Every Lent for over 45 years, I have given up watching TV and have chosen a spiritual classic to read and meditate on instead. Over the years, I have returned to certain classics multiple times (especially “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” by St. John Climacus and “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas á Kempis), and as with any book, new circumstances in life and years of study and prayer in between readings lead to a new experience of the text and new insights.
The volume I chose for this Lent is one that I haven’t read in over 30 years, in large part because the first time I read it, I came away frustrated rather than spiritually uplifted. I’ve pulled it off the shelf many times over the last three decades and thumbed through it but always put it back, because each time the memory of my struggle with the text came welling up.
The work in question is “The Cloud of Unknowing,” written in the 14th century by an unknown English mystic. Translated into modern English, the text is not particularly hard to understand. It is usually presented as — in the words of the promotional copy on the paperback edition I’m currently reading — “a practical guide in the path of contemplation.”
My struggle with the text the first time around stemmed entirely from a literal reading of that promotional copy. Young and eager to grow in my knowledge of God, I wanted a step-by-step guide to mystical union. Instead, what I found were such lines as “I do not believe reasoning ever helps in the contemplative work” and “Thought cannot comprehend God.” Contemplation, the author says, requires deliberately moving beyond thought: “By love he may be touched and embraced, never by thought.”
Being united to God
“Contemplative prayer is God’s gift, wholly gratuitous. No one can earn it.” Thirty years ago, I was not ready to read such words. What is the point of the Christian life if not movement toward union with God? But if we cannot move ourselves but must wait for God to move us — “let that mysterious grace move in your spirit as it will and follow wherever it leads you” — isn’t everything we do simply futile unless and until God makes the first move?
In my mid-20s, the simple reality of this truth didn’t make sense, in a rational, discursive way. But the decades of experience of God’s gratuitous love in between have opened up the meaning of these words. The idea that one must move beyond reason in order to contemplate God is still as foreign to reason as it was back then, but having experienced the limitations of my own reason, I can now understand what the author means when he writes, “As long as we live in these mortal bodies the keenness of our intellect remains dulled by material limitations whenever it deals with spiritual realities and most especially God.”
Decades of prayer, fruitful and otherwise, have convinced me of the truth that “prayer is simply a reverent, conscious openness to God full of the desire to grow in goodness and overcome evil.” All of our actions must flow from God and return to him. With John the Baptist, we must be able to cry from the depths of our being, “He must increase; I must decrease” (Jn 3:30) because, in the words of our anonymous author, “a true lover not only cherishes his beloved more than himself but in a certain sense he becomes oblivious of himself on account of the one he loves.”
In these pages that I avoided for so long, I have, this Lent, found the true meaning of Lent: Our Lenten practices of prayer, fasting and almsgiving are not goods in themselves but must be manifestations of our desire to be united to God. There is no blueprint, no series of steps we can follow that will reliably lead us to that union, because it takes place within that cloud of unknowing. All we can do is to strive to place ourselves there by rising above the cares and concerns of this world, and let God do the rest.
