Notes from my reading of the Pursuit of Wisdom (by the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, 14th century), taken during my study at Oxford, summer 2007: "You must gather together your thoughts and your desires and make of them a church, and there learn to love only this good word Jesus, so that all your desires and thoughts are directed to love Jesus alone. And do not fail in this mindfulness, insofar as it is possible by grace and your frailty will permit, humbling yourself more and more in prayer and taking counsel, patiently waiting on the will of the Lord, until the mind is ravished above itself to be fed with the sweet food of angels in the beholding of God and godly things."
The purest prayer isn't complicated
A vacation posting: re-posting from early last summer
Jesus said, “When you pray, go into your closet, shut the door, and pray to God in secret.” Matthew 6.6
“But I can’t find such a place to pray,” a young mother tells me. “My life’s hectic. The only secret place in my house is the bathroom, and my four year old makes sure not even that’s guaranteed.”
You may not find such a place, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enter the closet of your heart.
Let go your idealizations of prayer, and just breathe.
“The breath that does not repeat the name of God is wasted breath,” wrote Kabir.
The purest forms of prayer aren’t complicated. That’s their genius.
A simple way to pray
A vacation posting: re-posting a well-read post from December 2009
Mount Tabor, called in the Gospels “The Mount of Transfiguration,” is a little hill in Galilee. But it figures big in the history of Christian prayer. Jesus leads a few of his followers up the mountain. At the top, Jesus is suddenly transfigured, and is made radiant, clothes “dazzling white”. Moses appears. Elijah too. The great prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, engaged in conversation with Jesus. One of the followers, Peter, awed by the sight, suggests a building project. He wants to build three shrines to commemorate the moment. Just then a cloud envelopes the mountain. They are rendered blind and dumb, and then a voice comes, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” (Mark 9.2-8).
Here’s a metaphor for prayer. In prayer, we ascend the heights, our goal, a vision of God. But just when we think we’ve got it, darkness comes. Prayer is a dark path where we must give up all props and pretension, all assumptions and preconceptions. When we think we’ve got a view of God, all will go dark—for God cannot be seen (Exodus 33.23). See for yourself how often in Scripture the encounter with God is in the midst of a cloud (Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, the disciples with Jesus here on Mount Tabor, and again in Acts 1.9).
Peter’s response to his experience on the mountain of prayer was to say something, do something.
You’re tempted to do the same. You want all light and glitter. You want an experience you can take a picture of. Don’t. Sit in stillness until the impulse leaves you. Persevere when darkness comes. The truth is, you’re closer to God now than when all was light.
This practice, based upon the Mount Tabor story, is part of the hesychastic tradition of the Eastern Church. The Jesus Prayer is the chief “technology” for resting in God. Hesychia means “stillness” in Greek. It is the daring obedience of prayer that enters into the unknown, grasps at nothing, and seeks nothing but what the Holy Spirit gives by grace.
My gripe with the history of hesychasm is that the simple beauty and necessity of this prayer’s been essentially the experience of monks. But the Bible repeatedly summons us all into an encounter with God that is stillness, just God, nothing else, in order that we may find out who we really are in God’s presence, naked of our falsehoods. Trends in spirituality today show that contemporary people seek just this kind of experience, but they’re not finding it in the churches where prayer is wordy and busy and all too certain, despite the clear teaching of Jesus that we are to pray with very few words (Matthew 6.7), and in absolute humility, even emptiness.
After Christmas, I’ll begin to explore the Jesus Prayer in greater detail. Until then, prepare for your encounter with the prayer, by
- sitting in stillness for 5-15 minutes twice a day,
- watching your thoughts like leaves floating along a gentle brook.
- Neither follow them nor fight them.
- Rest in God.
Your heart: a shrine in the midst of the city
One reader explores her own awakening and longing to live in full communion with God. She's begun a solid practice and the practice of this interior prayer is carrying her deeper into this communion. She knows the beauty of simply sitting in God's presence, just being. But she wonders, "Is it possible for that peace to always be there?" I offer this as an answer . . .
That peace is always there. Jesus assures us that the kingdom, the reign or realm of God, is both coming and already among us. What's more, it is within us. So is it always there, within us and among us. The trick is to create such a well-worn path by our practice of prayer that we can quickly find the narrow gate to that inner world of eternity no matter where we are or what we're doing.
We will not always (or perhaps often) live in the bliss of that peace. We live a mixed life (both active and contemplative) and will find ourselves tilting one way or another during the day. But we carry the peace of God within us.
Imagine your heart as a little shrine in the midst of the city, often overlooked by the traffic on the street or sidewalk, mostly ignored by the busy and important people in offices and restaurants around it. But it is always there and you can enter it whenever you wish.
There are times you'll forget it and the narrow gate at its entrance will become overgrown and hidden. But when you awaken again and return to your practice, you can push through the ivy on the gate and clear the path again.
It's no use berating yourselves for forgetting the little shrine that's always so near, or fearing that you'll get too busy to enter it. You will. But you can always return. In fact, every distraction is another opportunity for you to return. And you'll find God always smiling, arms outstretched when you walk back through that gate and down the path.
The wonder of all this is that this shrine isn't out the door and down the street. It's as near as the beating of your heart. The peace of God is enshrined in your heart and goes with you wherever you may go.
The Modern barrier to prayer
Such talk of prayer is likely to awaken objections---
"How do I pray continually when my life is so full of obligations?"
"When I'm not doing the things I need to do to get through the day, I'm thinking about what I need to do. Prayer is often the last thing on my mind."
"As much as I desire intimacy with God, the call to prayer loads me with more guilt than inspiration. The prayers I utter are basically prayers for help---for myself and for others."
There's no getting around the truth that Jesus summons us to unbroken communion with God and that the Apostles taught this practice to the first Christians. Throughout history, there's also an unbroken line of praying people who've kept the practice alive, handing it down from one generation to the next. That it's foreign to us is an indication that the Modern world isn't very hospitable to interior experience, to mystery, and the mystic encounter with God that is above and beyond the heightened rationalism so characteristic of these last centuries.