So … 30 years ago when I was first being instructed in prayer as a member of a religious community (ie, a nun in a convent) I learned about meditation and contemplation. These were things we “did” when we were “doing” prayer.
My take on Evelyn Underhill’s Practical Mysticism, and now, what I have read so far from The Cloud of Unknowing, reminds me of much of what I was taught back then.
What is becoming more clear to me is that what we are attempting to accomplish through these ways of praying is what I would see as “mysticism”. In today’s jargon, I would use the phrase “direct knowing” of God. Or, the experience of God without an intermediary.
Now, I find this interesting. As a Roman Catholic (although no longer a nun), I have also been taught that the only way to God is through the church. So, already I am at odds with the church.
Whenever I read any Christian literature about mysticism, I am generally dismayed by the authors’ remarks that invariably refer to some right and wrong ways of contemplation. Inherent in writings such as Underhill and the “Cloud” is a message that this is “the way” to do something and that those outside of this “way” are somehow deemed as being unworthy or false.
After all these years, I have come to believe that we are all unique as individuals. As such, we will ALL have unique mystical experiences. The most any of us can do is to share with each other what OUR experiences have been fully in the knowledge that the others’ experience may be, indeed probably will be, different.
Perhaps one of the hallmark’s of true mystical experience is that the person experiencing it no longer needs outside confirmation or affirmation. I think it is part of our human nature to want to find others who have had similar experiences, but one who has experienced this “direct knowledge” of God “knows” they have had it, and in that knowing, comes to understand the impossibility of describing it to the other.
I also believe it is true, for very many reasons, that over the past decades, we have lost our sense of the mystical, and because of this, those of us who are mystics, do not find affirmation where we might hope for it the most …. in our churches.
I have heard other people comment on this point. It has been a long, difficult and painful journey for me to reach the point where I understand that I am not a leader, a mover and shaker in my church. In fact, I have learned that I pretty much exist on the periphery. Yet, I do believe that my existence is important to the life of the church. (They just might not see it that way!!)
It has been in Buddhist teachings (Tibetan, to be specific) that I have found my “path” even to my Christian God. I do resonate with the simplicity of the teaching and the total abandonment of all “things” … even of the use of a single word for meditation.
Ironically, as I bring this lengthy post to a close, I am going to say that I believe that the less said, the greater I believe the apparent truth to be.
For me …. my contemplative path is to enter into an experience of nothingness and there to find everything.
