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| Berndnaut Smilde, Nimbus Sankt Peter, 2013 |
Hello, my name is Phillip Dawson and it is a great pleasure to welcome you to our Start:Stop reflection from St Stephen Walbrook, when we stop for a few minutes and start to reflect on a passage from scripture. You can hear an audio recording of this reflection at this link.
This week, a great prayer from the Letter to the Ephesians, that we might be strengthened by the fullness of God’s love for us - a love that surpasses knowledge.
Bible
Reading - Ephesians 3:16-19
I pray
that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be
strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ
may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in
love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints,
what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of
Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the
fullness of God.
Reflection
“It’s all
in the cloud!”
Cloud
computing has allowed many of us to continue to work and study from home during
the lockdown. One of the tutors at the theological college I attend part-time
signed us up to an “augmented reality” environment, so we could socialise after
our lessons on Zoom. Yes, even the college bar is now “in the cloud”! I keep
getting emails from Apple telling me to rent more space as my cloud is full -
probably of video recordings of our church services during the lockdown, notes
and prayers I have started to write and the thousands of photographs I took on
my phone in Africa! While I was there, necessity finally forced me to start
using electronic books; the libraries full of real books were all closed - and
there is no Amazon in South Africa!
It seems
as though more and more of our knowledge is now being stored “in the cloud” -
even our knowledge about God, about ourselves and our memories of others - and
our cloud keeps growing.
That
might sound a bit scary to some - but according to an anonymous mystic, writing
in the late fourteenth century - that’s exactly as it should be. In fact, he says
that we must put all our thoughts and experiences into a “cloud of forgetting”
to have any hope of getting close to knowing the fullness of God’s love for us;
a God who himself appears as a “Cloud of Unknowing” - which gives the book its
title.
Over
seventy five short chapters, the author - a teacher or guide - walks with a
younger student on a spiritual pilgrimage; offering advice that might help him
come closer to God; the state which the author of the Letter to the Ephesians
prays we might all reach.
Along the
journey, the teacher reflects with humility on his own experience and
shortcomings - and stops to check that what he has taught is properly
understood. While the author of The Cloud remains anonymous by his own
choosing, the style of Middle English has been linked to six other surviving
works; he is thought to have been a priest (and therefore a man) and to have
lived somewhere in the East Midlands.
References
to other writings date The Cloud to the late fourteenth century; a time of
great change with the Peasants’ Revolt, The Black Death and the Hundred Years’
War all raging; but also a time when we find many mystics - like Julian of
Norwich - active in the Western Church.
As it’s
title suggests, The Cloud of Unknowing explores the idea that God is beyond
human conception; our understanding of Him is necessarily limited by human
thought and language. We are encouraged to become accustomed to this
uncomfortableness; to embrace and accept our lack of understanding. The author
assures us that while God is indescribable, he is not completely unknowable in
this life; He can be reached by love.
By this,
he does not mean by offering loving service or charity to those in need -
although these features of the active life of a Christian are important and a
vocation to which many are rightfully called; instead he is referring to
another expression of Christian life, a contemplative life.
There is
a great equality of opportunity throughout the book, in which the author is
keen to emphasize that this life is not an easy way out for the work-shy or
available only to people of independent financial means. By living a life
devoted solely to fully loving God, He will provide for all our needs - God’s
love is all we need to sustain us.
But
loving is a joy, not hard work - in fact it is no work for us at all - loving
is God’s work and reliant solely on His grace. The task of the contemplative - and
here comes the struggle - is to become completely passive; to put all other
knowledge into our cloud of forgetting; to become an empty house in which God
can move in. It is only when we have placed all our knowledge in the cloud of
forgetting that we will have the capacity to consider the “Cloud of Unknowing”
that is God.
This
means putting out of our minds all memory of God’s beautiful creative work -
even clearing our head of our meditations on Christ and his passion. These
thoughts are good but ultimately a distraction to longing for God’s love; to
focusing entirely on Him.
While the
author leaves much of the detail of the teaching to God himself - he does offer
specific advice on prayer which, he says, should be as short as possible,
ideally words of one syllable. Repeating “love” or “God” is a meditative
technique which later became known as centring prayer.
A short,
repeated prayer means less distraction - less reliance on human language and
understanding. We are warned not to seek to dismantle the word in our thoughts
- to explore what “love” or “God” might mean - but to accept the word in all
its fullness.
Our
eminently practical guide likens such prayers to the heartfelt cries of people
in need shouting “help” or “fire”; like them we must continually cry out to God
in prayer until we receive his help. These short prayers are likened to darts
which we throw hoping to penetrate the thick Cloud of Unknowing and from which,
by His grace and at a time of His choosing, God may choose to send down on us a
shaft of His spiritual light, showing a glimpse of the fullness of His
love.
The
difference between an active and a contemplative Christian life is not binary -
all are commanded to love and serve our neighbours. But the true contemplative,
like the one responding to a shout of “help” or “fire” - will do so whether the
person crying out is family, friend or foe. Such distinctions are irrelevant
when our focus and motivation is solely on longing for God’s love.
The Cloud
of Unknowing helps us to see how we might make space in our own lives to
receive the strength that is the fullness of God’s love. Perhaps it is fitting
that translations of this medieval spiritual classic are now available online,
and I commend it to you!
“It’s all
in the cloud!”
Silent
Reflection
Prayer
This
“Prayer for the Preface” is written at the start of The Cloud of Unknowing:
God,
unto whom
all hearts are open,
unto whom
all wills do speak,
from whom
no secret thing is hidden,
I beseech
thee
so to
cleanse the purpose of my heart
with the
unutterable gift of thy grace
that I
may perfectly love thee,
and
worthily praise thee.
Amen
Thank you
for listening to this week’s Start:Stop reflection. Do join us in church or
online for our events and services through the week.
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