The Big Book of Christian Mysticism: The Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality

by Carl McColman

  The second lesson in the Zen story is perhaps even more important. The roshi is, in effect, cautioning his student against expectations that the spiritual life will quickly or automatically change him in radical or remarkable ways. While Christian spirituality may not use the language of enlightenment in the same way the Buddhists do, the parallel is clear. Before I fell in love with God, I washed the dishes and folded the laundry. After I fell in love with God, I washed the dishes and folded the laundry. Before I experienced a call to the life of contemplation, I lived an ordinary life and after receiving that call, my life remains as down-to-earth as ever.

  A daily practice of lectio divina, prayer, and contemplation can, in subtle ways and over time, change your attitude toward life, help you see the evidence of the Holy Spirit in the most unlikely places, and even propel you, when you least expect it, into moments of profound joy even ecstasy. There can be moments when everything falls away and you taste the sweetness of union with God. But daily Christian spiritual practice will also take you through periods of boredom, restlessness, and questioning: "Why am I doing this every day? It seems so meaningless." God, in his wisdom, can give you the gift of feeling his absence just as easily as the gift of feeling his presence. Anyone who is serious about exploring the Christian mysteries will, sooner or later, receive both of these gifts.

  Aspiring mystics and spiritual seekers place such a strong emphasis on the need for direct, personal experience with God that we run the risk of rejecting mere faith as somehow second-rate. People who merely believe in God without actually having experiences of his presence are somehow missing out, or so we think. But perhaps we're missing an important detail: in our quest for spiritual experience, perhaps we have traded "belief in God" for "belief in experience." In the words of the French mystic Francis de Sales, "There is a great difference between being occupied with God, who gives us the contentment, and being busied with the contentment which Gods give us."42

  The longer I study the wisdom of the Christian mystics, practice the disciplines of the Christian life, and compare notes with my brothers and sisters in Christ who are journeying along this path with me, the more convinced I am that experience is only part of the mystical story. When meditation and contemplation lead to the cloud of unknowing, perhaps this points to the fact that God loves you enough to shield you from mystical experiences, most if not almost all of the time. In fact, a mystical relationship with God would soon implode if you were shouldered with the burden of continual, or even regular, experiences of ecstasy.

  This is not to say that you must go through life with no sense of God's love or presence or activity in your life. Rather, I think the hidden point behind the Zen story is that, while, on the one hand, nothing changes as a result of embracing the mystical life, on the other, everything changes.You do the same chores, perform the same tasks, enjoy the same pleasures, and struggle against the same sins. And yet, you do all of this in the light of your disciplined commitment to seek intimacy with God. It is a light that subtly informs who you are, regardless of whether you are bored or energized by your spiritual exercises on any given day. And the light of your daily practice is the light by which you can see, if not the face of God, then at least the subtle traces of his presence in your life and in your soul.

  Five hundred years before Christ, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said: "You cannot step into the same river twice." This koan-like insight into the impermanence of existence can serve as a clue to the question of how to live a truly contemplative life. "See, I am making all things new," promises Jesus toward the end of the NewTestament (Revelation 21:5). If we take him at his word, then we can never step into the same river twice because of the bracing action of God in the universe, creating new possibilities and new realities every moment of our lives. What this means, of course, is that, even on days when you can barely stand the thought of slogging through a half-hour of meditative Bible reading, and praying to God about the boring details of your life, and sitting in silence that feels like little more than a continual struggle against your incessant mental chatter even on those less-than-exciting days, God is present, hidden in the mystery of your own inability to see, your own willful refusal to see, your own need to be ordinary and restless rather than ecstatic and joyful. And every moment may be the one in which, suddenly, the scales fall from your eyes and the tiniest and most undramatic things in your life become radiant and luminous with the presence of divine love. Living a contemplative life means, in large measure, living in continual expectancy of receiving an unexpected kiss from God on good days as well as bad.

  HUMBLE WISDOM FROM AN ANCIENT GUIDE

  One of the wisest guides for living a Christ-centered life is Benedict of Nursia, the monk whose Rule for Monasteries became the standard for governing monastic communities in the Western church. Even though most Christians today would never even think about living in a monastery, Benedict's rule is surprisingly adaptable to life "in the world," largely because of the common-sense advice that lies beneath the specific instructions for managing an intentional community of monks.

  At first glance, Benedict's writing can strike the reader as surprisingly unspiritual in its focus. He comes across as mostly concerned with mundane issues like how the community is organized and which Psalms will be prayed each day. He seems unconcerned with questions like how to pray, how to meditate, or how to contemplate. Benedict is utterly downto-earth and his writing reflects this. And Benedictine monasticism has been shaped by his "chop wood, carry water" approach to spirituality ever since. Indeed, the motto of Benedictine spirituality is Ora et Labora, which means "pray and work."

  The utter simplicity of this motto corresponds beautifully to the two great commandments of Jesus, commandments we first considered in Chapter 11 (Matthew 22:37-40):

  Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.

  Love your neighbor as yourself.

  The first commandment calls us to prayer; for, as we have seen, prayer is the heart of fostering or deepening a loving relationship with God. The second calls us to work; because, as the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran said, "work is love made visible."We work because we love. And we love because it is essential to a truly spiritual life.

  Out of the love you seek to share with God comes the call to live a truly spiritual and contemplative life, a life that, in turn, can foster within you the splendor of mystical consciousness. Likewise, it is through the love you seek to share with your neighbors that you have the opportunity to anchor that contemplative spirituality in the most humble, down-to-earth, and ordinary of ways by embracing the effort required to truly serve and care for one another, no matter how laborious, tedious, or exhausting that work may be.

  The Christian mystics understood that you cannot separate the commandment to love God from the commandment to love others. To live a contemplative life, you cannot ignore either one of the two great directives. Although some may orient their lives more toward one than the other there will always be deep contemplatives as well as social activists even if you do, you are still bound to observe both in some way. In other words, you cannot truly love your neighbor as yourself unless you are fully grounded in the love of God. And you cannot fully experience the love of God unless you are engaged in loving your neighbors. Perhaps we need to love our neighbors in order to recognize God's love in our life, as it is only through God's love that we are able to love our neighbors at all. Richard Rohr sums it up nicely in his book The Naked Now: "When you honor and accept the divine image within yourself, you cannot help but see it in everybody else, too, and you know it is just as undeserved and unmerited as it is in you. That is why you stop judging, and that is how you start loving unconditionally and without asking whether someone is worthy or not.i43

  So the life of a Christian mystic is the life of love and, therefore, the life of work whether that's exciting and creative work, or dull and repetitive work. The daily chores you face in order to keep your lif
e and your relationships in good order are all at the heart of the call to a truly spiritual life.

  AFTER EACH DAY COMES THE NIGHT

  When we talk about the role of ordinary labor as part of the spiritual life, it's important to see this in perspective. Work is part of the normal rhythm of being alive, alongside the human need for rest, relaxation, recreation, connection with others, the pursuit of leisure or hobbies and, of course, time devoted to spiritual endeavors like lectio divina, contemplation, and participation in a faith community. In a similar way, the life of prayer involves a rhythm of those times when God is felt keenly to be present, or close, or even united with us, balanced against those times when God is known to us only in terms of absence, or distance, or simply silence.

  Larger rhythms are at work in the Christian spiritual life as well rhythms that unfold over time. Two of the most powerful metaphors used by mystics over time are the cloud and the dark night. The cloud, as immortalized in The Cloud of Unknowing, envelops you with mist and fog and renders all of your attempts to "know" God (in a mental, cognitive sense) ultimately useless. Meanwhile, the dark night, as explained by John of the Cross, can visit you more than once. John distinguishes between a dark night of the senses, in which you are called to surrender inordinate attachments to the things of this world in order to love God more fully, and the far more terrifying dark night of the soul, in which even the pleasure you take in spiritual and religious experience must ultimately be surrendered. For, to love God fully, you must let go of even the "things of God" (religious or spiritual experiences), or you fall into the trap of loving the pleasure you take in God rather than loving God for God alone.

  The images of darkness, night, and the cloud can be depressing if not terrifying, and they are easily misunderstood. The cloud of unknowing is not an excuse to retreat into some sort of infantile, anti-intellectual religious sentimentalism or romanticism, where you refuse to wrestle with the challenges of faith "because there's no way I'll ever figure it all out anyway." The commandment to love God with all your mind still stands, even once you enter the cloud of unknowing. The cloud is simply a humbling reminder that the keenest mind will still ultimately fail before the profound silence of the Ultimate Mystery.

  Likewise, the dark night of the senses is not a directive to hate the things of this world. Much misery has come out of dualism -a false interpretation of the gospel that suggests that, to be truly spiritual, you must renounce, reject, and even hate your body, your sexuality, and the material pleasures of earthly existence. This kind of dualism is particularly pernicious because it is shot through with sexism. The same logic that deems the human body and sexuality to be evil also regards women as inherently inferior to men, since men are more "spiritual" and women more "carnal."

  The purpose of the dark night of the senses is to teach you a light, nonattached relationship to your own "bodiliness" and materiality, to enjoy the good gifts that God has given you without fusing your identity with them or thinking that your happiness is bound up with your material well-being. When you are nonattached from material things, you are in a better position to share your resources with those in need, or to roll with life's punches as you experience the losses that, sooner or later, we all face financial setbacks, loss of loved ones, loss of health. When God, rather than something material, is your center, you are empowered to suffer life's challenges with grace and at least a degree of serenity. With God at your center, your task is not to reject all other things and relationships, but to love and care for God's creation in a manner consistent with living a God-centered life. If, however, you make the mistake of rejecting all that is "not God," you run the risk of choosing a life of hatred, which, in turn, leads directly to hell.

  Finally, the dark night of the soul, which strips away anything that comes between you and God even religious or spiritual experience can be a temptation to abandon faith or let go of participation in Christian community. The joy formerly found in the sacraments or in public worship, the pleasure of reading the scripture or other sacred writings, even the joy of contemplation itself is slowly replaced with a profound, wordless, imageless, feeling-transcending trust in God and God alone. In the midst of the dark night, you may be tempted to think that the Christian tradition itself has lost all purpose and meaning, and that the community of faith is no longer important, especially if your community of faith is not particularly sensitive to the wisdom of Christian mysticism. When you begin this descent into the darkness, however, is precisely when you need your grounding in others the most, even if those relationships bring you nothing more than a sense of boredom and ennui.

  The experiences of darkness, of the cloud, of unknowing, of radical letting-go may tempt you to abandon the spiritual journey to retreat into cynicism, into despair, or into ego-driven fantasy. The best safeguard against this derailing of your spiritual journey is continual prayer. Trust in God, even when it feels as if you're barely hanging on, and rely on the love, support, and guidance of others your spiritual friend(s) and/or director, and your larger community of faith. Dark-night experiences may seem to be episodes of depression, so be careful, when you enter the darkness, to discern whether the sense of profound loss and sadness you are feeling needs psychological care or spiritual support. Sometimes, it may require both.

  The journey of a maturing spiritual life has many seasons and nuanced changes. No matter how deeply we fall in love with God, we never stop being embodied human beings with material needs and earthly concerns not, at least, on this side of death. Each stage of life childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, midlife, and old age carries its own set of spiritual issues and life concerns. A young person's need to establish a sense of self differs considerably from a retiree's quest to find grace and humility in facing the limitations of age and the need to provide a legacy to the next generation. Our gender, our experience with addiction or illness, our ethnicity and level of education and socioeconomic status all these factors contribute to the unique flavor of our own dance with God. As you persevere on the long road to faithful love of God, you will experience both joy and sadness, both breathtaking moments of God's felt presence and the, alas, all more common feelings of God's silence or absence. Times of confident growth and peaceful contentment give way to seasons of loss or unknowing. But through all of life's changes and uncertainties, when you balance the quest for the love of God with a commitment to love your neighbors as yourself, you anchor yourself in the resources and support systems necessary to live the spiritual life well.

  CHANGING WATER INTO WINE

  I began this chapter with a Zen story. Let's end it with a Christian tale that comes from the second chapter of the Gospel of John:

  On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother ofJesus said to him, "They have no wine."And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come."His mother said to the servants, `Do whatever he tells you."Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purcation, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, "Fill the jars with water."And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, "Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward." So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now."Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him (John 2:1-11).

  Even if we ignore the miracle at the center of this story, it relates a marvelously human tale. Jesus responds irritably when his mother prods him to help out, and we catch a glimpse of the kind of behind-the-scenes action that takes place at just about any party or social event. Jesus
, one of the guests, takes on the role of servant, following his mother's suggestion that he do something to make an ordinary day extraordinary. A miracle occurs, but it slips by when the steward suggests to the groom merely that there's been a mix-up with the wine.

  This story can remind us that, whenever we talk about the "nighttime" dimension of mystical spirituality, we ought to keep in mind that, following every night, comes a new dawn. This, then, is the other side of"chop wood, carry water." Living the contemplative life is also all about changing water into wine. While the exercises of the contemplative life cannot guarantee anyone any kind of supernatural or extraordinary encounters with God, for those who are willing to see the possibilities within them, they can help us to see all of life in an entirely new way. And so we arrive at yet another paradox: Become a contemplative, and nothing will change; become a contemplative, and everything changes.

  The dark-night experience whether of the senses or of the soul transforms you as certainly as Jesus changed the water into wine. The night never lasts forever, and it yields to a new dawn, a new day in which everything is changed. When you accept the boredom and confusion, the pain and letting-go that lies at the heart of the dark night, you are, in effect, yielding to the possibility that God is working something wondrous within you. And in accepting the possibility of deep transformation, you choose to embrace the promise of the new dawn.

  Like chopping wood and carrying water, however, changing water into wine is not a one-time event. Nothing in the Christian tradition will encourage you to believe that if you, say, spent a year or two in daily prayer and contemplation, then you'll wake up one morning to see everything glowing with an unearthly light because you have been totally and permanently enlightened. What is far more likely to happen after two years of prayer is that you'll wake up one morning with your heart aching for God more than ever before, along with an increasing desire to serve your neighbors, particularly those in the greatest of need.