There is No Way to Stillness

Stillness is the Way.

Lift up your heart to God with a gentle stirring of love. Focus on him alone. Want him, and not anything he’s made. Think on nothing but him. Don’t let anything else run through your mind or will. Here’s how. Forget what you know. Forget everything God made and everybody who exists and everything that is going on in the world, until your thoughts and emotions aren’t focused on or reaching toward anything, not in a general way and not in a particular way. Let them be. For the moment, don’t care about anything.

—The Cloud of Unknowing.

Now when He was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, ^‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.¹

—Luke 17:20-21

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Time is short.

No doubt this is an obvious statement. But it is an obvious truth we are all too inclined to forget. We are mortal of course, and no one is guaranteed another day, but I know that I often act like the opposite is the case and that I have all the time in the world to fritter away my time with trivialities. Worse yet, even as I do so—and have long done so²—I am completely aware of just how pointless and trivial these endeavors are. And yet over my lifetime, I have chosen to engage in them, over and over. It is an exceedingly difficult habit to break.³

As one sign of this, it being winter, I recently went online looking to purchase a pair of gloves. Nearly all of them now tout the feature of having some kind of traction on the pointer finger so that even in the bitterest of cold weather,⁴ one could still be guaranteed the use of one’s smartphone. It’s one thing to be cold—this we might survive—but to be without the use of one’s smartphone has become unthinkable.⁵ This is only one small example of the myriad ways we rob ourselves of the finite amount of time given us. Even our clothing conspires against us.

We are building a new civilization that is founded on this very kind of distraction. We have been at it for a long while now, the so-called attention economy. One of its singular properties—if not its central purpose—is that of being anti-contemplative.⁶ By that I mean, that the purpose and fulfillment of any human life is now deemed entirely external. The Kingdom of Getting and Spending is Outside You.

Though we are promised that we will be liberated from the illusion of any goals other than ones of our own choosing, it isn’t so. Because therein lies the trick. Since we can no longer be trusted to know what is good for ourselves—with all our biases and irrational choices—our goals and choices can only be dispassionately determined by neutral experts.⁷ Don’t worry, it’s science.

To the chagrin of the planners, we aren’t so easily molded into our new and proper form. No matter how much we might (or might not) believe in the new dispensation, something in us rebels, something in us knows it can’t possibly work.

Or as T.S. Eliot put it:

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be. 

But there is no such escape and there is no such system.

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All of this is just to say that there is another way to live than the way we have been sold. Though we all know this—we can still sense it, however dimly, in our bones— we are continually prompted to forget.⁸ Even if we do forget for a time and put it out of our minds, something still gnaws at us, and all the various distractions we are offered can avail us only for a time—if they do so at all.

Thomas Merton, in discussing the Desert Fathers, puts it this way:

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.⁹

This disaster is happening all around us, and, more importantly, within us. But we can choose to live differently. We don’t need anyone’s permission and there is absolutely nothing we need to purchase or obtain to begin. We already have everything we need.

But again: time is short.

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My initiation into a contemplative practice began as a young man 25 years or so ago in the Zen tradition. I had already looked into various forms of Christianity but hadn’t found what I was looking for. I wanted something that would offer me a different way of experiencing and being in the world, and I didn’t see that happening in Christianity.¹⁰ At this point, the Tao Te Ching was already a great influence on me, so it seemed natural to look to Zen to find a practice to begin to live out the contemplative path.

Within the first year or so I decided, in my flush of enthusiasm, to sign up for a three-day Sesshin, or meditation retreat. It took place in an otherwise unremarkable suburban neighborhood in the basement of a practitioner’s house. For the next few days, I would be spending nearly all of my time there facing a wall in meditation.

I arrived Friday evening after work somewhat apprehensive but excited to get started. I settled in and we sat for about two hours before rolling out our sleeping bags for the night. The next day started early and we would need our rest.

I think we got going around 5 a.m.—which at the time was obscenely early for me—and it didn’t take long for things to turn. By around 7 a.m. or so, after only a few hours of sitting, I found that I was in so much pain, both physically and emotionally, that I could hardly stand to be there anymore. At this point, I started to panic. It felt like everything was coming apart, and me right in the middle of it. I felt like I was going to die.

Part of Zen practice is what is known as dokusan—an interview with the teacher. Which is where I anxiously unburdened myself. I told him what was happening. The sense that I had to get out of there was very palpable and urgent to me. But he sat very calmly and said to me, “I would hate for you to go just when you are finally meeting yourself.” This stopped me in my tracks.

So I stayed. It was an excruciating and humiliating experience. Usually, in terms of the world, we think of ‘humiliation’ as a bad thing.¹¹ At the time I certainly did. But it isn’t. Humiliation is a reconciliation with reality. The Zen teacher was right, I had finally met myself but worse than that, I didn’t like what I saw at all. What I saw was a young man so filled with pain and anxiety that was so obvious he couldn’t see it. I saw someone whose brokenness lay just below the surface of an artificial construction called ‘Jack’. I didn’t like what I saw at all.

I left the retreat feeling a great relief that the whole ordeal was over. I realized that what I had encountered was far too intense for me to deal with in this way. Maybe it was cowardice—it probably was—but I then turned my attention towards Aikido and Tai Chi. In retrospect, I don’t think it was a bad choice at all. Practicing the martial arts gave me confidence in myself, and cultivated attention. I also turned to therapy for a time, a practice I am still ambivalent about, though I think it holds great promise.

Slowly I returned to a meditation practice, which over time transitioned from Zen to silent Contemplative Prayer. It took me a while to attempt practicing anything nearly as intense as the Zen retreat. Whenever I would start to feel overwhelmed I allowed myself to pause and integrate what was coming up for me. Without really knowing it I took a somewhat more gentle path and reconciled myself to taking things slowly. At least I had learned that much.

Failure is instructive. It would almost be pointless for life to go completely to our liking, even if such a thing were possible, which of course, it thankfully isn’t.

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So stop hesitating. Do this work until you feel the delight of it. In the trying is the desire. The first time you practice contemplation, you’ll only experience a darkness, like a cloud of unknowing. You won’t know what this is. You’ll only know that in your will you feel a simple reaching out to God. You must also know that this darkness and this cloud will always be between you and your God, whatever you do. They will always keep you from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your intellect and will block you from feeling him fully in the sweetness of love in your emotions. So, be sure you make your home in this darkness. Stay there as long as you can, crying out to him over and over again, because you love him. It’s the closest you can get to God here on earth, by waiting in this darkness and in this cloud. Work at this diligently, as I’ve asked you to, and know that God’s mercy will lead you there.

—The Cloud of Unknowing.

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I don’t tell you this to discourage you but rather to do the opposite. We are all broken, some more than others, but no one escapes it. We can frequently form our whole lives and our personalities around the stubborn determination to hide this brokenness from not only the detection of others but most importantly from ourselves.

The degree to which we are successful in hiding is the degree to which we fail to realize the rare and precious opportunity of our lives. We are made for far more than getting and spending; much more than social approval; much more than the hedonic calculus. We are made to know through love the infinite love of the unknowable, unfathomable mystery of the Unknowable God, who is Love. The Kingdom of Love is within you and amongst us.

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When I went to the monastery I hoped to find a way to live outside of the system. I hoped that there was still a way to simply exit once and for all. In my naivete, I was hoping to find a way to form a contemplative community. That’s not how it turned out. I am probably not ready for that. In the meantime, what we can all do is live a contemplative life where we find ourselves. And maybe in so doing, we will find a way, despite ourselves, to live together. I still hope for a life of silence, solitude, and simplicity in community. A life lived away from the machine and more intimately with nature.

If that is ever to happen we don’t have to wait. We can start right now.

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The problem with contemplation is that works. It works so well that if you practice it all that is hidden in you will be made known. This can be a painful process because we will frequently not like what we see in ourselves, i.e., all of our brokenness, petty hatred, jealousy, anger, sadness, etc. In other words, the whole mess we call the human condition. No one escapes it. And what does surface in us will be, therefore, both utterly surprising and completely familiar. Ah, so this is what has been running my life! In seeing it, in knowing it intimately, however long it takes, what has been long oppressing us just pops like a soap bubble and is gone. We are free.¹²

It is a strange thing that happens to you when you sit still. Things begin to settle down. It may take years, even decades of diligent work, but eventually, we will only settle down when all that unsettles us is made known. I found that out the hard way at the Zen retreat long ago. It was surely the best thing I could have found out. It entirely changed my life.¹³ Without it my time in silence and solitude at the monastery would probably never have happened. It certainly wouldn’t have been as fruitful.

In this, needless to sayt, I do not claim to be anything other than a beginner. Always a beginner.¹⁴ The further one travels the less one knows.¹⁵ Yet, it is by unknowing that we begin to understand, and it is by coming completely undone that we find ourselves. This is, I think, the only way it can be. The Anonymous author of The Cloud tells us, again and again, that God cannot be known through knowledge but only through Love.¹⁶ This is for us, the good news.

So today is the perfect day to sit still in silence. It is a good day to continue, or to begin, doing so. It is a good day to face all that is within ourselves, all that is ugly and also everything beautiful. This beginning can be found no further than the ground on which we are already standing, in the chair we are right now sitting. It is both just that simple and just that difficult.

Time is short.

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The heart itself is only a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and lions, there are poisonous beasts, and all the treasures of evil, there are rough and uneven roads, there are precipes; but there too is God and the angels, life is there, and the Kingdom, there too is light, and there the apostles and heavenly cities, and treasures of grace. All things lie within that little space. – St Macarius.

1. In some translations, it is rendered, “The Kingdom of God is amongst you”. Which I think is also true, and follows—if not logically, then in experience—from the Kingdom being within, i.e., everywhere present and filling all things. Some translators give the reason that since Jesus is talking to Pharisees, he couldn’t possibly be telling them that the Kingdom of God is within them. I, for one, think that is exactly what he is saying. I dare say this is a prominent fork in various interpretive traditions of Christianity. Regardless, it is hardly insignificant.

2. I weep at the amount of time I have wasted in front of a TV. Frequently not even enjoying what I was watching. The same goes double, at least, for the internet.

3. We live in what I have called The Kingdom of Infinite Distraction. Even when I lived at the monastery, far from the fevers of the world, it still had its hooks in me, or rather my hooks in it.

4. Speaking of cold weather it is cold here at the moment—and I do mean cold. The internet weather is telling me it is currently -9 F. For those readers who use Celsius, that would be nearly -23 C. And yet! And yet, intrepid Substackist that I am, I boldly sallied forth into the bitterness. When it gets this cold it isn’t all that bad, one just goes numb. It can be quite invigorating. Cold shower, anyone?

5. Recently, I was almost unable to get a credit card at my bank—a bank that I have used for decades—because the only way I could be “verified” was through receiving a text to my phone. I don’t have a smartphone and I don’t want one. I had to jump through many hoops to prove my identity even though I was sitting right there in the bank.

6. Tivoli Gardens in Denmark, the second oldest amusement park in the world, was founded in 1843 by Georg Carstensen when he convinced the King of Denmark that, “when the people are amusing themselves, they do not think about politics.” Now, the whole of our lives are encouraged to be amusement parks and entertainment.

7. We are all heirs to the hedonic calculus, which offers us a very simple equation to determine the direction of our lives: if it gives pleasure, then it is good; if it is painful, then it is bad. This is the fundamental basis of our economy, and what passes for our culture, i.e., anti-culture. We are formed now almost entirely by the carrot and the stick, and therefore whoever wields them, holds our lives in their hands—benevolently, we can surely assume. This is the new freedom being forced upon us.

8. Speaking for myself, there have been long stretches of my life in which I might have been quite glad to forget, try as I might. Even if it worked, it didn’t work. Or rather, the more it worked the worse things got. It took me a long time to figure that out.

9. From the introduction to The Wisdom of the Desert. This is a small, and excellent, collection of the sayings of the Desert Fathers. The introduction itself is worth the price of the book.

10. I was wrong.

11. It certainly can be—when used as a weapon to degrade another.

12. Then on to the next thing, and the next one…and the next one. On and on.

13. “This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.” —The Man Watching. Rainer Maria Rilke. https://www.michaelppowers.com/wisdom/rilke.html

14. “You’re human so watch out for that enemy, pride. Never think you are holier or better than anyone else. Never confuse the worthiness of your calling with who you are.” —The Cloud of Unknowing.

15. Cf. Tao Te Ching. Chapter 47.

16. “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

 Love never ends.” —1 Corinthians 13:4-8