The metaphor of the wilderness

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The desire for something deeper in life, for a meaning that seems to be elusive or absent, is a precious opportunity. It is an invitation to discover a purpose and an identity that is more than the stories we have told ourselves.

This is rarely a comfortable place to be. It often starts with a sense of absence and emptiness; of meaninglessness, anxiety or dread. All of this is a gift. This is where desire begins, in the absence of the beloved. The desire for God, the hollowness that cries out to be filled, is already the activity of the Spirit within us, refusing to be satisfied with distractions, and drawing us to itself. It is the Light itself, showing us our condition and planting the seeds of desire within us for a deeper and more expansive life.

When the possibility of a meaningful life feels most distant, when we suffer a sense of isolation from every possibility of goodness in the world, this may be the beginning of a process of inner transformation.

Craig Barnett, Seeking and being found

This less than comfortable place is effectively where I’ve been for the last five years or so, since during the recent pandemic I found myself on what Martin Laird once described as a “pathless path“. It seems to have taken that long for me to recognise the Spirit drawing me to itself.

It seems to be that when we are being drawn to a new layer of the spiritual life we have often – or so I’ve found myself – to be drawn out of the previous layer, into what is often described as the desert, on the far side of a river we had not even known we were about to cross. In the opening chapter of her recent book Sarah Bessey writes,

I’ve loved the metaphor of the wilderness for many years now. It just seems to fit with what I understand of the world and my place in it. If the city is a metaphor for certainty and belonging, then the wilderness is for our questions and our truth.

Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith,  p.3

Clearly for me at least this has proved the only true place to begin. Unless everything is questioned, how can we be open to the breaking in of something we could not have thought of?

But a month ago, on an unexpected visit to Newcastle Cathedral, I stumbled on a celebration of the Eucharist in a side chapel, at the precise moment of the Prayer of Consecration. Looking up at one of the high windows, it took a moment for me to realise where I was; and as I did so, I became aware of what I can only describe as a field of some intense kind of magnetism, as deep and as fundamental as the gravity holding me to the tiled floor. Later in the same book, Sarah Bessey describes an almost analogous experience:

But as I went forward on that evening, while the community was singing, the woman who was offering bread and wine in my corner of the church quietly tucked the bread into my open palm and said to me, “This is the Body of Christ, given to you, Sarah.” I closed my fingers around the hunk of bread and raised it toward the cup that was being held by her partner, who said, “This is the blood of Christ, poured out for you, Sarah.” I dipped the bread into the wine and popped it into my mouth.

The bread, weighted with wine, sat on my tongue. I pressed it against the roof of my mouth and my knees buckled involuntarily. I quickly walked over to my chair in the front row and collapsed into it. I chewed and swallowed, suddenly aware of every taste, every reality of it, tears running down my face.

It felt like the line of time collapsed a bit, as if all that was and is and will be was present there. In that moment of tasting, something in my soul illuminated that I haven’t been able to articulate even now, years later, about the welcome and faithfulness of Love for all of us hungry and thirsty ones.

ibid., pp.212-214

Since then I seem to have arrived, against all expectations, back home. There is no arguing with it. I am simply on the other side of that river I had not expected to cross again, and I am home.

If we are to speak of God

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If we are to speak of God as he is, then, we need to check what we say as often as possible against the touchstone of our experience of living towards holy encounter… God in Godself is beyond not just our language but our minds. We, who stand under God, don’t have the kind of perspective that would allow us to understand God…

In the same way, if you think about individual words and how we know what they mean, you’ll see that they work by dividing reality up into identifiable bits. Definitions enable us to home in on the right bit of reality – so that we can distinguish between a chair and a bed, for example, or between nutritious plants and poisonous ones. Words are a little bit like the machines that slice salami: they cut up reality into digestible chunks. But God isn’t a ‘bit of reality’. God is the source of the whole thing. So it’s not surprising that words won’t quite work properly when it comes to God.

JP Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality

We cannot go on referring to God as though God were something we had thought up, an optional extra to a real life lived among real things. God is not like that, not even remotely. God is no thing – no thing at all, but the open ground in which what is comes to be.. God is far beyond things, and in him all things live and move and have their being. (Acts 17:28)

But how does this realisation work? For a long time now I have been skirting the wilderness – since the recent pandemic, really. I have defended myself against the wilderness with too many words; and it is in the wilderness that God waits, and always has done. Sarah Bessey: “There isn’t anywhere you’ve been and there isn’t anywhere you’re going where you’re not at home in God’s love. The wilderness is home to God, even the wilderness inside you. Your life is already a place where God is quite at home.” (Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith, p.64)

To stand still in love, not in understanding – I’m coming to realise after all this time that that is the only opening to grace. What we are is too fragile, too malleable to do otherwise. As TS Eliot wrote in ‘Burnt Norton’, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” It is only in admitting my own unknowing that I can listen intently enough into the silence to hear the approach of grace.

Acceptance and integration

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I have written much here about acceptance – including particularly Tara Brach’s concept of radical acceptance – and it seems to me one of the keystones of any contemplative practice. To accept the circumstances of our life, the time and place of our birth, our age and our state of health, the changing seasons… this is a way of being that underlies whatever peace and stillness we uncover.

Integration, the goal of so much psychotherapeutic theory and practice – most obviously in the Jungian tradition – is the core process of individuation, where hidden, unconscious parts of the mind – the shadow, the anima or animus, repressed or concealed complexes – are brought into conscious awareness to create a unified, whole self: the endpoint of healing.

Acceptance is key to integration, also: it is not possible to bring into open awareness these intensely charged unconscious materials without acceptance. To accept oneself, all of oneself, as at its heart given (see Martin Heidegger’s Geworfenheit for instance) is the beginning of our inner work, and its fruit.

All that we are is given to us, in its iridescent, changing beauty. The necessity of what is remains, but it is in a sense a contingent necessity. Our response is ours to make: to remain still and watch is the beginning of radical acceptance – Heidegger’s Gelassenheit if you will – and a fundamental surrender to isness itself. In hesychasm the principle of synergia – the cooperative working together of free will and grace – is perhaps the deepest human level of integration.

To sit still, just that, is the beginning and the end of practice. There is nothing else to do, nothing else is needed. The ground opens in this moment: there is nothing else, nowhere else to go.

Grace?

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Grace? But wouldn’t it be simpler just to call these experiences [of unsought peace and illumination] moments of grace? For that is what they are, aren’t they—times when God suddenly touches our lives with his blessing and renews us from the center of his own bottomless abundance?

Well, yes, that is quite true. Grace and mystical hope are close synonyms, and the outward effects are virtually identical. A person under the sway of grace and a person connected to the flow of mystical hope will display the same qualities of joy, gratitude, and a lightness and fullness of being even in the face of apparent reversal and defeat. Outwardly, they are dead ringers for each other, and even inwardly I believe they resonate with the same experience.

But words also have connotations, and this is why I make the distinction between grace and hope. For over the theological centuries calling an experience “grace”… has come to connote something extraordinary and uncharacteristic: an infusion of divine sustenance into our lives as a special gift from God, given with God’s own timing and discretion. Such a notion is consistent with the traditional theological viewpoint, where it seems that the first priority has always been to affirm the sovereign freedom of God and God’s role as sole initiator. Using the term “grace” tends to lock us back into those traditional categories and allows us to go sailing right by the distinction I really want to highlight.

For in overemphasizing this divine freedom it is all too easy to understate and miss that hope is not intended to be an extraordinary infusion, but an abiding state of being. We lose sight of the invitation—and in fact, our responsibility, as stewards of creation—to develop a conscious and permanent connection to this wellspring. We miss the call to become a vessel, to become a chalice into which this divine energy can pour; a lamp through which it can shine.

But what if we are intended to become this vessel, this body of hope? What if, in fact, this effervescent, “lightness-of-being” energy is the fuel that drives our human life toward its divine fulfillment? What if our insistence on treating it as a rare and exceptional phenomenon is a way of ducking the invitation that was permanently extended [John 4:1-42] at the Samarian well that blazing midday?

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope, p.16

I have often stumbled over this word grace myself. There is so undeniable a sense of givenness about so much of the inner life that it is hard to evade the expression. We may practice faithfully for weeks, years, and yet illumination comes unsought, unexpected, often at what on the face of it might seem to be the most unpropitious of times. We may be overwhelmed with loss, with grief and regret, and suddenly the sky will open and we are flooded with peace and acceptance like a shaft of unimaginable sunlight.

What is happening here? Of course it is tempting on the one hand to turn to theories of the bicameral mind, or of the collective unconscious, or on the other to conventional theological formulations of “[s]aving grace [as] the free and unmerited operation of God’s person and presence… initiat[ing] the spiritual life of God’s people” (The Gospel Coalition). But neither extreme seems even to begin to reflect the wonderful lightness of being, the openness and clarity, the sheer sense of gift that comes so unexpectedly, so seemingly undeservedly. There is a profound mystery here, in the true sense of the term.

You may have noticed that [these] experiences have one thing in common: they all catapult us out of ego-centered consciousness. Those who come back 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.

Ibid. p.47

One thing that all Bourgeault’s examples have in common with my own is this inherent quality of wordlessness. Of course in order to know something conceptually we must use words, if only to ourselves, and so these experiences of grace are clouded over with unknowing. And yet it is only in surrendering to not knowing that we can receive them – which may be why they are so often received in extremis. “Ego-centered consciousness” is mediated by thought, and thought by words; defeat words, and thought drops away from itself. What is left is silence.

I think this wordless silence is itself the back staircase; and there is an argument to be made that all forms of contemplative practice – and, phenomenologically, such things as near death experiences – are no more, at the very bottom, than means of silence. The heart yearns for silence, especially in the depths of its passions; at the end of all things there is silence, and it is out of silence that all things come to be. Silence is the utter want of naming, of distinctions; it is no thing, but it is given to us as our only home at the end of all we know.

Being present to death

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Now is the only moment we will ever know. Our memories of the past are experiences in the present. So are our thoughts about the future. So when we talk about not being present, we mean our attention is not on the present moment. It is focused on thoughts about the past or future.

We can be present in three ways. First, we can live for today, not worrying about yesterday or about what tomorrow may bring…

A second way, common to many meditation practices, is being aware of our current experience. Whereas most of our thoughts are about the past or the future, our sensory experience is always “now.” This is why basic meditation techniques often focus the attention on the body — the heartbeat, the breath, or some other sensation. The feelings in the body are always in the present.

And there is a third way of being present that can develop from this: being present to how it is to be present — not so much noticing your experience of the moment but noticing how it feels to be in the moment…

Savoring how it actually feels to be present motivates us to return here more often. As we do, the familiar, delightful feeling of being here now becomes a beacon drawing us home.

Peter Russell, Letting Go of Nothing

Death, it seems to me, is not a mishap or some kind of failure; it is as much a part of what we are as birth or love. It is not a horror to be evaded at the cost of our health, our happiness, our kindness; it is, as Hamlet half-suspected, really a consummation devoutly (but not impatiently) to be wished – a consolation for all ills, a reward for patience and a gentle homecoming at the close of day. It is a gift to be received alertly and with grace.

One of the blessings of growing old may be that it is harder by the day to forget that death is common to us all, without exception. Being present to one’s own death – whether in prospect or in actuality – may be perhaps the greatest liberation available to us.

In being present, though, one must as Russell says be present to presence itself – only so, I’ve found, is it even possible to know death for what it is, our oldest friend.

What is this light?

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In the west today, we are very interested in what consciousness (our field of awareness) can reveal when focused on the external world. For instance, if we focus our awareness on plants we can build a system of botany, and if we focus it on rocks we can build a system of geology. But mystics of all traditions have been interested in what we might call the nature of consciousness itself. What is this light inside our heads that the philosopher Colin McGinn has called the “mysterious flame?” In the same way that we acknowledge an external world to be explored, mystics have recognized an internal wilderness, also to be explored—and with rich reward…

To use an analogy, in the west we’ve traditionally or habitually assumed that consciousness operates like a standard light switch on the wall; it can be turned either on or off, and so we are awake during the day and “off” during the night. However, in the mystical traditions, it’s believed that consciousness can vary greatly, functioning more like a dimmer switch; that is, the “light” of our consciousness can be turned “on” but it can also be turned “up,” increasing its luminosity.

Dana Sawyer, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded: A Guide for the Mystically Inclined, pp.28-29

Despite a blossoming in recent years of academic research and discussion (Daniel Dennett, Anil Seth, Susan Blackmore, Phillip Goff, David Chalmers and many others) consciousness remains a difficult field to study:

What is consciousness? This may sound like a simple question but it is not. Consciousness is at once the most obvious and the most difficult thing we can investigate. We seem either to have to use consciousness to investigate itself, which is a slightly weird idea, or to have to extricate ourselves from the very thing we want to study. No wonder philosophers have struggled for millennia with the concept; and for long periods scientists refused even to study it. The good news is that, in the 21st century, ‘consciousness studies’ is thriving. Psychology, biology, and neuroscience have reached the point where they are ready to confront some tricky questions: What does consciousness do? Could we have evolved without it? Is consciousness an illusion? What do we mean by consciousness, anyway?

This does not mean that the mystery has gone away. Indeed, it is as deep as ever. The difference now is that we know enough about the brain to confront the problem head on. How on earth can the electrical firing of millions of tiny brain cells produce this—my private, subjective, conscious experience?

Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, p.1

The weird idea of using consciousness to investigate itself is precisely what I have been up to for most of my life, despite being distracted by the need to earn a living, and confused by the persistent claims of religion to have a corner on the field. As Blackmore herself knows (see her delightful Zen and the Art of Consciousness) what might broadly be called mystical experience is precisely this: the direct encounter of mind itself with mind itself.

It won’t have escaped my readers that this is also a decent definition of phenomenology; Martin Heidegger, following his mentor Edmund Husserl, makes this quite clear, as does, especially, Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

Consciousness is not behind the body—it is in the body. This is Merleau-Ponty’s radical idea: To perceive is already to act. To act is already to understand. This destroys the mind/body divide far more thoroughly than Descartes ever anticipated.

Robert Flix, Merleau-Ponty in Plain English: Understanding Perception, Embodiment, and Experience, p.75

The point here is one that contemplatives of all traditions would recognise: mind and body, body and being, are a unified field. What occurs in one occurs in the others – not that they are “others” – and primary awareness holds the field just as it is, without the fragmentation to which our everyday mind has become so accustomed.

Contemplative practice – of whatever kind, it seems to me – acknowledges this unity as axiomatic, somehow. We sit, we breathe, we are aware of sounds and of our own weight, and our direct awareness of this awareness allows us to step from observer to observed and back in one epoché in which the distinction collapses into illumination. As Eve Baker puts it so clearly in her own slightly different context:

The solitary is the bearer of the future, of that which is not yet born, of the mystery which lies beyond the circle of lamplight or the edge of the known world. There are some who make raids into this unknown world of mystery and who come back bearing artefacts. These are the creative artists, the poets who offer us their vision of the mystery…

But there are also those who make solitude their home, who travel further into the inner desert, from which they bring back few artefacts. These are the contemplatives, those who are drawn into the heart of the mystery. Contemplatives have no function and no ministry. They are in [that] world as a fish is in the sea, to use Catherine of Siena’s phrase, as part of the mystery. That they are necessary is proved by the fact that they exist in all religious traditions. Contemplatives are not as a rule called to activity, they are useless people and therefore little understood in a world that measures everything by utility and cash value. Unlike the poet they do not return bearing artefacts, but remain in the desert, pointing to the mystery, drawing others in.

Paths in Solitude, pp.10-11

The paradox of active surrender

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“It is the first thing any one has to learn in order to live,” Henry Miller wrote in comparing the art of living to dance, driven by rhythm into which the dancer must relax. “It is extremely difficult, because it means surrender, full surrender.” Surrender, it turns out, is an essential part of testing the limits, which is in turn an essential part of transcending them — in other words, the raw material of creative breakthroughs. But the beautiful term that Jeanette Winterson used to describe the experience of letting art transform us — “the paradox of active surrender” — applies just as aptly to the art of living itself: Paradoxical as it may sound, to stop resisting that which we cannot control is the only choice we have, but it is also one we must actively make in order to transcend our limits.

Maria Popova

“The paradox of active surrender” might almost be another name for the contemplative life itself. The conscious state of illumination (often referred to by Catholic writers as “contemplation” or “infused contemplation” – a different usage to “contemplative practice” as I employ the phrase here) is a gift. It cannot be achieved. It seems to me that intent needs simply to disappear in the practice of contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. But nevertheless the absence of intent, replaced with a simple dwelling in the presence of what is, now, is the only sure way I know of becoming vulnerable and available to awakening, to open objectless awareness.

And yet surrender cannot help but be active in this context: one must intend to sit down, to be still – to surrender – even while one is relinquishing intent itself. The only response to such a paradox is simply unknowing: the embrace, the lingering, longing embrace, of what cannot be known, and yet is.

We do not see our hearts

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There are situations when one owes solitude to other people, if only not to bother them. But more than this, the multitude needs solitaries as it needs postmen, doctors and fishermen. They go out and they send, or bring, something back—even if they send no word and vanish finally from sight. The solitary is as necessary to our common sanity as wilderness, as the forest where no one goes, as the waterfall in a canyon, which no one has ever seen or heard. We do not see our hearts. I do not expect to be all that solitary for, as a paradoxical person, I am also gregarious and favour the rhythm of withdrawal and return. But in the mountain, I watch the Tao, the way of nonhuman nature (if there is really any such thing) and feel myself into it to discover that I was never outside because nature ‘peoples’ just as much as it ‘forests’.

Alan Watts, from Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

It’s true – we do not see our hearts in the shadow of what we take to be ourselves. The end of our unknowing is the open ground itself; and that we cannot know, since it is no thing.

It seems an almost unbearable paradox that society should need solitaires just as it needs other tradespeople, and yet Watts is right. Somehow I have known this in the depths of my heart for most of my life, though most of the time I haven’t dared believe it, or it I have, I’ve allowed it to be concealed behind doctrine and religious explication. The call to this life of Einsamkeit is as real as any other, only we don’t like to talk about it. (We don’t like to talk about death either, the two things being more closely related than we think.)

Perhaps it’s just as well that the vocation of Einsiedler is not better known, since societies have a way of misunderstanding those whose paths lie outside the highways of commerce and politics. After all, it is not by being known that we can serve our fellow people, but by being unknown: hidden mycorrhiza in the soil of community. Julian of Norwich lived out her life as an anchoress, her life of prayer and solitude embedded in the city of her birth.

Books like Watts’ and blog posts like this one notwithstanding, all we need to do is to keep still and listen. What we may hear will be all our gift.

Part of the mystery

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The solitary is the bearer of the future, of that which is not yet born, of the mystery which lies beyond the circle of lamplight or the edge of the known world. There are some who make raids into this unknown world of mystery and who come back bearing artefacts. These are the creative artists, the poets who offer us their vision of the mystery… But there are also those who make solitude their home, who travel further into the inner desert, from which they bring back few artefacts. These are the contemplatives, those who are drawn into the heart of the mystery. Contemplatives have no function and no ministry. They are in [that] world as a fish is in the sea, to use Catherine of Siena’s phrase, as part of the mystery. That they are necessary is proved by the fact that they exist in all religious traditions. Contemplatives are not as a rule called to activity, they are useless people and therefore little understood in a world that measures everything by utility and cash value. Unlike the poet they do not return bearing artefacts, but remain in the desert, pointing to the mystery, drawing others in.

Eve Baker, Paths in Solitude, pp.10-11

As Steve Taylor writes: “However, awakened people travel lightly and transition easily. They perceive their existence as part of a vast network of being that will continue to flourish without them. They feel that they share their identity with the whole of the network, that something inside them is part of everything else.” The contemplative life is not a one-way relationship, as so often imagined by religious dogma. Sitting still, we find ourselves part of the unknowable ground as waves are part of the ocean: not other, and yet not exactly one with.

To live as part of the mystery, fully aware of our partial and temporary nature, might seem from an observer’s point of view a kind of death. In fact it is in truth a kind of death. The notion of ourselves as finite, detachable entities cannot live long in the desert. That is why we go there, into the desert of the heart. As Eve Baker puts it (ibid.), “The desert to which the solitary is called is not a place, but something that must be there below the surface of ordinary human existence. It is nowhere, a place of thirst…”

So much of this life is apophatic: we find ourselves in a trackless land, unknowing; what we are is no thing: in that we are part of the ground itself, nothing more. What else could we long for?

Small things

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I feel like I’ve written about the idea that God does not coerce but instead lures us toward greater justice, beauty, and etc a few times already. So rather than focus on this, or indeed the relational nature of the text [Matthew 10:40-42], I want to point out that process thought insists that every small thing is important.

In fact there are no ‘big things’ really – only collections of ‘small things’.

Everything is made up of cells, cells are made of atoms, atoms are made of sub-atomic particles which are sites of movement and energy. Solid things are largely made up of energy. Solidity itself is something of an illusion.

So yes, the reality we experience around us is, largely, an illusion. That ‘tree’ you can see over there is actually mainly energy, it is also a large group of small things, working together to be a tree. In that sense a ‘tree’ is a ‘society’, or even a ‘society of societies’ – we just think of it as an individual thing because that’s how it looks to us. In reality it’s nothing of the sort. And of course, the same is true of you, and the same is true of me. We are very complex, very sophisticated, societies. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman put it. Apart from anything else, you currently contain something like a kilogram of bacteria in your internal organs. Good luck living without them.

So here we are encouraged not to despise ‘the day of small things’ – even the smallest act of care has a real impact. Offering someone a glass of water is not ‘just’ symbolic of an alignment with their cause, it’s also a real piece of participation in the constantly evolving web of relations.

It’s part of that idea: “for the want of the nail the shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe the horse was lost, for the want of a horse the battle was lost…” The smallest things, the most insignificant things, have real importance.

So here the writer imagines a network of households choosing to offer welcome to emissaries of Jesus, small things, vulnerable things. Moment by moment choices that shape the future. Depending on how you look at it, that’s either a deeply encouraging idea, or a terrifying one.

Simon J Cross

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated with small things – the spray of stamens on a Rose-of-Sharon, a harvestman resting spread-eagled on a brick wall beneath a windowsill, the tiny black bristles at the corner of a sparrow’s bill – these have seemed to me more precious, more freighted with meaning, than the ambitions of men.

The reality of things is relationship. Nothing can be without other things; that there are things at all depends on their relations one with another; depends, ultimately, on the ground of being itself.

TAO engenders One,
One engenders Two,
Two engenders Three,
Three engenders the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things carry shade
And embrace sunlight.
Shade and sunlight, yin and yang,
Breath blending into harmony.

Laozi, Tao te Ching, tr. Addiss and Lombardo, ch.42

Thought cannot embrace the quantum fields in which things consist: theoretical physics can learn about them to some degree, but to know reality at its fundamental level is impossible for the rational mind. Unknowing, remaining still, we can perhaps touch the skirts of this unseen world. All that is, we are; in the quiet, that we can know as we know a lover’s breathing. In the quiet, we can come home to that.