Cloud of Unknowing
Lift up your heart to God with a gentle stirring of love. Focus on him alone. Forget everything God made and everybody who exists and everything that’s going on in the world until your thoughts and emotions aren’t focused on or reaching towards anything. The Cloud of Unknowing
Gregg’s Reflection
As I began to move into Contemplation, I read Carmen Butcher’s translation of the Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous 14th century mystical text. I had been meditating for twenty-five years, and most of my path had unfolded in visions and inspiration during my meditation. My spiritual director, Mark Ritchie, helped me see the difference. He said, “Meditation is about knowing and discerning. Contemplation is about experiencing unity.” The idea of letting go of all thoughts, even inspiring ones, was foreign to me. Most of the markings of God’s faint path had come to me in times of meditation.
As I read The Cloud, I stumbled upon this passage:
Dealing with spiritual thoughts in prayer: You’ll find thoughts seducing you. For example, a thought may remind you of the many times God has been kind to you and how he is amazingly sweet and loving, full of grace and mercy. It likes nothing better than to grab your attention, and once it knows you’re listening, the thought will start rambling. It will chatter on about Christ’s Passion, drawing you in more and more, and then it will show you God’s miraculous, sacrificial kindness.
The thought loves you when you listen to it… and before you know it, your mind is scattered all over the place. How did this happen? You listened to the thought. You answered it, embraced it, and set it free. (The hardest thing for me was to learn to let go of divine thoughts and inspirations during my contemplative sit. GB)
Cloud of Unknowing Ch 7
I was convicted when I read that when you begin to dwell on a thought in contemplation, you just put something between you and God. That led me into letting go of thoughts. Now I realize letting go is the primary gesture of the spiritual journey.
So, in addition to never seeing more of God than a thick cloud of darkness, we are instructed to put a cloud of forgetting below us, blocking out any thoughts at all. I think this Pink Floyd album cover gives a good illustration.
So, now I do a contemplative sit in the morning, and I end my day in meditation. Most of the transformation of my ways of thinking and seeing have come from my times in silence and listening. I was amazed how many scripture verses lend credence to the Cloud surrounding God’s presence. Read on to discover God in the thick clouds of darkness.
Here is a short audio introduction:
Journaling Prompts:
How much of your prayer practice is talking to God, and how much is listening? “Be Still” are the words I come back to when thoughts interrupt my silence. Have you chosen a word to bring you back to the silence? What would it look like for you to wade into silence?
Scripture
By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night.
Exodus 13:21
The the angel of God, who had been traveling in front of Israel’s army withdrew and went behind them! The pillar of cloud also moved from in front and stood behind them
Exodus 14:9
While Aaron was speaking to the whole Israelite community, they looked toward the desert, and there was the glory of the Lord appearing in the cloud.
Exodus 16:10
Moses entered the darkness where God dwelled.
Exodus 20:21
As Moses went into the tent, the pillar of cloud would come down and stay at the entrance, while the Lord spoke with Moses.
Exodus 33:9
The cloud of the Lord was over them by day when they set out from the camp.
Numbers 10:34
The Lord has said he would dwell in thick darkness.
1 Kings 8:12
And the priests could not perform their services because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the temple of God.
2 Chronicles 5:14
He parted the heavens and came down; dark clouds were under his feet.
Psalm 18:9
God made the darkness his dwelling place.
Psalm 18:11
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:5
It is God alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to Him be honor and eternal dominion.
1 Timothy 6:16
Ancient Writings
Concerning mystical sight, leave behind with a strong effort senses and intellectual operations, and all existing and nonexisting things, and rise up unknowingly to union with Him who is above every substance and knowledge. Firmly fix footsteps above the heights of this mountain, and establish oneself in the sublime and unitive contemplations of the divine mind.
St Dionysius, Mystical Theology, chapter 1:1
Dionsyius exhorted his disciple Timothy: ‘My dear son Timothy, you should soar above yourself with untroubled mind, above all your powers, characteristics, and states, up into the still, secret darkness, so that you may come to know the unknown God above all gods. Forsake everything. God despises ideas.’
Meister Eckhart, Sermon 1
If someone is to perform an inner work, they must draw in all their powers as if in the corner of their soul, hiding from all images and forms, and then they shall be able to act. They must thus enter a forgetfulness and an unknowing. Where this word is to be heard, there must be stillness and silence. We cannot serve this word better than with stillness and silence; there it can be heard and properly understood, and there we are in a state of unknowing. Where we know nothing, there it reveals itself and makes itself known.
Meister Eckhart, Sermon 24
A man should flee his senses, turn his powers inward, and sink into a forgetting of all things and himself. “Withdraw from the unrest of external activities, then flee away and hide from the turmoil of inward thoughts, for they create but discord.” (Anselm, Proslogion 1). And so, if God is to speak his word and himself in the soul, she must be at rest and at peace.
Meister Eckhart, Sermon 101, McGinn, Essential Writings of Christian Mystics, p. 417
It’s the closest you can get to God here on earth, by waiting in this darkness and in this cloud.
Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing
The active life starts and ends on earth, but the contemplative life begins on earth and never ends.
Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing
Become blind during contemplative prayer and cut yourself off from needing to know things. Knowledge hinders, not helps you in contemplation. Be content feeling moved in a delightful, loving way by something mysterious and unknown, leaving you focused entirely on God, with no other thought then of him alone. Let your naked desire rest there.
Carmen Butcher, The Cloud of Unknowing, p. xxi
Lift up your heart to God with a gentle stirring of love. Focus on him alone. Want him, and not anything he’s made. Forget everything God made and everybody who exists and everything that’s going on in the world until your thoughts and emotions aren’t focused on or reaching towards anything.
Carmen Butcher, The Cloud of Unknowing P. 11
The first time you practice contemplation, you’ll only experience the darkness, like a cloud of unknowing. You’ll only know that in your will you feel a simple reaching out to God. You must also know that this darkness in this cloud will always be between you and your God, whatever you do so, be sure you make your home in this darkness. Then beat on the thick cloud of unknowing with the sharp arrow of longing and never stop loving, no matter what comes your way.
Carmen Butcher, The Cloud of Unknowing, p.12
Contemplation requires us to hide all people in all things past, present, and future, and all accomplishments, under the cloud of forgetting. To the cloud of unknowing above you and between you and your God, add the cloud of forgetting between you and creation. Hide all creative things, material and spiritual, good and bad, under the cloud of forgetting.
Carmen Butcher, The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 21
Modern Writings
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
When we are united with God in silence and darkness and when our faculties are raised above the level of their own natural activity, and rest in the pure, tranquil, incomprehensible cloud that surrounds the presence of God, our prayer and the grace that is given to us tend of their very nature to overflow invisibly through the mystical body of Christ; and we who dwell together invisibly in the bond of the one Spirit of God affect one another more than we can ever realize by our own union with God, by our spiritual vitality in Him.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 272
What does it feel like to enter a state of contemplation for the first time? The beloved text, The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous, has offered generations of contemplative seekers insights for living a more engaged life.
Written in England by an anonymous mystic in the 1300s, The Cloud of Unknowing is structured as a letter to a friend. The author invites us to find the courage to reach out for deeper union with God, who is yearning for union with us. To do this, we must first create an experience of stillness and openness that invites God to join us in presence.
It’s not always easy—we all struggle with finding moments of contemplative stillness in the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives. But if we can leave our daily concerns behind, even for a moment, the author of The Cloud reminds us that we have taken an important step towards a deeper union with God.
From that experience, our next challenge presents itself. How do we forget everything we think we know about ourselves—our names, duties, worries—long enough to wait for God in the stillness? This humbled state is something that Richard Rohr often calls “the beginner’s mind.” He writes, “The author of The Cloud of Unknowing is always saying you’ve got to balance your knowing with a willingness not to know…first we have to enter the Cloud of Forgetting—to forget all our certitudes, all our labels, all our explanations, just forget them! They are all a waste of time. They are nothing but our ego projecting itself and announcing itself. It has nothing to do with objective reality. If the world doesn’t learn this kind of humility, what we’re calling ‘beginner’s mind’, I think we’re in trouble.”
According to author of The Cloud of Unknowing, it’s when we have begun to regularly cultivate reaching for Divine union, that we experience a life of action and contemplation. The author writes, “The higher stage of the active life is also the lower stage of the contemplative life. That’s why you can’t be truly active unless you participate in the contemplative life, and you can’t be fully contemplative unless you participate in the active life. The active life starts and ends on earth, but the contemplative life begins on earth and never ends.”
Learn more about The Cloud of Unknowing on Season 5 of Turning to the Mystics podcast with James Finley.
Sitting with the Unknown, Turning back to the Wisdom of the Cloud of Unknowing, Center for Action and Contemplation, We Conspire series, 2/21/24