Prayer is a practice that shapes both an individual’s self-identity and her posture toward the world, what David Kelsey calls one’s “existential how.” This process of formation is perhaps best exemplified in the 14th-century handbook The Cloud of Unknowing. This work was written by an anonymous monk to direct a young novice in the “work of contemplation.” The author offers a series of directives for a spiritual practice of apophatic prayer, or, prayer by way of negation (via negativa). The main insight of this work can be summed up in the words of St. Denis, quoted by the author: “The truly divine knowledge of God is that which is known by unknowing.” Because of the ontological and epistemological gulf between God and humanity, the one who thinks she can reach God through “intellectual labor” is “perilously deluded” (16-17). There will always be a dark “cloud of unknowing” preventing one from “seeing God clearly by the light of understanding in reason.” Fortunately, though incomprehensible to the intellect, God is “entirely comprehensible” to the “loving power” within each and every person (13). “It is love alone that can reach God in this life, and not knowing” (27).
The goal of prayer, then, is the cultivation of one’s desire for God and the orientation of one’s will toward God. In order to pray rightly, the novice should “lift up her heart to God with a humble impulse of love, and have God alone as her aim” (10). She should be careful not to fix her attention on any created thing—not even herself or the blessings that God bestows upon her. She should even avoid thinking about God’s character or perfections, which can only imperfectly describe God by way of analogy with created things. She should press down all thoughts of created things beneath a “cloud of forgetting,” should “step above each one stalwartly but lovingly, and with a devout, pleasing, impulsive love strive to pierce that darkness above her, to smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love” (20). If a thought should arise, of any sort, she should say in her heart “You have no part to play… Go down again” into the cloud of forgetting. This exercise requires no words, but allowing for the difficulty of wordless thought, the author makes a concession: “if you like, you can have this reaching out to God wrapped up and enfolded in a single word. So as to have a better grasp of it, take just a little word, of one syllable rather than two, for the shorter it is, the better it is in agreement with this exercise of the spirit. Such a one is the word “God” or the word “love”… With this word you are to beat upon this cloud and this darkness above you. With this word you are to strike down every kind of thought under the cloud of forgetting” (22-23).
In her book Powers and Submissions, Coakley helpfully unpacks the dynamics of moral agency and identity formation that are embedded within apophatic prayer practices like the one just described. She notes how non-discursive and non-conceptual prayer (what she calls “silent prayer”) involve a renunciation of the notion of control, a patient waiting, and a de-centering of the self and its desires in the hope (and expectation) of grace drawing the prayer toward mystical union with the divine.
There are many forms of prayer in the Christian tradition that fit this description—not all of them strictly wordless. One may think, for example, of the Quaker prayer meeting, the practice of “centering prayer,” the charismatic experience of glossolalia, or the Eastern Orthodox Jesus Prayer (repeatedly, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”). As with The Cloud of Unknowing, each of these practices enacts a form of thought that is non-discursive, and therefore, in some sense passive. For example, as Coakley explains, in reciting the Jesus Prayer, the aim is not necessarily to focus on the meaning of each word, but rather to “use repetitive but mechanical “acts”… not as the prayer, but as a sort of accompanying “drone” to keep the imagination occupied… Not only is the imagination thus mechanically stilled, but the “drone” also helps prevent the mind from operating discursively; thus the (empty) intellect is left facing a “blank,” with the will gently holding it there.” According to Coakley, these practices enact a “spiritual extension of Christic kenosis” (emptying) because the one who thus prays must refuse from the outset a grasping, controlling mentality. This “involves an ascetical commitment of some subtlety, a regular and willed practice of ceding and responding to the divine.” Coakley calls this “gentle space-making.”
The adjective “gentle” is key, for Coakley’s treatment of silent prayer in Powers and Submissions comprises an extended refutation of the critiques of feminist theologians like Daphne Hampson, who suggests that “for women, the theme of self-emptying and self-abnegation is far from helpful as a spiritual paradigm.” It is one thing for someone who enjoys social prestige and privilege, including some measure of economic and political stability, to be told that he should embrace contingency and vulnerability as an expression of faith in Christ’s ultimate victory and trustworthiness. It is another thing altogether to tell this to someone who has very little power from which she may be “dispossessed” and who already experiences the threat of “vulnerability” in spades. Therefore, it is significant that the encounter which takes place in silent prayer is “not an invitation to be battered; nor is its silence a silencing… God… neither shouts nor forces, let alone ‘obliterates.’” This form of “self-emptying” is not simply an abnegation of the self, but rather ‘the place of the self’s transformation and expansion into God.”
(excerpted from chapter 6)
