The Cloud of Unknowing Yesterday, Today and Always

I have recently returned to a classic writing on Spiritual Direction - The Cloud of Knowing by Anonymous.  It is a 14^th century classic of Contemplative Spirituality by an unnamed author who was probably a cleric.  It is written to a 24-year-old novice whom he is advising.  It is an early classic in Spiritual Direction and was formative for such people as Julian of Norwich, Friedrick von Hugel, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila.  It was also formative in the development of modern Centering Prayer by Thomas Keating. 

In reading it again. What strikes me about it is its modern feel.  This is in part probably due to the masterful translation.  However, it also seems to be dealing with themes that resonate with today’s culture.  Anonymous speaks of the desire by people to solve problems through intellect and advises that this approach is not going to work for spiritual issues and our relationship with God.  He (we know that anonymous was a man) notes, “The self-important, hyper analytical intellect must always and in every way be quashed.  Stomp it under foot, if you want to do the work of contemplation with integrity”.  In this I believe it is a wonderful tonic to the approach today which believes that intellect and the products of intellect can solve all the world’s problems. 

Anonymous has a very dim view of the problems caused by what can be seen today as people being ego-centric, “You’re human, so watch out for that enemy, pride. Never think you're holier or better than anyone else.  Never confuse the worthiness of your calling with who you are”.  The more I experience life and observe what is going on in the world the more convinced I am that ego plays a central role in many of the problems in relationships between individuals and groups.  To overcome our ego-centric position has been the challenge that people have faced ever since humankind was exiled from the Garden.  Anonymous certainly seems to have identified it as a significant block to our relationship to God. 

I will close today with the prayer that Anonymous uses to close the preface to his book:

Dear spiritual friend in God, examine your life.  Pay careful attention to the way you live your calling.  With all your heart, thank God for your blessings, and his grace will help you stand strong in the face or subtle attacks from within and without, until you win the everlasting crown of life.  Amen

 

 

Grumpy Old Man

As I get older or just plain old - probably 76 does qualify as old –- I seem to be getting grumpier.  The question arises – if not begged (I’m still not sure what exactly begging the question is) – am I grumpy because I am getting old – an internal thing - or am I grumpy because the world is imposing a lot of things on me that it shouldn’t?  Now don’t get me wrong, I have a lot to be thankful for – a wonderful wife who is very generous with her advice- particularly when we are driving somewhere; financial security; relatively good health and a great church community we are part of. 

That being said, I find myself becoming annoyed more easily than I used to – at least in my self-assessment.  I find annoyance is right there not too far under the surface and just lurking in wait for an opportunity to show itself.  There seem to be more opportunities for annoyance to raise its ugly head these days as life seems to be more complicated.  I struggle to deal with all the modern conveniences, particularly those which come with complicated ways of operating that don’t seem to make sense to me. 

Here are a few examples to help you understand what I am ranting about this morning.  We finally broke down and got a ‘smart’ phone a few years ago.   Up until then we had an old-fashioned flip phone which was used for emergencies.   We seemed to manage quite well but decided – for some reason I don’t really remember – don’t get me started on my memory challenges – to bite the bullet and get one.  I believe we were in Maisonville Mall in London trying to get a COVID shot and there was a booth nearby – so while we were waiting for our appointment, we decided to take the leap into the wonderful world of ‘smart’ phones.  Well, it has turned out that the phone is definitely smarter than me.  I dread to get a call on it – we don’t usually give out the number – as I find it is a challenge to answer the call – we did get advice on that from someone – I forget who – that we should swipe the phone and not tap it vigorously.  I can hardly wait to try this out, but I haven’t received a call yet.  There are lots of other challenges using this smarty pants device, but I hope this gives you a sense of where I speak. 

Well, let me give you one more example.  We recently had an electronic thermostat installed.  Boy has it been fun figuring it out.  We can control it – you guessed it – on the smarty pants phone.  After some trial and error – emphasis on the error – I have it figured out but the icon on the phone keeps disappearing.  Sometimes it is there and sometimes not.  I think the phone is just trying to remind me who is in charge. 

Another area of annoyance is parking.  I am old enough – see above – to remember when parking lots had attendants who would take your ticket and tell you how much you owed, and you could give them real money to settle up.  Now the attendant has gone the way of the dinosaurs – perhaps that is my fate as well.  We have the wonders of the machines where you get to pay your money by card – if you can figure out the instructions - and hope for the best.  Recently we were in Stratford to see a performance of Macbeth and parked in a municipal lot.  You had to put in vast amounts of information e.g. licence plate number, zone number (whatever that is) and pay for the time you think you will be parking.  Now, Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays but who knows how long we will be parked.   Well, we probably might have managed (with help from bad language) but we/I couldn’t see the screen as it was in bright sunlight.  We gave up and luckily found a spot on the street which- Hallelujah - had an old-fashioned meter which took coins.  Moving on from parking challenges we went to the theater and tried to find our seats.  The row numbers were cleverly hidden for plain sight, and we had to guess where row D was.  It was not the fourth row back as we discovered after we made our way to the seats in the middle – to the inconvenience of others seated.  It was apparently row DD.  We tried again with no more success.  Until we found an attendant – what do you call the people who show you where your seat is – words fail me again.

In any case, I am finding life to me more complicated and my annoyance more accessible as well.  I do feel more like a dinosaur as life becomes more complex.  I realize that my annoyance is partly because I want life to be the way I want it to be, and it is less that way.  There is a self centeredness in my annoyance – why can’t things be done the way they should be - or at least the way I think they should.  I’m afraid it has never been that way and is getting less that way all the time.  It just isn’t fair – but as someone – I don’t remember who – told me many years ago – life isn’t – and they were right.  I guess I will try to be a less grumpy old man – perhaps if I prayed to that Old Man in the sky it would help.  

 

To Be Blessed

Recently, I was reading the Beatitudes in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 6: 20-31).  The Beatitudes are the address by Jesus to his disciples in which Jesus tells them who is blessed.  The address opens with, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”  Jesus goes from there to include others who are blessed – the hungry, those who weep, people who are hated on account of the ‘Son of Man’.  Considering this passage, I realized that I didn’t have as full a grasp on what it means to be blessed, as I would like.  Generally, I know that to be blessed is a good thing, but what does it actually mean for the person who is blessed?

Some versions of the Bible use happy in this passage rather than blessed.  However, to my mind, 'happy' does not capture the full meaning of blessed – happy sounds like a passing thing which is contingent on external conditions.  However, blessed seems to have a sense of a deeper state.

The earliest reference to blessing in the bible is in the creation story.  God blesses the living creatures and says, be fruitful and multiply.  He then blesses humans and tells them the same thing – be fruitful and multiply.  So, it would appear that to be blessed means you are going to be fruitful in life which at that time meant having many offspring.  Later we have the rather infamous case of Jacob – that patriarch of the church, stealing the blessing from his brother Esau – not great family values there.  One commentary noted that the meaning of the blessing that Jacob stole:

was to grant leadership to the one who received it, with Jacob becoming the head of a powerful family and nation, and with nations and brothers bowing down to him. This included not only material wealth but also spiritual significance and the continuation of God's covenant with Abraham, a legacy Jacob would carry forward. 

The covenant between God and God’s chosen people included God’s promise of land and offspring.   In effect, to be blessed, at least at that time meant to be fruitful and multiply as in the original blessing. 

So, in this case what does it mean to be fruitful?  This can have the meaning of receiving material prosperity i.e. having lots of material possession and material wealth.  This kind of meaning has led to the mistaken theology of the prosperity Gospel in my view. 

I believe that Jesus used the term blessed in the framework of the Beatitudes to describe the inner quality of a faithful servant of God. This blessedness is a spiritual state of well-being and prosperity—a deep state of peaceful contentment that cannot be shaken by external events such as poverty, hunger, or conflict because God is present with us through these difficult times.  We are blessed by God, therefore, we can be blessed by God in all things but not for all things.

May you be blessed on your journey. 

 

MAID’s Slippery Slope

I received information recently from a friend sharing the news that a friend of hers had ended her life through the Canadian program of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID).  As advised by my friend, her friend had decided to end her life because she was faced with a future where she would be blind due to macular degeneration.  I was shocked by this and the whole MAID program of MAID has been in my thoughts ever since.

When MAID was made legal in Canada 2016, I was generally in support of this move.  There had been many examples reported at the time of people suffering from incurable illnesses who had no prospect of relief and whose death was imminent.  It seemed to be a compassionate response to such a situation.  I did not and do not believe there is any virtue in people suffering in such situations.  It seemed to be a compassionate response to intolerable circumstances.   

The law was brought in by the Federal Government of the day in response to the ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada which found the previous Criminal Code provisions against assisted suicide to be unconstitutional.  The law allows a person to end their life through assistance of a medical professional if the person has a grievous and irremediable condition and experiences unbearable physical or mental suffering from an illness, disease, disability, or state of decline that cannot be relieved under conditions that the person considers acceptable. (information from Dying with Dignity Canada https://www.dyingwithdignity.ca/)

There were warnings at the time of the law being a slippery slope to increase access to MAID for people in less severe conditions and in non-terminal circumstances.  It would appear there are significant indications that Canada is well on the way down that slippery slope.  If the circumstance described by my friend whose friend used MAID because of macular degeneration, and the prospect of blindness is accurate it is truly a dangerous sign.  Coincidentally, I received information recently from another friend who shared concerns about where MAID is heading and shared this site with me, from Inclusion Canada https://www.inclusioncanada.ca/post/do-better-inclusion-canada-welcomes-un-committee-s-concluding-observations-on-canada-s-disabilit.

The site notes that Canada has received a critical review from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities regarding MAID.  Among the key recommendations, the UN Committee has urged Canada to:

Repeal Track 2 Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), including the planned 2027 expansion to persons whose “sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness,” and reject proposals to expand MAiD to “mature minors” and through advance requests.  

These are serious indications that the slippery slope is definitely engaged and becoming steeper.  I believe the intentions behind MAID are worthwhile and commendable.  However, the application of MAID and the direction it is heading needs serious reconsideration.  There need to be ways and means of ensuring that the law as it stands is applied by medical professionals as is intended i.e.  people suffering from grievous and irremediable condition and experience unbearable physical or mental suffering as noted above. 

To find God’s will in this is a challenge which should not be taken lightly.  It is a matter of life and death on our journey.

Seeing Around the Corner

 

Last time, I wrote about giving thanks in all things.  This was in contrast to giving thanks for all things.  There are, of course, many things that I cannot give thanks for, but I can still give thanks to God in all things.  It is all a matter of perspective – of how we look at the world.  In this regard, there is an approach proposed by author Charles Williams, a contemporary of C. S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot, who proposed that we sometimes see good as evil in our limited perspective.  This seems counter intuitive and raises the question why we would ever see good as evil. 

On reflection, I can think of the ultimate example for Christians when we consider that the followers of Jesus must have viewed Jesus’ crucifixion as the ultimate evil and the defeat of all their hopes and dreams.  We can often, given the perspective of time, look back on events and see the good which came out of some event that seemed very bad at the time.   We can think of people who were not able to be at work in the twin towers on 9-11 or someone who was delayed getting a flight to a vacation in an exotic location only later to be informed the plan crashed and none on board survived.  We don’t see the bigger picture at the time. 

Charles Williams understood "seeing the good as evil" as the human predicament of experiencing good things in a way that makes them seem evil, primarily because of our divided consciousness and our ego centered understanding of things. The solution, for Williams, was not to simply separate good from evil, but to transform evil into an "occasion for love" by understanding it as an opportunity for good and love, thereby integrating both into a higher understanding of God. 

I don’t want to be Pollyannaish about this and be like Dr. Pangloss of the novel Candide, "all is for the best" in "the best of all possible worlds."  There is such a thing as evil and there are many manifestations of evil in the world.  However, with our limited understanding and perspective, there are times when we can’t see what the outcome of an event will be.  I believe that we should keep an open mind about the possibility of a good outcome of a bad event.  After all you we can’t see what is around every corner all the time.  It does put things into perspective.

 

Giving Thanks In All Things

For the non-Canadians who may read this, today is Canadian Thanksgiving.  I won’t discuss if this is the better Thanksgiving than the other one celebrated south of us.  Giving thanks, whenever you do it, is always a good thing.  The question I pose today is, what do we give thanks for?  There is the usual giving thanks for all the good things in our lives – for health and happiness; for abundant, if expensive, food; for a safe place to live; perhaps, for Canadians, giving thanks that the Liberal’s led by Mark Carney was elected rather than the other one who wanted to eliminate funding for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – but I won’t go there. 

What I actually want to discuss is, can we give thanks for things that we normally don’t give thanks for?   Drawing on St. Julian of Norwich who said, “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” It is hard to believe that we can give thanks, even in our darkest hour that things shall be well.  It certainly doesn’t look like this these days, and yet this morning there is, if not peace in Gaza, at least a cease fire and a release of hostages and prisoners on both sides.  That is definitely something to give thanks for. 

It may be helpful to draw on another saying, this one by St. Paul, ‘give thanks in all things.’  This is different from giving thanks for all things.  There are things which I cannot give thanks for - so giving thanks in all things does ring true.  As much as I find many things in this modern world frustrating and   annoying and stupid, I can give thanks that I am able to get frustrated by them.  I am part of the modern world with all its challenges and complicated devices, and glad I can benefit from the many modern conveniences in this world that I benefit from.

I do sometimes think that with all the “smart” things I must deal with e.g. smart phones, smart thermostats, smart internet, the only thing in my life that is not smart is me, as they can make me feel really unsmart.  But I shouldn’t rant in a missive about giving thanks.  So, I will remind myself to give thanks in all things – and remember that it is God to whom I am giving thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian friends - and even to the non-Canadians.  

Being the Salt of the Earth

I have been appreciating salt recently on my food. Actually, I have been using salt in the many cobs of corn which I have been consuming.  I generally don’t add salt to my food as it is not recommended for people who deal with high blood pressure.  In any case, I find it essential for eating corn on the cob and here at the cottage we have a great local source for this food group – Keddy’s Corn.

With that as context, the bible passage came to mind about salt losing its saltiness: “For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.”  —Mark 9:49–50

That led me to wonder if it is actually possible for salt to lose its saltiness?  With this kind of question, I turn to AI for an answer: 

Pure salt (sodium chloride) cannot lose its saltiness because its taste is an inherent property of its stable chemical compound. However, impure or ancient salts mixed with other minerals could lose their taste if exposed to water, causing the actual sodium chloride to dissolve and wash away, leaving behind flavorless fillers. Additionally, if someone has a taste disorder, they might perceive salt as not being salty, even if the salt itself remains unchanged. 

That, in turn, left me with the question of what was the point of this parable that Jesus was trying to give us?  Jesus used many common situations and real-life examples in his parables, so this must have been a common experience for the people listening to him.  What was the spiritual message that Jesus was giving to his audience two thousand years ago and us today?  Well, fortunately I was given an answer to that question in one the Daily Meditations from Richard Rhor:

Jesus connects using our power to honor and protect others with being a transforming presence or “salt” in the world. 

When we keep in mind the context of this whole passage in which the disciples have been jostling for power and Jesus gives stark warnings to those who misuse their power (Mark 9:33–48), we discover a piercing challenge. Here, the gathering together of imagery of being “salted with fire,” ideas of sacrifice and the challenge to live peaceably together, may reflect ideas about being purified and refined for peace. That is, in the process of allowing our lives to become a salty offering, no longer driven by power plays, but instead focused upon honouring and protecting others, especially the “little ones,” our ego-driven agendas are burned away. Like the fighting disciples, this will be a costly process of having our assumptions about power deconstructed, so that we may actually be able to embody God’s peace together…. Australian theologian Sally Douglas

As it happens, today I was not really feeling like producing another edition of this blog.  I was convincing myself that I didn’t really need o do it and probably it wouldn’t be missed if I didn’t.  I had the topic on salt as a topic and decided to buck up and put the computer version of pen to paper.  I think that feeling of why bother and not feeling up to a task and what does it matter anyway is an aspect of losing my saltiness and especially being salted with fire.  So, for what it’s worth - here it is my effort to get in touch with my saltiness.

May you be blessed to be the salt of the earth on your journey.