listening process often described as looking for the will of God for the group, gives a basis for a shared understanding of what kind of God might be involved. That isn’t automatically anything which is named ‘God’ or would be recognised as the God of another tradition. The Nontheist Friends Network use Quaker business method for their decision making and they are clear that they see the ‘will of God’ as metaphorical language to explain a complex, but not supernatural, phenomenon. There are still things we can say about the Spirit which guides a Quaker meeting for worship for business, though. It can be sensed in a room. It can have a direction and make distinctions: yes this, not that. It is worth trusting.

Rhiannon Grant, Telling the Truth About God: Quaker Approaches to Theology, Quaker Quicks, p.14

During meeting for worship, and even more in our own practice of prayer or contemplation, we can enter a condition analogous to that known in Sōtō Zen as Shikantaza, derived from a Chinese term in Caodong Buddhism, usually translated into English as “Silent Illumination”, or “Serene Reflection”. Merv Fowler, however (in a now out of print book) translates it as “open awareness”, which seems to me a much better, less other-worldly translation. It is this condition which, in my understanding, allows us to listen for the Light in the silence. Meister Eckhart, to put it in a Christian contemplative context, calls it gelassenheit. It is from this place of open awareness that true ministry comes, and in the Quaker decision-making process, is – at least ideally – the source of our discernment.

This practice of quiet listening, together and individually, is what lies at the heart of Quakerism, and is the source of our faith and the root of our practice. We lose sight of it at our peril: without it, an aggressive, politically polarised activism based on “send[ing] our passions on God’s errands” (William Penn) misses the real source of our strength, and loses track of the sure wisdom that rests in silence.

A Quiet Life

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 now that the pandemic is coming more nearly 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 be happening, 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 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 our own silence and practice are allowed to stand untitled. The phrase used by Friends, “Meeting for Worship”, is strangely graced in this context, as is the practice itself: it has no formal structure, other than a beginning and an end, and in the tides of silence we can find, and be found by, a light which we need not name.

Silence

Quite apart from the formal silence of meeting for worship, I have loved silence as much as or more than I have loved music – and of course music is only what it is by virtue of the silence that comes with it, both the kind you can write down, that is threaded all through it, and the kind that underlies it, an open ground beneath the whole structure of sound.

Contrary to our common imagination, our solar system, and the space beyond our heliosphere, is bathed and criss-crossed with unheard, magnetic sounds, that can can even be converted to audio waves that we can hear with our human ears. ClassicFM has some samples, and NASA too has shared some from much further away in the depths of interstellar space. But under these too is silence: a silence bright with starlight and seamed with barely imaginable gravitational waves.

The fertile stillness that silence is seems very close to the dark transparency that sometimes one can touch in contemplation. It seems to me that in contemplation perhaps all we are doing is stripping away the accretions of thought and habit, draining the mind’s default mode that tries to fill our resting moments with its lowest common denominator daydreams. All that we are, all we have come from, rests in the ground of being itself, and it may be that we can touch the edge of that ground itself in silence, in the resting place between breaths, or the quiet of sitting still.

The Nub of Hope

“What if the nub of hope is that we cannot know where it is leading?” (Dana Littlepage Smith, writing in The Friend 21 May 2020) This morning the rain is grey and unceasing. Drops trickle down the windows, beyond the reflections of the room lights, on since we woke up, late. A chill seeps in, despite the good tight glazing, and the room’s warmth. Out along the hazels, damp little blue tits flit from shelter to shelter, looking for spiders under the leaves. “Silence is paradoxically a listening, and solitude is truly finding the whole world in God.” George Maloney, Prayer of the Heart: The Contemplative Tradition of the Christian East. “All our steps are ordered by the LORD; how then can we understand our own ways?… The human spirit is the lamp of the LORD, searching every inmost part.” (Proverbs 20:24,27 NRSV) It is only in the darkness of unknowing that the structures of our understanding fall away from our naked awareness, and we find that nothing separates us from the wholly unknowable ground of all that is, Eckhart’s Istigkeit, love alone in which all things come to be, and are held. But it is only when we are at the very end of ourselves that this gift can be received, into open hands that can hold onto nothing anyway, that have lost all they ever had. “…for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3 NRSV) “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?” (Romans 8:24 NRSV)

What Is Worship?

Our local Quaker meeting house had just moved to what is termed “blended worship” – part Zoom, part distanced worship, in our case limited to eight Friends due to the size of the room – when the announcement came of a second lockdown throughout November at least.

I personally have found the Zoom technology intrusive, and in itself somehow attention-seeking, and so I have become part of the small group of Friends who have joined the silence, alone in our respective homes. For me, as perhaps for some of the others, this has felt far closer and more like “real” worship than a screenful of animated postage stamps. But this raises the question, what is worship?

For millennia men and women have met together to worship, and though what we know of their practices and liturgies have widely differed from religion to religion, and nation to nation, they have met together, whether it has been to dance, sing, chant the Nembutsu or walk sacred paths. Many, perhaps most, faiths have solitary practices of prayer, in many cases silent practices. Quakers are unusual, in that their meetings for worship are silent, but they are corporate, and their members not only call them “worship” but understand them that way too, on the whole.

I have, as I have described elsewhere, a discipline of private, silent prayer. It is a vital part of who I am, of my own understanding of what I am here for, but it does not feel like what Friends do together on a Sunday morning. Yet, when I am sitting alone in silence on a First Day morning, conscious of other Friends across our town, across our Area and our Yearly Meeting, across the world, sitting likewise, I know that I am joining with them in an act of worship. It is not at all the same as my own regular times of contemplative prayer. On one or two occasions I have even found myself visited by what I can only term “ministry”, that I have shared by email afterwards.

What is going on here? And, more to the point perhaps, what might it suggest for the future of worship during, and even after, a pandemic? Maybe worship isn’t only meeting together in rows, a breath and a handshake apart. Maybe worship, which is after all a joining in spirit more than anything else, perhaps, is less dependent on physical togetherness than we had thought. Always there have been Friends who, for reasons of great age, illness, remoteness, even occasionally imprisonment, could not come to the meeting house on Sunday morning. We have remembered them, and we have hoped that they could remember us, sitting together in worship, but we have, most of us I imagine, tended to feel sorry for them, that they had to “miss out” on “our” meeting. Perhaps we knew less than we thought. Perhaps indeed there were some of us who did understand, who knew that despite outer appearances and the presumptions of our own attempted compassion, these Friends were as much part of our worship as the warm and breathing presence next to us.

Perhaps the future of worship is stranger and more luminous than we had thought. Perhaps we are moving into new territory, making our own maps as we tread forward on virgin ground, into a place odder and more beautiful than we have known. I hope so.

Church is what?

The period of “doing church” during lockdown was an interesting time. The Dorchester churches were closed of course, as was the Quaker meeting, and while there were various efforts at worship via Zoom, livestreamed sermons and meditations, and other initiatives, by and large – for me at least – the peace of silence, and the practice of the Jesus Prayer, filled the space left with a closeness to God that I hadn’t experienced for a long time.

Our experience of church during this current period of uncertain easing of regulations, and imposition of others such as the wearing of face coverings in public gatherings, has been very mixed. As with some shops, there is constant tension and uncertainty around the often ambiguous – if necessary – rules, and continual vigilance, about following one-way routes to and from communion stations, for instance. It has been good to see those we’ve missed again, and to hear their voices without the interposition of electronics, but in many ways it seems to me that our local Quaker meeting has made the better choice in remaining closed until we are sure that the pandemic is more nearly under control.

What can we learn from these experiences, which come, for me, as a kind of culmination of a quite long process, involving an increasing sense of being drawn to a hiddenness of life and worship, to silence and to stillness? Back in June this year, I wrote:

This seems to be for me more than ever before a time between times. I haven’t written much here the last few weeks, not because there’s been nothing to say, really, but more because it has come to me without words, this stillness; the waiting so deep that I haven’t even been able to find even a cognitive toehold, so to speak, to explain it to myself… this liminal place is for me about more than the result of the current suspension of normal life while we wait for the pandemic to pass.  It is a place God has brought me to, in that hidden way he has. 

These anything but ordinary weeks of near-isolation, bereft of so many of the distractions of ordinary life, have brought me here, against all expectations.

It seems that to remain hidden (Colossians 3:3) with Christ in God, unknowing, is at least for me the narrow path to, and the gift of, God’s own presence, where even our own steps are unknown to us: our God who is entirely beyond our own comprehension, whose name can only be a pointer, as Jennifer Kavanagh says, to something beyond our description. In silence itself is our hiddenness, our unknowing, where God waits within our own waiting (Isaiah 30:18).

Where does this leave us? What is to be learned – or to put it another way, what might the Spirit be showing me – of the path ahead? The final sentences of Steve Aisthorpe’s The Invisible Church read:

There is a growing realisation that church is what occurs when people are touched by the living Christ and share the journey of faith with others. Whether that occurs in an historic building or online or . . . wherever, is unimportant.

Looking back over past posts here – try a search within this blog for the word “hiddenness” – I have the uncomfortable sense of being crept up on, in the way that God so often has. In the past, those who sought to follow Christ sometimes came to a time in their lives when they felt drawn, like St Aidan or St Cuthbert, to climb into a coracle and paddle away to some offshore island; or like the Desert Fathers and Mothers, to move out into the all but trackless desert. Perhaps I am at some analogous stage in my life. I don’t know. But the kind of qualified solitude that I found during the period of complete lockdown was a healing thing, an unsought wholeness and peace with God, a sense of being in the right place, against all expectations.

I seem to find myself quoting the author of Proverbs here, again and again, when he writes:

All our steps are ordered by the LORD;
how then can we understand our own ways?

(Proverbs 20:24 NRSV)

But it’s true; and in accepting that, and in waiting quietly for whatever God may yet reveal, there is a peace and a contentment that I had not anticipated.

Truth

Pontius Pilate infamously asked Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38) and philosophers from Socrates through Kant to Erich Fromm have attempted to give their own answers. But I am coming to believe that the incessant exercise of the human power of reason actually takes us further from truth itself, as much as it may seek to know about it.

John Starke, in The Possibility of Prayer, writes:

Throughout the Gospels we find Jesus resisting the powerful and pompous and going to the outcast and the humble… If we want to experience what God does in us and around us, which is quiet and subtle, we must make ourselves low. Prayer is the regular practice of lowering ourselves to better views of his work… It’s a strange irony that prayer is the strengthening of an inner muscle that does nothing more than boast in weakness [2 Corinthians 12:9]

Unless we can be still in prayer, and cease from our anxious reasoning, and surrender to God’s presence in the space between one breath and another, one morsel of bread and the next crumb, the experience will slip past us, and the memory fail.

John Bellows wrote:

I know of no other way, in these deeper depths, of trusting in the name of the Lord, and staying upon God, than sinking into silence and nothingness before Him… So long as the enemy can keep us reasoning he can buffet us to and fro; but into the true solemn silence of the soul before God he cannot follow us.

In the true littleness of our silence truth for a moment lifts to us the mirror of God. “Faith”, said Jennifer Kavanagh, “is not about certainty, but about trust.” In our stillness, our unknowing, our very lowliness, is the very place Jacob found: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:17 NIV)