concepts and images of God must be lived through and allowed to crumble. Leaving them, at last, on the shore, we enter the dark waters, allowing them to lift and carry us in naked simplicity and trust. Here we come to the heart of the matter. Contemplatives long to experience, unmediated, the Divine Mystery itself, to breathe ocean winds, to become one with the deep. For this they risk everything – like people in love. These words are, I know, cryptic and obscure – but what words will do? Call this a ‘ray of darkness’, a ‘cloud of unknowing’, a ‘divine wasteland’ – it remains more simple, silent and subtle than words can describe.
I often ask myself: ‘Who wants this emptiness, this desert?’ For this is not just about inner prayer, but also actual, everyday life. ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing…’ wrote St John of the Cross, and some days that’s exactly how it feels. Yet the same John also wrote: ‘My Beloved is the mountains, the solitary wooded valleys, the whispering of love-stirring breezes at the rising of tranquil dawn, resounding rivers, silent music.’ In the emptying is the embrace. Gradually, gently, you come to know this. I sometimes say that contemplative experience is nothing much –but it’s a ‘nothing much’ I’d give everything for.
Of course, it’s important to keep balanced – this is a way of living, not a short retreat or a week at the beach. Merton sometimes used to slip out of his hermitage to drink whisky and listen to jazz in nearby Louisville. I know I often need to get to the city, have a drink at the Portsea pub or catch a film in Rosebud. The company of friends and the warmth of a sensuous embrace are also sweet gifts of God that I delight in when I can.
In the simplicity of this life, you come home to yourself. You slowly become who you truly are, you breathe deeply, open to the wonder of what is. On a wild beach, in the silence after midnight, over a quiet coffee on a sunny afternoon, you trust and let go. ‘I cast the anchor of my life down and let its line run deep into the heart of the ocean of God on whose breast I rest.’
In the resting, and from the silence, you may sometimes be asked to speak, and you may then discover a strange freedom that comes, in part, from having little left to lose. Contemplatives, they say, have often been troublemakers.
*
Published in The Age as a Faith column in December 1998.
Christmas, sex, longing and God:
towards a spirituality of desire
All my life I have been haunted by longing.
Do you remember Christmas mornings? In our house they used to begin very, very early. After sleeping in fits and starts one of us children would shake the others awake in the still, pre-dawn darkness, wondering if it was ‘time’ yet. Giggling, with a delicious sense of conspiracy, we would tiptoe breathless and wide-eyed through the slumbering house to peek at the Christmas tree. ‘Mum! Dad! Father Christmas has been!’ And the door would be flung open and we’d be on our knees before all these brightly wrapped marvels, tumbling in anticipation and delight.
And if you were lucky, there was at least one special present, one that you couldn’t guess. You’d hold it and shake it and turn it, and you’d wonder. I would unwrap this present slowly, not looking, not wanting to catch a glimpse of a label on the box and guess the secret before the wondrous moment of unveiling. Savouring the edge of possibility. Tasting the wonder, the miracle of this gift that could be – anything! Could be the very thing I longed for, which I could not name myself, which I had wanted and waited for, without knowing it, all my life. Could this be It?
Here, now, in this moment I was on the threshold, I was touching the hem. Was this how the woman in the Gospel felt when she touched Jesus’ garment, hoping to be made well (Luke 8: 43-48)?
Eventually, inevitably, the present was unwrapped. Immediately, something wondrous was lost. This was not It. And yet… there was that moment, that luminous moment when everything was possible. Such a moment! Even today something in me rises to meet it, wide-eyed and open-hearted.
Why do adults so love Christmas time, so often reflecting that ‘it’s just not the same without children’? I believe that the sweetness of this remembered childhood moment lingers. Something in us all is still waiting, still longing, still hoping. Just to be here again on this threshold is delight, as we see, shining in the eyes of children, our own wonder and hope. Perhaps this year!
We are all children, waiting on the threshold for the Wonder to show itself. We are all haunted by longing.
Do you remember your first orgasm? I remember mine. I didn’t really know what it was. I was used to the excitement and pleasure of arousal, but this was completely new and unexpected. I remember very clearly saying to myself that it felt in that moment as if everything I had ever wanted had been given to me. Everything. Not this and that, but the Essence. It. I had tasted that for which I longed. In that brief splinter of time all was ecstatically complete, fulfilled.
Yet, even as it burst into my life it was gone. Of course I soon learned I could taste this delight again and again, and despite the turmoil, chaos and guilt that came to accompany it, the purity and power of that moment of ecstasy remained. It fired my longing and undid both my own plans and the dictates of a repressed and frightened Church. Again and again I would stand on the threshold and, unlike the Christmas present, this did not disappoint. Here, however fleetingly, I crossed the threshold and tasted the wonder. Yet, like Christmas, it too was gone in the very moment of its sweetest delight.
Do you remember your first taste of spiritual joy? As a boy I had been very religious, loving ritual, prayer and ‘holy things’. However, when I was about fourteen, something new broke into my life. One day when I was spending a lonely lunchtime in the school chapel trying some simple methods of prayer that I had read about, I had a sudden sense of immediate, mirror-like contact with the One to whom I prayed. It was simple (no visions or lights or anything) and it was intoxicating, like drinking at a fountain of joy. For several months this continued, especially after Holy Communion when I alternately felt as if I were flying as high as the ceiling, or as if I were about to burst from joy. God only knows what my schoolmates, bored by the daily liturgy, must have thought as I closed my eyes and drank from this hidden spring.
Again, I was on the threshold, again tasting It. Yet It withdrew. Soon the spring dried up, went underground and my prayer became plain and dry. However, I had known what it was to have my heart on fire and I would never be satisfied until it consumed me completely.
The liminal moment
These three sacred moments: the gift giving of Christmas, sexual awakening and spiritual awakening, can be called ‘liminal’ experiences. Limen is the Latin word for ‘threshold’, and it refers in a special way to the threshold of the temple: an entrance, a barrier, a meeting place between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’, between the ‘divine’ and the ‘human’, between my ‘deepest self’ and my ordinary ‘daily self’. In liminal states we taste a level of awareness beyond the rational, analytical and image-making mind, sometimes even tasting the deepest centre of self that opens into Absolute Mystery, that ground of our being where ‘God’s Spirit with her own Being is effective’.1
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1 Meister Eckhart, quoted in M Fox, Original blessing, Bear and Co., New Mexico, 1983, p. 132.
These liminal experiences cannot truly be controlled by the individual, by Church or by society. They take us beyond. And that is the point. They are profoundly free and freeing, shaking up all the structures of the self and unmistakably asserting the sovereign freedom of God in the heart and soul of every person.
