Called out by The Cloud

After my trip, I am working on getting back to my daily and other reading habits. One of the books that I am steadily working with is "The Cloud of Unknowing". I just stumbled onto a passage that really diagnoses the type of experience that I described a couple posts back when I talked of repenting from a gnostic error. The author of The Cloud in Chapter 4 talks about two primary faculties: Knowing and Loving. They say that God cannot be known through the first but is entirely known through the second. If we were speaking Spanish I would hazard to guess that the first "know" is saber and the second is conocer. God cannot be grasped as a fact, but can be beheld as a person.

Though it probably violates the admonitions put forth in the very beginning of The Cloud, I'd like to post the primary paragraph that resonated with a stretch of years in my past. It has some very profound things to say about that attempt and its dangers:

A person hearing this book read or quoted may misunderstand my point. I'm not saying that if a person thinks hard enough, he or she will succeed in the work of contemplation. I do not want people sitting around analyzing, racking their brains, their curiosity forcing their imagination to go entirely the wrong way. It's not natural. It's not wise for the mind, and it's not healthy for the body. These people are dangerously deluded, and it would take a miracle to save them God in his infinite goodness and mercy would have to intervene, making these people stop such a wrong-minded approach and seek the counsel of experienced contemplatives; otherwise, such erring souls could succumb to madness, frenzied fits, or the devil's lies, which lead to the profound misery of sin and eventually to the loss of body and soul, for all eternity.

I can definitely say that the author is right. In the ten years between 1997 and 2007, I experienced all of the pitfalls mentioned, not as the only feature of my life, but certainly in large events and large swathes of time. When pushed to my limit, I looked to God in the small hours and said in great distress, "I do not understand". There is no worse feeling on the gnostic quest when knowledge and understanding are the keys to the imagined life that "should" be.

However, I was not permanently lost. God did indeed intervene, slow things down, and break me out of my pattern. I did indeed seek the counsel of experienced contemplative. The cathedral community and its various ministries is full of vital and experienced contemplatives.

My descent into Egypt is not a new challenge nor one that I have faced which others have not. I pray that they may be delivered from the pain of having to figure it all out. For those that can turn back and choose love which transcends and includes knowledge that they may gain as much as I did from my wanderings among the rocky paths.

Perfect love cast out all fear, including the fear of unknowing.