Please Note: 2011 Annual Lecture cancelled
London Centre for Spirituality Annual Lecture, 2010
Some lines from Robert Browning’s poem, The Ring and the Book,
but priests
Should study passion; how else cure mankind,
Who come for help in passionate extremes?
(Browning 1943, vi. Ll. 2078-80)
My title, ‘Going Nowhere’, is intended both to state a truth and to flag a warning. The truth is that, if we want to rest in God, there is no ‘where’ where we can go. Thomas Merton said, ‘I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. The gate of heaven is everywhere’ (Bourgeault 2004, p 14). And the author of the Cloud – conscious, no doubt, of our endless capacity for literal mindedness – reminds us that,
Heaven is as near down as up, and up as down, behind as before, before as behind, . . . so much so that, if anyone truly desired to be in heaven then, at that moment, he would be in heaven – spiritually. For the sure and nearest way there is achieved by desire, and not by walking. (The Cloud of Unknowing, chapter 60, my translation)
Contemplatives have no ‘where’ to go when they seek God.
At the same time, my title, ‘Going Nowhere’ is intended also to suggest a darker possibility. In my experience, there are times when the urge to engage in more silent and wordless forms of prayer goes nowhere because, far from deepening our relationship with God, the attraction of silence – however devoutly intended – may be an unconscious strategy, designed to evade the painful processes through which God is laboring to purify our hearts. Both as people who pray and as spiritual directors, we need to be alert to this danger. Contemplative prayer is not a state of suspended animation.
The subject of contemplative prayer – by which I mean simple, affective ways of praying; prayer in which we feel drawn into silent adoration - is close to my heart. When I was 18 years old I left home, intent on joining a Benedictine Community, and for the next four and a half years I had the extraordinary privilege of being inducted into the monastic life. It was a hugely precious experience. Not least, to read my way through many of the classic texts of western spirituality and contemplative prayer, while living a life that would have been familiar to Benedict, and Bede, and Bernard, and all the great monastic figures of the past.
There was so much that was good about that experience and yet, after four and a half years, I crashed out of it, suffering from an anorexic style breakdown.
It took many years – including years of psychotherapy – before I could begin to make sense of my monastic days. Along the way I had to learn that certain spiritual practices and disciplines, not least disciplines of silent prayer and meditation, can actually be dangerous if embarked on prematurely, or if they are used to evade the challenges of emotional and spiritual growth. The author of the Cloud makes this very clear – I had read his warnings, but in my hubris had not imagined that they might apply to me.
Today, we are living in a very rich and exciting time when many of the treasures of Christian spirituality are being recovered and made available, even to people who have little connection with the church. In many ways, this is a great thing. There has been a bourgeoning of Ignatian spirituality; and now, not least through the work of Centering Prayer and John Main’s Christian Meditation Movement, some of the riches of more silent forms of prayer are finding their way onto the market – and the word ‘market’ seems not wholly inappropriate because there is a sense in which these forms of prayer are being packaged and marketed in a very attractive, accessible and effective way.
Perhaps I am being overcautious – and I may well be being influenced by my personal history - but several conversations, over recent years, with friends and directees who have attended Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation workshops have disturbed me. I have four areas of concern,
The level of deep rest accessed during the prayer period loosens up the hardpan around the emotional weeds stored in the unconscious, of which the body seems to be the warehouse. The psyche begins to evacuate spontaneously the undigested emotional material of a lifetime, opening up new space for self- knowledge, freedom of choice, and the discovery of the divine presence within. As a consequence, a growing trust in God, a bonding with the Divine Therapist, enables us to endure the process. (Bourgeault 2004, p 95)
There is indeed evidence to show that deep states of relaxation and meditation can loosen the moorings of repressed experience. In TM this is called unstressing, which occurs when repressed feelings, perhaps of anger or panic resurface. Delmonte reports,
Unstressing can be so strong for some people that they give up meditation. Others, especially those with a history of psychogenic disorders, have overt psychotic episodes during meditation. Unpleasant physical and emotional sensations have been reported by a sizeable minority of subjects. (Delmonte 1987, p. 45, references to research literature given in the original)
This should be a caution to us. If what Keating calls ‘the undigested emotional material of a lifetime’ was just to be evacuated, we would be losing whole chunks of our life experience; maybe some of it very painful but, nevertheless, precious because it is part of us and still in need of healing. Evacuation, if it occurred, would lead to an impairment of our personalities.
Now, I don’t want to spend this evening in negative vein, picking holes in schools of prayer which may be helping many people – despite my reservations. What I would like to do, though, is to take a fresh look at the contemplative tradition of prayer, and to ask – as far as I can, and from a human point of view – what this prayer is, what can assist it, and – from a psychological perspective – what its value may be. This will provide us with a rich canvas on which to work, and I will be more than happy, when we come to the discussion, if you can allay my fears about Centering Prayer and the Christian Meditation Movement.
Let me begin with some thoughts about the human condition: who is it who prays?
According to the Book of Genesis, we human beings are a curious amalgam: dust of the earth – frail, mortal, finite – and yet, made in the image of God. Creatures of a season (and I thank God I am only the creature of a season!), we fall like the leaves in autumn; and yet, we have eternal longings in our hearts.
The fact that we are made in God’s image means that, ultimately, nothing less than life with God will satisfy our needs. We are blest (or cursed) with an infinity of Eros. Augustine knew this: ‘You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you’ (Augustine 1992, p. 3), he said. But Eros, as Diotima instructed Socrates, is ‘a great spirit . . . half-god and half-man’ (Plato 1951, p. 81). Music, poetry, the visual and plastic arts, religion, conquest, scientific endeavour, the desire for love, and so on, are all fuelled by Eros – which can ennoble or destroy us.
If we ask, what is contemplative prayer? What are contemplatives seeking? The answer, I think, is union with God: union with God, though faith, in love. Eros is the fuel that drives contemplative prayer: the desire to know God, to love God, to be at one with God, and to find everyone and everything in God. A proud or hardhearted contemplative is a contradiction in terms.
Eros is our most precious and dangerous possession. Like a three-stage rocket it is compounded of the desire to know and the desire to be united with another in love, both driven by an almost cosmically powerful force of nature. If all were well, and we lived in an unfallen universe, these three elements would always work together: the desire to know would be informed by love, and both of them would be energized for action.
But in the fallen universe in which we live, they split apart. Now, the desire to know and the compulsion to love so easily get perverted into acts of power, or the need to possess or to depend, and the frustrated energetic power of Eros manifests as aggression.
This means that a prime task of the spiritual life is the healing of our Eros. Only as our Eros is healed and reintegrated will we be united with God in love, and find our rightful place in the creation. This is a long, painful, and difficult business because, in it and through it, we have to engage with the elemental forces in our lives. By the same token, though, it is also a glorious business, because it puts us in touch with the wellsprings of our being.
Before we can think about any particular forms of prayer – whether we might best be helped by Lectio divina, or Ignatian style meditation, or Centering Payer, or whatever, we have to understand what the task is, and where our current needs for healing lie. These will dictate the forms of prayer that are most appropriate for whatever stage of the journey we happen to be on.
My problem, as a young monk, was that I was so keen to advance into what I took to be the more elevated states of prayer that I was not prepared to spend the time needed to lay wise, sound, and deep foundations. No wonder I fell so far and fast. But two of Jesus’ sayings have helped me to understand the nature of the healing process by which our Eros is purified, and its various strands reconnected with each other.
In the Beatitudes Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God’ (Matthew 5.8, NRSV). And, later in the Sermon on the Mount, he says,
The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6.22-23, NRSV)
In their great International Critical Commentary on Saint Matthew’s Gospel, Davies and Allison tell us that,
In the biblical tradition, the heart is the real or true self, the psyche at its deepest level; it is the seat of the emotions (Deut. 28.47, Prov 27.11; Isa 35.4; Acts 14.17), volition (Prov 6.18; Jer 3.17, 23.20; Dan 1.8), and the intellect (Gen 27.41; Jg 5.16; Mk 2.6), as well as the internal sphere in which divinity is encountered (Ps 27.8; Eph 3.17) (Davies and Allison 2004, p. 456)
The heart is the place where Eros dwells. Eros is God given, yet – in all of us, I guess – we know it only in damaged or distorted form. According to Jesus, the purification of the heart – the purging and repairing of our Eros - is the prerequisite for seeing God; for the ultimate act of contemplation.
According to the Sermon on the Mount a pure heart is free of adulterous thoughts (5.27), is not concerned with outward show (6.1-18), and dwells with its treasure in heaven (6.21). In other words, if our hearts were pure we would be able to love in a non-possessive way, be free from our narcissistic tendencies, and enjoy the quiet imperturbability of those who know that ‘all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’ (Julian of Norwich 1998, p 22).
Then Jesus says,
The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6.22-23, NRSV)
We may find it difficult to grasp Jesus’ meaning because we take it for granted that our sight depends on our ability to detect rays of light coming to us from outside. But this is a modern theory. In the ancient world, which was the world of the Bible, it was believed that we see because our eyes contain a light, or a fire, like the sun. This is why Biblical authors speak of the ‘light of the eyes’ (Prov 15.30; Tob 10.5, 11.13); of eyes becoming dimmed, or darkened (Gen 27.1; 48.10; Deut 34.7 etc); and of God ‘enlightening’ or ‘brightening’ the eyes (Ezra 9.8; 1 Sam 14.24-30). It was believed that the eyes sent out rays of light by which we see (2 Sam 12.11; Ecclus. 23.19), and stories were told of occasions when light from people’s eyes became so intense as to be visible (Dan 10.6; Rev 1.14, 2.18).
According to the ancient theory of sight, the accuracy of our vision depends on the quality of the light in our eyes. Although misguided from the perspective of modern physics, there is considerable psychological truth in this view. As we now know, we never see anything as it is in itself but, rather, in the colour, shape and form determined by our brains. We may not literally have a light or a fire in our eyes, but our perceptions are almost completely coloured – if not determined – by what is in our minds. In a real sense, we only see what we are programmed to see. The Biblical authors were alert to the psychological dimension of perception when they referred, metaphorically, to a ‘good eye’, as a synonym for generosity, and an ‘evil eye’ as a synonym for envy. According to Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, the good, generous, healthy eye is – in Greek – haplous – ‘single’, ‘sincere’, ‘undivided’.
Here, as with purity of heart, it seems that our capacity for contemplation – our ability to see things as they really are – is conditioned by the state of our inner world. If our hearts are in thrall to envy, we will believe that other people’s good fortune is achieved at our expense, and will hate them accordingly. On the other hand, if our heart is pure, if our eye is ‘single’, we will see people and situations from God’s point of view, without selfish admixture of our own. Then we will weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who rejoice – as Jesus would have done.
How can an ‘evil eye’ be transformed into a ‘good eye’, so that it becomes ‘single’, ‘sincere’, ‘undivided’? How can a heart in which Eros has been fractured into its component parts, so that they work against each other, gradually be cleansed and reintegrated so that it becomes more genuinely loving? Can contemplative prayer assist with this?
I think it can, but only to the extent that contemplative prayer allows us to register and attend to the distorted motions of our hearts. But can contemplative prayer do this? Or does it necessarily require us to ignore, or to look beyond, our inner turmoil?
Dictionaries of spirituality give sophisticated theological definitions of contemplation, but I want to attend to the root meaning of the word. Etymologically speaking, ‘to contemplate’ comes from the Latin, contemplari, which means, ‘to mark out carefully a templum or place for auguries’ (Chambers Dictionary, 9th edition). This may sound unpromising, but it fits my purpose well.
In ancient Rome and Etruria, an augur was a priest whose function was to interpret the will of the gods by studying the flight of birds. Before augury could begin a templum, or sacred space within which discernment could occur, had to be established. Ideally it was a cube. During the period of observation strict silence was maintained as the augur registered the species, sounds, and movements of the birds. Observation was followed by interpretation: what were the gods saying through the motions of the birds?
A sacred space, inhabited by hopping, fluttering, flying, singing creatures, of very different size, habit and plumage, some of them highly predatory: what a wonderful description of our hearts, not least in times of prayer! Only, in times of prayer, we are very often bidden to let the birds flutter and not give them our attention. This may sometimes be appropriate, but I want to suggest that simply withholding attention, of itself, does little to transform us.
If you have been conditioned to ignore thoughts that come to you in prayer, this may sound like heresy. But maybe the ancient world can help us make some healing connections between contemplation, observation and interpretation, and in a way that has more resonance with depth psychological understandings than Thomas Keating’s notion of evacuating the contents of the unconscious.
For me, a key figure here – one of the really great masters of the spiritual life – is Evagrius of Pontus, or Evagrius the Hermit as he is sometimes known.
Evagrius was a fourth century monastic theologian whose contributions to our understanding of contemplative prayer are only now being fully recognised, recovered, and translated. Condemned in the mid-6th century, for his supposed Originistic tendencies, many of his writings continued to circulate pseudonymously and have always had a profound influence on the mystical theology of the Orthodox Churches.
Evagrius divided the Christian life into two main stages: the Practical life and the Gnostic life.
At the outset – perhaps when we begin simply trying to sit still and open our hearts to God in prayer - we are likely to find that we are almost totally subject to swings and surges of mood and passion, particularly, says Evagrius, from what he calls our disordered concupiscence and irascibility, which tend to manifest in eight characteristic sets of thoughts: gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride (Sinkewicz 2003, pp xxvi – xxx). Rather sadly though, when these eight diagnostic categories – which is what Evagrius intended them to be – reached the West, they were reclassified as the seven deadly sins, which sounds negative and forbidding. (Tilby 2009, p 19f). In times of prayer, despite our best intentions, these thoughts easily capture our imaginations and may bring about physical changes in our bodies, sometimes causing us to behave in uncontrollable ways.
Now the really significant thing, I think, from a psychological point of view, is that Evagrius does not counsel us to ignore, or to try to look through or beyond these disturbing thoughts during our times of prayer. Instead he says,
If one of the monks should wish to acquire experience with the cruel demons and become familiar with their skill, let him observe the thoughts and let him note their intensity and their relaxation, their interrelationships, their occasions, which of the demons do this or that particular thing, what sort of demon follows upon another and which does not follow another; and let him seek from Christ the reasons for these things. (Praktikos 50. Sinkewicz 2003, p. 106)
If we were to substitute ‘birds’ for ‘demons’ and ‘thoughts’, we might be back with the augurs silently contemplating significant developments in their field of view. Leaping forward to the last century, we might also be with Freud and the other early psychoanalysts, who learned that if we want to get to the roots of unconscious conflict, we have to abandon rational thought and conscious explanation, and simply observe the free flowing movement of our thoughts, fantasies and feelings as we relax on a couch.
Experience shows that this is difficult to do. In a psychotherapy session, as in a time of prayer, we may be ashamed to acknowledge, even to ourselves, the content of our thoughts and the ways we enact them. At other times, we may not dare to free associate because – consciously or unconsciously – we are terrified that unknown forces (call them demons if you will) in our inner worlds will possess or fragment our minds. Alternatively, our fear may be that, if we become aware of some repressed impulse, we will not be able to live with ourselves, or will have no option but to enact it, regardless of consequences. So we may freeze our minds into a state of suspended animation: almost deliberately going nowhere, because we fear that any movement might cause the bottom to fall out of our world.
What Evagrius is proposing, for this first stage of the spiritual journey, is that we very actively take note of the thoughts, feelings, impulses, and inclinations which try to take hold of us during times of prayer. Only, and this is the crucial thing, with God’s help we struggle not to be possessed by them but, like an ornithologist or an augur, simply to observe them, and make connections between them.
So, maybe, when we sit in prayer, we spontaneously remember a painful incident in which someone slighted us. Instantly, and as if no time has elapsed since the original event, we are furious with that person. If Evagrius was sitting beside us, though, he might wonder what we had been thinking or feeling in the moments before this incident came to mind. At first, we might be tempted to say, “I wasn’t feeling or thinking anything”. But then we might remember that, earlier in the day, we had spoken slightingly to someone else, rather in the way we are raging at another person for slighting us now. So what is going on? Could it be that, subconsciously, we were feeling guilty about our earlier action, but we didn’t want to acknowledge it so, unconsciously, we blocked our guilt feelings by conjuring up a memory of a time when we were the wounded party – which allows us to bask in righteous indignation! “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse – who can understand it?” says God to Jeremiah (17.9).
From Evagrius’ point of view, there is a double benefit to be gained from this kind of introspection. On the one hand, we gain in self-knowledge, which gradually helps us to become more humble, more realistic about ourselves, and more honest in our relationships with God and other people. At the same time, we are also becoming more conversant with the ways in which our minds work. So, the next time we find ourselves smarting and full of fury with someone else for the way they have treated us, we may just pause long enough to ask ourselves whether we are not using righteous indignation to ward off a painful bit of self-knowledge about the way we have treated another person – and so on, and so on.
As anyone who has been in analysis knows, this can be a lengthy process. Fortunately – and unlike even the most dedicated and healthy psychoanalyst – God has all the time in the world. As the Japanese Christian theologian, Kosuke Koyama used to remind us (Koyama 1979, pp. 3-7), God was happy to walk through the wilderness with the Children of Israel, at three miles an hour for forty years, just to help them learn they could not live by bread alone!
Why is this important? Because - and here I link back to what I was saying about the purification of the heart and the ‘light’ of our eyes, those internal attitudes which colour our perceptions – Evagrius sees the fruit of this long drawn out process of quiet observation, which gradually leads to increased self-knowledge and the capacity to be aware of our internal disturbances without being compelled to act them out, as the prerequisite for genuine contemplation, for simply being able to see ourselves, and other people, and the world around us, as they really are – and not as they appear to be when distorted by our prejudicial gaze.
This is the beginning of what Evagrius calls the Gnostic life, when we begin to gain some understanding of the deep structures of creation. Of this stage, Angela Tilby writes,
Human beings . . now learn how to overcome ignorance, to understand their true place in the world, not as controlling, nor as subordinate but as those who participate in nature and take tranquil and non-possessive delight in its diversity. This enables them to grasp the world as the creation of the Logos, designed to lead beyond itself to pure contemplation. This is perhaps best called natural contemplation (Tilby 2009, p. 51)
It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this development, when we begin to see things and people and events as they really are, free from our neurotic, or narcissistic, or even psychotic tendencies to spin reality to suit our private vision of the world. Tilby calls it natural contemplation, but my reading of Evagrius makes it rather more significant than this, because, with his rather neo-Platonic perspective, he thinks that we are beginning to glimpse the logos of things: the way they are in the mind and heart of God.
Beyond this first stage of the Gnostic life lies a further stage about which Evagrius is reticent to speak. Once the contemplative has begun to see life through the eyes of God, then
direct and unitary knowledge of God is granted to the Gnostic during the rare and privileged moments of pure prayers. It presumes not only the purification of the passionate part of the soul and the attainment of impassibility, but also the voiding of the mind of all representations and all forms, both those associated with created natures and even those of God himself. At this point the intellect may be granted to see itself as ‘the place of God’. Evagrius describes this experience in Thoughts 39: ‘When the mind has put off the old self and shall put on the one born of grace (cf. Col 3.9f), then it will see its own state in the time of prayer resembling sapphire or the colour of heaven; this state scripture calls the place of God that was seen by the elders on Mount Sinai (cf. Ex 24.9-11).’ . . . In these special moments of prayer then’ (comments Sinkewicz) the mind sees itself as luminous, and this light that allows it to see itself is none other than the light of the Holy Trinity (Sinkewicz 2003, p. xxxvf)
We are far beyond my comprehension! But Evagrius’ two-stage model of the Christian path strikes me as possessing enormous theological and psychological sophistication.
What I value about Evagrius’ approach, compared with other approaches to prayer that either ignore the unconscious, or treat it as something that can be evacuated, is that it is intensely dynamic. Of course, we have to allow for his fourth century perspective. In his writings he moves seamlessly between describing our disturbances in prayer as due to thoughts, and then attributing them to devils. At the least, though, this is a vivid way of affirming that our thoughts have lives of their own, and are not under the control of our conscious minds. From a psychological perspective, this recognition of unconscious processes is important, because it brings our greater self into the arena of prayer, and relativises the workings of the ego. But what implications does Evagrius’ approach have for spiritual direction?
If we stay with the monastic tradition, and keep close to Evagrius’ day, we can get some helpful guidance from the Rule of St Benedict, which was composed about a hundred years after Evagrius’s death.
Benedict says that the prime task of the monk is truly to seek God. (McCann 1952, p. 7). He does not pretend it will be an easy journey. He warns that the ‘amendment of evil habit or the preservation of charity’ may require some strictness of discipline. Yet, he promises that
as we progress in our monastic life and in faith, our hearts shall be enlarged, and we shall run with unspeakable sweetness of love in the way of God’s commandments . . (McCann 1952, p. 13)
By the ‘enlargement our hearts’ I take Benedict to mean that, rightly borne, the struggles of the way will increase our capacity for loving.
How does Benedict suggest we deal with the thoughts that disturb us during times of prayer? In chapter 4 of his Rule, he says,
When evil thoughts come into one’s heart, to dash them at once on the rock of Christ and to manifest them to one’s spiritual father. (McCann 1952, p. 29)
‘Dashing’ our thoughts on the rock of Christ sounds a bit melodramatic. But maybe Benedict – who elsewhere shows himself to have been a compassionate and understanding spiritual father – meant something more akin to bringing our disturbing thoughts to Jesus, as we might bring a personal need, or even a mad friend for healing. This would be in line with Evagrius’ advice that we seek from ‘Christ the reasons for these things’ (Sinkewicz 2003, p. 106).
Again, in his chapter on Humility, Benedict writes,
The fifth degree of humility is that (the monk) humbly confess and conceal not from his abbot any evil thoughts that enter his heart, or any secret sins he has committed. (McCann 1952, p. 45)
And in the chapter, Of those who offend in any other matters, while Benedict stipulates that monks who lose or damage the community’s property, or commit other faults against the public good, shall confess publicly to the Abbot and community, he goes on to say,
Should the matter be a secret sin of the soul, let him tell such a thing to the abbot alone, or to a spiritual father; for they know how to cure both their own wounds and the wounds of others without disclosing them and publishing them. (McCann 1952, p. 109)
The key to monastic spiritual direction – to ‘monastic therapy’, if we can call it this - lies in our readiness to expose the inner truth about ourselves to another person, within the context of an enduring, secure, and confidential relationship. Here we seem to have a clear connection between the monastic tradition of contemplative prayer, psychoanalysis, and spiritual direction.
This is no mean task. In one of his papers, C G Jung writes
That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ – all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself – that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved – what then? Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed: there is then no more talk of love and long-suffering; we say to the brother within us “Raca”, and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide him from the world, we deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves, and had it been God himself who drew near us in this despicable form we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock crowed. (Jung CW vol. xi. §520)
Strong words, but if you have ever trembled in the confessional you may be inclined to agree that Jung has not dramatized his case.
Having said this, though, I can sense Evagrius tapping me on the shoulder. One of the really interesting things brought out by Angela Tilby in her recent book on Evagrius, which is rather badly titled, The Seven Deadly Sins, is that Evagrius did not call the thoughts sins. Talk of sin only appeared when Cassian translated some of Evagrius’s ideas – without acknowledgement – into a western, Latin context. Evagrius himself was more akin to the psychoanalyst who has no interest in attributing blame, or accusing his patient of sin, but is intent simply on trying to understand and unravel the complicated workings of his unconscious thoughts.
The Sacrament of Reconciliation has an important place in the spiritual life; but its most valuable contribution, I have often found, is not in the heat of sin and guilt, when someone is feeling intensely guilty and longing to get their self-accusing super-ego off their back. Confession at this stage may simply take the energy out of our quest for understanding. Rather, the best place for confession is often somewhat further down the line, when we have had greater opportunity to understand our actions, engage with them, and are ready to move on. Then we can take real responsibility for actions which, at the time when we committed them, were beyond our understanding or control.
On the other hand, spiritual directors working in the Benedictine tradition may be able to provide us with a space in which we can reflect on the species and movements of the birds in our inner worlds during our times of prayer: the nature and the sequence of our tormenting thoughts. If, augur-like, we can learn to understand them, they will lay bare the ways in which our Eros is wounded, and make clear its needs for healing.
My title, ‘Going Nowhere’, was intended to state a truth and to flag a danger. To Evagrius’s Gnostic, there is no ‘where’ to go when we seek God because the whole world is luminous with the divine Logos. At the same time, forms of silent prayer can be dead ends, or even counterproductive, if they prevent deeper integration.
However we pray, a prime concern for all of us is the healing and restoration of our Eros. Jesus talks of the purification of the heart and the single eye. I believe that Evagrius of Pontus has much to teach us about the Practical Life, in which greater integration is achieved between conscious and unconscious processes. These internal reconnections lay the foundation for the unclouded vision of things and, ultimately, to see the Face of God. As Evagrius himself puts it,
Just as it is impossible to see one’s own image in water that has been disturbed, so too the mind will not be able to see the Lord as in a mirror without having set right its interior state and without having purified the soul of passionate attachments to material things. (Sinkewicz 2003, p 219. Exhortation 2 to monks. 5)
Or, as Browning put it,
but priests
Should study passion; how else cure mankind,
Who come for help in passionate extremes? (Browning 1943, vi. Ll. 2078-80)
cmackenna@stmarylebone.org
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