The spiritual discipline of paying attention

  Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 4-

Two books are called to our attention here. The first is the paper-and-ink word of God. The second is the “book” that God produces through our experience of him – the personal diary of oneself and God.

It is needful to pause here for a moment and consider how difficult it is to put into writing some of the deeper, more prayerful expressions of the faith. Those of a more contemplative nature have said that union with God through contemplation is rare, momentary, cannot be caused by the seeker, and cannot be prolonged by the one so engaged with the presence of God. It is also considered an inexpressible, wordless experience in which one simply basks in the company of God.

I believe we can count Father Caussade among those who have taken much to heart from the likes of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avilla, co-founders of the Discalced Carmelite order, and both considered “mystical” in their published works about God. (As we go along, I will touch on an unfortunate attitude among some believers that “mystical” equals “dismissible.”)

For example, Father C mentions a “ray of darkness,” in this section, which is lifted from the pages of John of the Cross. (See Dark Night of the Soul, Book 2, Chapter 5, Section 3, where John says he got the phrase from St. Dionysius and “other mystical theologians.”) The idea of faith being sightless, in the sense of walking not by the light of day, weighs heavily in some of John’s thoughts about ascending the mount, or treading in the soul’s dark night. (In Scripture, see: “For we walk by faith not by sight.” 2 Corinthians 5:7, for example.) Obviously, the language begins to fail us in expressing all there is to express about God. We know God to be infinite, and so we must realize that we will soon run out of vocabulary to describe him and our walk with him.

In comments about John of the Cross in The Impact of God, Iain Matthew points out the saint’s search for these nearly wordless descriptions of God, and says John found some help in the Psalms and in Revelation. These, says Matthew, “tell us ‘something.’ They all frame it well, but [John] says, ‘None of them explains it, nor all of them together.’” (Page 94, quoting the second redaction of John of the Cross’s Spiritual Canticle [38.8].)

I have to point out that John of the Cross had a deep, abiding love for God. His love for God transcended the Scriptures in the same way that a young man’s love for his fiancée transcends her letters to him. Indeed, it is not the letters he loves, but the person who wrote them.

Along this line of reasoning also, William Barclay comments on the Gospel of John at one point saying, significantly, “The Jews worshipped a God who wrote rather than a God who acted and therefore when Christ came they did not recognize him. The function of the Scriptures is not to give life, but to point to him who can.” (The Gospel of John, Volume 1, Page 198)

We are advised that Christ is a person, rather than a book. There is no dismissing the Bible by John, Jean-Pierre or myself. The Bible opens us to a relationship with God, tells us who God is, and what he has done for us in Christ, but a relationship with the Bible as a student/scholar for information is not the same as a relationship with Christ as a disciple for transformation.

It should come as no surprise that we are not always able to capture God in our words. Consider that many of the hearers of Jesus (and here I mean believers, not just detractors) spent much of their time saying, “Huh?” and seeking out Jesus for clarification.

What did that parable mean? How can I be born again from my mother’s womb? Where is this living water of which you speak? How can he rebuild the temple in three days when it took years to build? Where are you going that we may not follow? These are but a few of the questions found in the gospel accounts.

Sometimes bringing words to bear on one’s experience with God will prove difficult. Paul mentions such a thing in Second  Corinthians, where he mentions “a man known to me” that was caught up into the “third heaven” and there found himself in a situation where whatever happened was unutterable, inexpressible. The likelihood here is that Paul is talking about himself, and the reference is thought to be to his vision of Jesus and corresponding conversion on the road to Damascus (from Acts 9). Obviously, some dimension of this experience was describable. Other aspects of this event, which eternally altered him, were beyond words.

On a much smaller scale, we realize words sometimes fail us when we wish we could say more than “thank you” to someone who has touched us deeply or saved our lives or rescued our child. “Thank you” doesn’t begin to say what every fiber in one’s being wants to express.

The passage in Second Corinthians is not easily understood, and sometimes John, Teresa, Jean-Pierre and others write passages that are difficult. If the visions of Ezekiel and John the Apostle confront the reader with complex imagery, then we must expect anyone else who writes of their visions or their deepest experiences in prayer and contemplation to struggle to put these into words and thus challenge the reader to understand them.

From this vantage point it might now be easier for us to come to Father C’s description of the two books – one the Scriptures, and one the experiences of the seeker and follower of Christ.

Taking his cue from the biblical concept that faith is a kind of sight or way of seeing that transcends or operates beyond the sense of sight, our guide assures us that God has not ceased working or speaking on the occasions in which we cannot see or hear him. God continues to act through events and occurrences – both historically and personally.

We know from Hebrews 11:1 that faith is “the assurance of things not seen.” Or, as the New Jerusalem Bible renders it, “Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen.”

Father C also knows that anything that happens that we do not understand or in which we cannot perceive God’s hand, we will likely discard. We are reminded here that nothing happens beyond God’s grasp, and nothing can lie too far afield to be outside of the providence of God. In learning to see in this way, we have to suspend our tendency to dismiss that which we cannot very well see or hear or even understand clearly.

When many of Christ’s followers departed from him in John 6, their conversation may have been something like this: “I don’t understand what he means. I am leaving.” Whereas, the Apostles put it this way: “I don’t understand what he means. I am staying.”

Since we cannot see these divine mysteries with the naked eye, we are told we have to operate in the dark – simply unaided by the eye. We have to learn to see with faith apart from natural light. We tend to associate darkness with the presence of evil or the absence of God, but in the sense that it used here by Caussade and Company, darkness is the mode in which faith operates when unaided by the light of day. Hence the strange expression, “a ray of darkness.”

He will expound on this in later sections, but, for now, we are to understand that we do not spend enough time seeking and finding God by faith in the events that occur around us.

In other words, God is interacting with you and with the world moment by moment. Are you in tune with this? Do you bother to look? Do you trouble yourself to believe that God’s providence, his “infinite perfections,” are making their way through every nook and cranny of the world and of your own life? Do you use faith to see?

If you do not, you are something of a Deist; living under the false assumption that God acted through Christ, dropped off the Bible (canonized some 300 years after Jesus died) and now sits inertly in an old rocking chair in heaven waiting for the angels to open the vials.

This comprises belief in a silent God. The Scriptures and the Church do not hold forth such a notion. God is hidden, but not absent. He is hard to hear, but he is not silent. God speaks through events, but must be perceived through faith. He works “in realities that are unseen.”

And so, the good father simply demands here that we pay more attention:

_{“But what god says to you, dear souls, the words he pronounces from moment to moment, the substance of which is not paper and ink but what you suffer and what you have to do from moment to moment, does this deserve no attention from you?.” (Page 26)}