5/21/22

A thought on my walk home today while listening to "A Coaching Session on Centering Prayer." The gifts or presence of God in relation to contemplative prayer = the immanence of the unconditioned in the here and now, permeating the present and our experience. To "receive" this gift requires letting go, an absence of striving combined with the stillness of mindfulness. You can't condition or create the unconditioned or even the experience of it, but you can condition an end to conditioning, thereby opening up to the experience of the unconditioned already present and hidden in plain sight. Hence, as the Tao Te Ching says, the unwanting soul sees the hidden. There's a level of reality that's intellectually unknowable to us, and we must paradoxically submit to the unknown, rest in it, become one with it. In some sense, we're powerless because there's a limit to our agency, to what we can will and achieve in this world. And the lesson for us to somehow learn is that, to achieve a glimpse of ultimate reality, we must set aside all desires and grasping and acts of will, and in the midst of that silent awareness free from our normal experience of space and time and sense of self, we can touch the deathless and become liberated. The unknown is thus known, not through our intellect or striving or act of will, but through a direct experience of divine emptiness in the depths of our heart. Something quite difficult yet effortless to achieve. Coincidentally, this also seems to be a topic on Richard Rohr's mind lately. For example, from his daily reflection on 5/17/22, he writes:

The desert elders would sink deeply and continually into what they called the “prayer of quiet.” This type of prayer is called apophatic prayer. It does not employ words. Apophatic prayer involves a mindful and relinquishing disposition in the process of communing with God. This contemplative method of praying does not use images, requests, intercessions, and rituals. It involves the quieting of one’s spirit and the settling into the essence of being, which allows one to be found in the presence of God.

Many of us in Western context and cultures are accustomed to only word-based praying. We understand God mainly through an acquisition of knowledge that affirms what and who God is. This is the kataphatic way of knowing God. This is the first way we begin to know God (or anything, for that matter): with definitions, descriptions, concepts, categories, images, and words. After some development, we understand more fully that God is transcendent, uncontainable. We may notice that God shatters any box of mental understanding we have been misusing. Then we may come to a place that points beyond conceptions so that we may start to discover what God is not and allow room for what we can hardly conceive—God is no thing.

Sometimes other names can help disrupt our hardened and limited concepts of God: Divine Love, Mystery, Source. Apophatic theology, seen most fully within Eastern Orthodox Christianity, invites the spiritually devoted beyond limitations and known categories to ways that make room for what we don’t know and cannot comprehend about the Divine. The prayer of quiet draws us ever deeper into the Mystery that is worth growing familiar with but is ultimately unknowable in its totality. There is a boundlessness of the One who we, in English, sometimes call God, and apophatic prayer may lead us into that unknowing to experience the divine beyond what we know.