It is clear that our practical life, the need to economize our spiritual powers, and to have an underlying feeling of stability and security, forces us to close our eyes to the dark abyss of the unknown which surrounds us. It is this practical need which requires of us this self-limitation and therefore limitedness. One thing is certain: the limitedness is a real part of us, and it becomes necessary, if not to break down an open door, at least to push our consciousness through it, to force our consciousness to see that the door is in fact open, that our “room” or our “house” in which we live, is only a part of the boundless unknown world.
—S.L. Frank. The Unknowable.
As for what it profits you to pursue this possibility, to keep yourself empty and bare, just following and tracking this darkness and unknowing without turning back - it contains the chance to gain Him who is all things.
—Meister Eckhart. Sermon 4.
It’s been a little over three years since I left the monastery and returned to world. In this time I haven’t written all that much. It hasn’t been because I didn’t want to or didn’t try to, but that I was largely unable to do so. Not physically unable1, of course, but unable nonetheless. Throughout this time I would have been barely able to explain to you, let alone to myself, why this was the case.
I have wrestled greatly with this question and therefore inevitably with myself. No sooner did I grasp onto one answer why, than others answers, many of them, would insist on being considered. It hasn’t always been a very pleasurable or seemingly fruitful way to be. I have known that my year meditation in the cabin was the best and most fruitful year of my life. But it wasn’t only that. The full consequences of my stay there have been ambivalent to me for a long time. Now, I can begin to more fully say where I’ve come to regarding my year’s stay in the wilderness.
I left the monastery because my father had gone into the hospital. I sensed at the time, and this turned out to true, that this was going to be his last hospital stay. I was also ready to go, albeit somewhat reluctantly. I could have easily gone on meditating in that cabin for years without complaint. But this was quickly becoming less an option as time passed. Yes, I could have stayed a few more months, but there was a growing expectation that I needed to make a decision whether or not to become a monk there.
I had realized by that point, regrettably, that monasticism was not my calling. The Benedictine life is a beautiful one, no doubt, but it isn’t mine. When I listened closely, what I heard instead was a call to return to the world. Even so, this was a prospect that held many great unknowns for me. I had no home to go to, no job, and a dwindling bank account among other things. Basically, I had little idea where I might end up or how I might live once I got there.
But the day I drove down the long dirt road out from the monastery for the last time, I felt an expansiveness I had never quite felt before. It seemed that my heart had opened to a great mystery there and that in my time I had been healed in a way that previously appeared impossible to me. I had found this living mystery in the wilderness, one that was continuing to grow within me and in everything all around wherever I went. My hope as I drove through the vast emptiness of Southwest Desert to see my father, was that I could find a way to live a very different kind of contemplative life in the world—a radical way. At that fleeting moment, at the still point, everything was wide open.
My father’s death was exhausting and difficult. For him certainly, but for myself as well. We had a lifetime of unresolved issues between us and not much time to talk. Don’t get me wrong, my father was an intelligent and thoughtful man. He was one of the great influences and models of my life, both for good and otherwise. But by the time I arrived there he was ready to die. On one level I didn’t have a problem with that—it certainly wasn’t my call to make. But what was surprising to me was just how little he seemed to have thought how his death would affect those he was leaving behind—myself among them. He was ready to go and that was that.2
As it turned out, there was no moment of clarity between us. No final words or gestures of goodwill to put a sometimes contentious lifetime together into perspective. The only regret my father did express, and this about a week before he died, was that he hadn’t spent more time at work. I kid you not. He regretted that he hadn’t made more money. Nobody gets to their deathbed and regrets not spending more time at the office, or so the joke goes. Well, not nobody. I proceeded right up to the end to naively hope that we, father and son, could cobble together a reconciliation in the face of the awesome mystery of death.3 But it wasn’t to be.
And I tell you this now, it broke my heart.
It is incredible to me that we humans can live a long, full lifetime on this planet and be unwilling to face the brokenness of our lives and the destruction we have caused ourselves and others. I know I shouldn’t get angry about it, but I sometimes do. I hope I can do better when my time comes, but who knows?4 One of the realizations I had while meditating in the cabin was that we humans, so capable of surviving nearly any catastrophe, no matter how horrific are—at our hidden core, in our most tender and utterly vulnerable ways—so easily broken and nearly impossible to fix.
We live in a broken world5 that can break us before we even have a chance to know who we are, or even that we are. No doubt those who break us were broken too—generations unto generations, time out of mind. And this primordial wound6 is inflicted on us prior to our ability to speak or to remember. And is therefore so difficult to let go of because there is no way to see what we are holding on to.7 We can traverse our entire lifetimes in a self-venting miasma of dysfunction so total that it becomes nearly invisible, and never really know why.8
It can take decades to find the awareness, if one finds it at all, to discover and begin to release all this. Though I had been practicing contemplation for decades I hadn’t come close to going deep enough to see how I was grasping onto my own pain. I have held it so tightly for so long—like my life depended on it! Certainly I had come up against this pain throughout my life, directly and in its compulsive consequences, but in those cases it proved far too difficult to bear close scrutiny. Eventually I found I could only let go if I could see it up close and personal, and I could only see up close and personal in prolonged, attentive stillness.9
So day by day in the cabin, I was able to begin to look at what had been hiding in plain sight my whole life and how I might begin to let it go. Yes, I knew about all this brokenness before, but now I inhabited it unmistakably from within myself. I could see it and taste it. It was suddenly not something I had, but something I was—and it was inescapable.
So, I returned to the world and was finally able to get back home to Colorado. I found a job and an apartment and settled in. Once I did it became apparent that the expansive wholeness I had begun to recognize in myself up on the mountain, was the very same openness that allowed in the suffering of the world—my own suffering, first and foremost—and it came crashing in all around me.
One of the great services our broken world provides, if one can allow it, are the effectively infinite number of ways it can effortlessly dredge up decades of anger, fear, resentment, frustration, ambition, and degradation, etc., in you. It is relentlessly efficient at doing so. Or so it seems. The world is as the world does, I guess, however brutally it often extracts it costs. But if we are ready, it will easily overwhelm our inadequate defenses and in doing open us up to all that we’re hiding from.
Despite this unfolding, in many ways I continued on in the world as I always have. I resentfully drove the commute to and from work. I showed up to do my tedious job. I made jokes and tried to keep things lively. I read. I meditated. I made friends. All perfectly normal, yes? Admittedly, few casually observing my life would have noticed anything at all out of the ordinary. So then what’s the malfunction, boyo? First world problems, buddy! Suck it up, buttercup, like everybody else and get with the program!
And, yes, it turns out the program can be very hard to wake up from…
So it often took involuntarily waking up a 2 am to see what I was still hiding from and allow it to come out into the open. I spent many rough nights this way. I could not reconcile the ever-present, unbounded wholeness I had recognized with the broken world I was living in and who it demands us to be. A broken world that contorts us into its morbid constrictions. Where we trade our lives just so we can simply survive. Turns out it is ridiculously easy to die inside and hardly even know it. Turns out it is easy, so ridiculously easy, to become an empty automaton serving ends diametrically opposed to your own—with a smile on your face—and to still believe everything’s fine.10
But that continual recognition at 2 am, however excruciating and impossible, was a true gift. And it still is. When meditating at 2 am there’s nothing secret that won’t come to light, and nothing hidden that won’t come to be known.11 It is a haunted hour, and we are the ghosts. And this ongoing practice has kept me going through the tedium of daily life as I began shedding layer after impossible layers of the persona I had unwittingly constructed—layers seemingly without end. I had to face myself in ways I hadn’t before, or could even scarcely imagine.12 There are dragons there, and lions.13
Slowly I found ways to see in the dark and to express what I found there. I do so now only in this inadequate and inarticulate language. I can let it all in, rather than trying to keep it away and forgotten. Any wholeness that cannot contain brokenness isn’t really wholeness At times I was sure it was going to break me further—and maybe at times it did. I am not nearly at the end of it, if there is one.14
I have wanted to share this path here on Substack. I have hinted at this in my few postings over the past three years. But I haven’t had the courage or coherence just to say it plainly and directly.15 It was all still too raw and at times ugly. And when I did try, no sooner did I begin typing then I would fall into a muddle of conflict, unable to reconcile two seemingly opposed propositions,16 both of which seemed equally true. And though I wish I could now say that I have it figured out and will once again post regularly on the contemplative path. I can’t because I don’t.17
The foundations of the world are now buckling under it’s strange and inordinate load. One might even think in these times: Surely some revelation is at hand! Surely the second coming is at hand! Well, maybe. Maybe not. I have no idea. But as the forces of mere anarchy are surely being loosed upon the world I at the same time feel the breath of other worlds.18
We journey unknowingly in the infinite. And it turns out you cannot map the infinite in which we travel. We must follow a pathless path, on which all human certainties inevitably topple. Yet we somehow find our bearings in its inconceivable depths, by some invisible lodestar. In this I find great hope.
Our hearts’ longing for endless beauty cannot be sequestered merely in words, in ideologies, or even in seemingly impervious civilizations that die like everything else in this world. This beauty can be hinted at with words—yes, yes, however poorly. And if such timid articulations ultimately occur needlessly, it is a needlessness we simply cannot do without.19 It points the way to what is not a way, but is nonetheless the way, the truth and the life.
There are surely great trials ahead.20 In one form or another. Some so daunting as to beggar the imagination. Some we can now but only vaguely feel as if low tremors through the soles of our feet. Regardless, we won’t escape what’s coming.
But this, I think, is our task, one we should not recoil from. We are here to fathom the unfathomable; to participate in, through and as the divine depths, the groundless ground, now and always. And to do so regardless of the circumstances we find ourselves in. Even in what lies out there in the distance, over the horizon, belching black smoke and heading our way. Or what may be now already arriving…
Because even these circumstances, right here and now, contain the chance to gain him who is all things.21 Especially these. And in these circumstances, we can follow and track a pathless path in darkness and unknowing without turning back. And to find him—and each other, in that darkness, and on this living earth—there is no place we need to go other than the ground and fathomless depths of our own limitless hearts.
However broken.
Listen carefully—unless a grain of wheat falls to the soil and dies it remains by itself, but if it dies it yields much fruit. Whoever loves his life will lose it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.
—John 12:23-24
The rose is without ‘why’; it blooms simply because it blooms.
It pays no attention to itself, nor does it ask whether anyone sees it.
O Man, as long as you exist, know, have, and cherish,
You have not been delivered, believe me, of your burden.
―Angelus Silesius. The Cherubinic Wanderer.Though the kind of low- to mid-level monotonous jobs I tend to get are surprisingly exhausting. Both mentally and physically.
“Good luck, and don’t let the door hit you on my way out,” he seemed to be saying. We almost had a real conversation in those last days. But he was so frail and recoiled from it. I didn’t push it/
We almost had a conversation. But I likely went too honest too soon and he shut down. He was so frail by this point so I didn’t push it.
How we live is how we’ll die. I try to keep that in mind.
I take the term ‘broken world’ from the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. I am using it slightly different than he did, but not by much it. The ‘broken world’ to Marcel, as I take him, is the functional, reductive world that obscures from us the ‘Mystery of Being’, the living reality of God. The world were we are turned into our functions and away from 'creative fidelity’ and self-donating care for others as others.
It is the ‘broken world’ that induces in us the primal wound caused by the empathic failure of those who are meant to care for us. See note 6 below.
The Primal Wound by John Firman and Ann Gila. This is one of the most insightful books of psychology I have ever read. I can’t recommend it enough.
I have likened it to, say, if I were clenching my jaw, and not knowing it. Nobody is doing the clenching but me but I am completely unaware of it. It has become normalized and invisible. I cannot stop clenching until I notice I am doing so. This is the trick. What if the whole world didn’t want you to notice?
The first rule of the broken world is that you are not really supposed to talk about it. Yes, like Fight Club. Of course you can talk about it. But the second rule of the broken world is that if you do talk about it you will likely either ignored or punished. Third rule: you cannot talk about the fact that you are being punished. There are as many similar rules available until you get the message. An infinite amount.
Our endless distractions do us in.
"The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etcetera, is sure to be noticed." —Soren Kierkegaard. The Sickness Unto Death.
Or it is our resistance to what is being made known that keeps us awake. We go to war with ourselves and expect to drift blissfully back to sleep. It doesn’t work. Only in opening up completely will we find peace.
It is only initially a ‘shedding’ of layers. Nothing is lost and all will return. Once differentiated, what is now known can begin to be integrated.
“The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasuries of grace—all things are there.” —St. Macarius the Great.
This quote is central to everything I have ever found through contemplative practice. Don’t ever say I didn’t warn you! To ignore its full implication, is to not be on the path but on something quite different…
And it may not be worth much at all to speak of it at this point, but I offer it anyway.
If ‘plainly and directly’ are what I am doing. Words!
Or often quite more than two things, many things, an infinity of things.
We shall see…
Entrückung" (Rapture)
By Stefan George
I feel the air of another planet.
The friendly faces that were turned toward me just now
Are growing faint, dissolving in the darkness.
The path is lost, the friendly valleys fade.
I am only a spark of the holy fire,
I am only a whisper of the holy voice.
I dissolve into tones, circling, weaving,
In nameless wishes and unmapped desires,
Yielding myself submissively to the great breath.
A violent wind overwhelms me,
In the rapture of my ascending prayer:
I am transfigured in the sacred smoke,
I float upon a sea of crystal radiance—
I am only a spark of the holy fire,
I am only a whisper of the holy voice.Widening Circles
By Rainer Maria Rilke
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?That’s it all in a nutshell.
Of course, you cannot gain what you already have, and are.
Jack,
So lovely to hear your voice again. I pray you find your way. If I had any answers for you, I’d pass them along, but I don’t…just a poor sinner, struggling and failing. But I’ll offer you what happened to me as perhaps something to think about.
After my wife’s passing I too tried the monastic life, talked to three Abbots, and spent 7 months at a monastery as well. When I got back to Montana I was a broken man in every way possible. On the one year anniversary of my wife’s repose I went to a 6am liturgy and was in tears the entire time. No one said anything but my priest: “memory eternal”. That was it for the compassion in my church. I got home and begged God for help. I’d never done it before but following others’ examples opened the Gospels randomly to hear a voice. Luke 27-38. “If you love those that love you of what benefit is that to you for even sinners do the same…but love your enemies…expecting nothing back….Give and it will be given to you: a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and overflowing will be given to you. For with the same measure that you measure, it will be measured back to you.” That evening in the akathist this jumped out at me: “Let us pray with tears while the memory of the loved one who has fallen asleep is painfully fresh. Let us remember her name day and night, giving alms, feeding the hungry, and crying from the depths of our souls: Alleluia!”
The next day I walked out into the streets to help the homeless. The 4th person was a schizophrenic. I gave her a bag with a bagel and coffee and said “I brought you breakfast.” She reached into her cart and said “I want to pay you,” and handed me D batteries. I smiled and said, “I don’t want payment, but if you pray would you pray for my wife who passed away a year ago yesterday?” She said, “can I pray now?” And I nodded yes. Up to this point her speech had been barely comprehensible. She said “I’m going to pray a prayer to the Holy Spirit,” and launched into a beautiful prayer, clear as a bell and articulate. And then she started weeping for my wife, started a prayer for me and wept for me too. I wept the mile or so home and called a housebound friend. What he said startled me: “See how good God is? You gave her food for her body and she gave you food for your soul.” I had been waiting a year for someone to actually care rather than just give me obligatory condolences, to offer themselves in the spirit of love, and there it was finally in a homeless schizophrenic woman.
I spent the next year giving away a large chunk of what little wealth I had to those in need, walking the streets and alleys looking for addicts and prostitutes, trying to show those who had no one to love them that someone did indeed love them. St Maria of Paris became my most revered saint. I forgot about myself in giving to these others.
And then my demons got the better of me again, sending me into a spiritual darkness for a year, mostly holed up in my apartment and finding nothing in the obligatory platitudes, the rules and dogma of my faith which seemed dead and not alive and I stopped helping those in need. I moved yet again, this time to Santa Fe. Rather than move, perhaps running away would be a better way to put it.
I can’t say I’m better, but I stated working with a homeless man again a couple of weeks ago. He’s 85. I’m hoping the clouds will part and the sense of God will come back into my heart again.
God bless you, Jack. Keep working things and trust God will bring you to where you need to be. If you get down to Santa Fe, get in touch and let’s have coffee.
Warm regards,
Tim
“I could not reconcile the ever-present, unbounded wholeness I had recognized with the broken world I was living in and the who it demands us to be.”
Yes, and yes again. And good that you didn’t entirely leave the monastery, but dragged part of it with you back into the world. I think there are many, many people who find themselves caught in the same paradox; but seen rightly, it can be a gift and a blessing.