Muddles of Pud.

So, Rich posted a thought-provoking comment in my last post with the big long Cloud of Unknowing quote. For convenience, I'm now going to quote his whole comment, because it was economical and plain. Unlike the posts of someone we all know pretty well.

I have always been a bit ambivalent about The Cloud of Unknowing. On the one hand it somehow sounds right. And I'm sure it's a useful counterbalance to all of our facile and possibly impious certainties about what God is and what God means. But...I also sometimes think this writer was unnecessarily muddying the waters. According to the gospel of John, when the disciples at that last passover feast asked Jesus to show them the father he did not answer them with a rebuke about the baffling mysteriousness and ineffability of God. Instead, he basically told them (freely paraphrased): "Look at me. You've been with me all this time. You know what I'm like. That's what God is like. Because I'm in him and he's in me."

I was very stirred by his comments - they actually worked to unite some frazzled ends the book had left me with, and brought into sharp relief just what it was that I had brought away with me at the end. When I read Jesus' loving command "Look at me!" I was instantly and forcibly struck with a vivid image of myself trying to get the attention of a child with that same phrase, because I needed to tell it something very important, only to find it staring raptly at a torn bandaid on its grimy index finger instead.

I tried to post the following as a comment, but apparently blogger's gotten wise to my long-winded ways (yes. yes they have. it's all about me.) and seems to be limiting comment lengths. Then when I realized it was going to end up being a post, I let it grow. Derr! So, another post from Amanda "Maybe-I-Should-Stop-Blogging" Gareis.

When you take into account the historical context of the The Cloud it makes more sense. My recall of medieval history is..err..cloudy...but in a few oversimplified strokes...the text was presumably addressed to a monastic audience. At that time, the monasteries were the default repositories of books and learning. Theology and philosophy were burgeoning...Aquinas et al. Then, as always, but especially then, there was deep concern that a scholarly approach to God would overtake the simple reality of His Presence, and the danger was deemed especially grave to the inhabitants of the monastery themselves. The very people regarded as specially called by God to bear witness to His Glory were now neck-deep in possible intellectual temptation and distraction, in the one place originally built to seclude them for His work. The Cloud is sometimes thought of as one of the best surviving recordings of the "backlash" against these developments.

I kind of think of it as a preparatory work to be able to truly understand what Jesus is saying in John. To repeat Rich's actually elegant paraphrase, Jesus says: "Look at me. You've been with me all this time. You know what I'm like. That's what God is like. Because I'm in him and he's in me."

...and the soul (if they are obnoxious and stuck in their heads, like me or the naughty monks the author was thinking of) responds..."But...I don't know Jesus. Do I? Through scripture? Really? Let's analyse scripture! Wait! Is he in the sacrament? Let's talk about transubstantiation! But....auuugh!"

(Now, at this moment...not before!)Enter the anonymous Cloud author (rudely paraphrased): "Hey! Egghead! Look at God. You don't know what God is? Aw, boo hoo. Actually, that's okay. Doesn't matter. Forget about it. Stop thinking. Love God. If you can't look at God, if you can't see him, it is because you are not really looking at God Himself, but at your thoughts of him. Oh, and by the way, you're looking at him with the wrong bit."

If I may take a Christological liberty, what is Christ but God Himself, unmediated, as experienceable directly to us? Without the Rabbi Jesus breaking bread with us, how are we to "be with him all this time" and "know what he is like" so that we may know God?

The author suggests, only through love, unobscured by feeble creaturely flailings of the brain/mind/ego. As I understand the message, the only reason the writer goes on and on and on about the baffling mysteriousness and ineffability of God is to flush our souls out of the underbrush of our conceptions and notions, so that they may be captured by Love. In fact, he makes it clear that God is actually fully accessible to us. In a beautiful passage I had to omit the first time 'round, (the thing was already huge) he says, "All rational beings...possess two faculties, the power of knowing, and the power of loving. To the first..God...is forever unknowable, but to the second, to love, he is completely knowable, and that by every separate individual." (emphasis mine.)

Is God baffling, mysterious, ineffable? Yes, says the author, the same way a symphony is baffling, mysterious, and ineffable - when you try to hear it with your elbow.

Rather than muddying the waters, I feel that the author is telling us that when we try to find God in our limited human imaginings and ponderings, we are playing in a puddle of our own creation which goes nowhere. He is telling us that the puddle is muddy and stagnant, calling us sternly out of it. It is a crime, he warns us, to dabble there when the roaring crystal Ocean of God is at hand. Once the soul recognizes this and does the necessary inner work to climb out of the puddle and plunge into the Ocean, it is finally ready to go back to the message of Jesus at beginning of this "conversation", and receive its meaning, whole.

I do think I part ways with him on his model that the only way for this love to operate is directly my-one-soul-to-God's-one-Being. I think that all of the "creatures" on this earth (including all people, and yes, maybe even my pesky intellect) are here as potential springs and vessels of that Love, running off the main Source. Rather than being, as the author infers, roadblocks by default, I think they become obstacles only when they call our attention away from Christ's "Look at me!" instead of pointing to it. To take my disagreement even further, I believe that I can both receive and give this Love from and to God through His creatures, and that I will find Him there, as well as in the intellectual Darkness of my soul, where He comes to me directly, Himself, as Light or Love, or whatever one-syllable word you want to call Him. There was a time I would have denied this way of communing with God, and said it was all only possible through the physical world. I was corrected. However, depending on one's working definition of God (heh. A little joke, there, Lord.) one can actually squish around the metaphors enough to make even the author's totalitarian scheme comfortable enough for one's tender Universalist bits. But there, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm supposed to be shunning these days. Anyway, there is also a fair amount of antiquated church-baggage filler that I don't find personally helpful, and rather distracting. Still, I felt like I got the point.

I think my main point here is that the book was and remains a corrective measure,(as Rich said all along, a counterbalance) aiming us back at the message of Jesus in John about how to know God, rather than competing with it. For one like myself, whose most tangible stumbles along the path have all had to do with over-thinking, its message is a powerful antidote. It manages to both kick me in the pants and lift me up all in one blow.

"Him I covet, him I seek, and nothing but him."