As we make the transition from practicing prayer to practicing descent, I wanted to reiterate something I said on Sunday about prayer that is kin to the journey downward, whether as intentional spiritual practice or as the unsolicited gravity of life.

I said that contemplation is agenda-less prayer. It’s not just that contemplation is a wordless, attentive presence to God who is Presence, not just that contemplation only begins when we finally stop talking, but more so that it is characterized by darkness, by [the cloud of] unknowing in which we “go without sight” and thus give up any control or the illusion of control by surrendering or abandoning ourselves to what just is. In “East Coker” T.S. Eliot writes:

In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.

This moves us away from prayer as manipulation and the prevalent idea that prayer is mainly what we do as opposed to what God does in or with us as our content (words) is replaced by our consent (willingness). The paradox of contemplative prayer is that the pray-er is not the actor but the acted upon. In this prayer, we are less the pray-er and more the prayed.

Like contemplation, practicing descent, what Rilke described as learning to fall and “patiently to trust our heaviness,”[i] involves a spirituality of relinquishment, where we risk letting go at times even of expectation or love or faith, even that is, of what we deem good agendas. Again in “East Coker” Eliot writes:

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. . . .
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Of course this is counter-intuitive because it means allowing the darkness that pulls us “toward the heart of the world”[ii] to have its way with us and to take us where it will. But darkness is not a synonym for bad, sinister, or evil. Rather, it is a reference to the unconscious, to the unknown, to that which cannot be seen. In the path of descent we must learn to trust not only our own heaviness but the darkness itself for as Wendell Berry asserts in his poem “Going Dark,” “the dark, too, blooms and sings,/ and is visited by dark feet and dark wings.”

Practicing descent not only means going dark but going down into the depths. So it is also counter-cultural, especially today, because the powers and principalities, the celebrities and stars, whether in secular or religious form, are all about ascent, climbing or rising to the top, making promises for pie-in-the-sky, all about providing strategies for being above it all, or harboring secret hopes of being called your highness.

But such airy projects prove lite more than they bring light, and lack a gravitas that is commensurate with the trials and tribulations that are part of the human experience. Jacob wrestles with God, tenaciously holds fast, refusing to let go until he gets a divine blessing. Which he does. But the cost is being wounded. And like so many of the blessed, he limps forever. In an authentic spirituality ascent is legitimated only by acquaintance with life’s descents, joy leaps up but from a life that also is grounded in a familiarity with grief and struggle and sadness, and hope is not pathological denial but radical daring rooted in the witness of “those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith” who, through their own prayer and descent, encourage us to be plunged “into paradox, at the center of which we will find transcendence and new life.”[iii]♦

Blessings,
Dan

ARTWORK: Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase

[i] See Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy’s translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Wenn etwas mir Fenster Fällt in Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii]  Parker Palmer, The Promise of Paradox: