But it will arrest your spiritual growth. Reverting will increase your feelings of devotion. You may be tempted to revert back to your meditative practice. That word is your primary tool in this spiritual pursuit. When you are distracted, you can get yourself back on track by saying a one-syllable word such as GOD or LOVE. If you encounter distractions, simply turn your focus back to God.
You might wonder, “How shall I meditate on God?” It just requires that you will it to happen.ĭuring our time of turning toward God, we must remove our focus from the created realm. This project of turning toward God is simple and brief. Set yourself to rest in this darkness as long as you can. The author uses “darkness” in the same way as the Spanish mystics - a haze a Cloud of Unknowing a Cloud of Forgetting.įorget everything you know. We are to turn away from distractions, and turn toward God.Īt first, what we experience will be unfamiliar. Only love - not knowledge - can bring us to God. The author calls us to wake up to our spiritual need, and to take action. In our spiritual lives, many of us lack zeal. God calls us to advance through those stages. There are four stages in our relationship with God: The Cloud of Unknowing consists of 75 chapters. And it parallels Room 4 of The Interior Castle by Teresa of Ávila. This teaching parallels The Dark Night by John of the Cross. It suggests the way to know God is to abandon any practice of meditation, and instead surrender to the realm of Unknowing. It was written by an unknown author in the late Middle Ages. The Cloud of Unknowing is a spiritual guide for contemplative prayer. Yet it strikes us as accurately translated and faithful to the text. We are fans of the translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher. People often find them quite difficult to read. Some of those translations are antiquated. The Cloud of Unknowing is a spiritual guide for Contemplative Prayer.
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