Tim Farrington's Blog
January 10, 2019
The Novelist and Prayer
“Our Nada Who Art in Nada”:
The Novelist and Prayer
“Do not say that a Christian art is impossible. Say rather that it is difficult, doubly difficult— four-fold difficult, because it is difficult to be an artist and very difficult to be a Christian, and because the total difficulty is not simply the sum but the product of these two difficulties multiplied by one another . . . ”
Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism
Flannery O’Connor, who is on the short list people with whom I would truly love to have a beer or two, and talk shop, began her potent essay “Novelist and Believer,” by saying, “Being a novelist and not a philosopher or theologian, I shall have to enter this discussion at a much lower level and proceed along a much narrower course” than everyone else at the particular symposium on art and religion at Sweet Briar where she first gave the talk. I like that modest, vocation-circumscribed approach to these matters, which does a lot to keep everyone honest, though I think O’Connor is being a little sly here, if not disingenuous: practicing a deft sort of philosophical/theological ju jitsu with the unwieldy weight and age-old momentum of various presuppositions about both art and belief: a side step, a flick of the wrist, a pivot, leaving the bulk of the crap on the floor behind her with a minimum of effort and moving on. Honestly, it’s hard to think of anyone who was a fiercer theologian than Flannery O’Connor.
* * *
It is also worth noting that O’Connor, after asserting the modest but crucial integrity of her novelist’s approach to the issue of “Novelist and Believer,” went on to assert a similarly modest but crucial integrity in her approach to the issue as a believer: in the face of the symposium’s suggested course of conceiving religion “broadly as an expression of man’s ultimate concern,” rather than identifying it with a particular institutional religion, she said, “I shall have to remain well within the Judeo-Christian tradition. I shall have to speak, without apology, of the Church, even when the Church is absent; of Christ, even when Christ is not recognized.” Amen, I say; and let the church say, Amen.
* * *
I am certainly not faulting Flannery O’Connor for proceeding cautiously on this holy ground, in the place of solitude where the three dreams of philosophy, theology, and art cross between blue rocks; approaching the burning bush that was not consumed, even Moses had to take off his shoes. It is the fear of presuming before God, even more than the prudent desire to avoid unnecessary squabbles with the experts and professionals, that enforces such modesty.
But frame it as you will, and say what you will to indicate the tiny place you stand, any Christian novelist worth his or her salt and trying to not lose the savor is going to find her- or himself working very precisely on this same dangerous and volatile ground, this fault line, this plate tectonic rift in our culture and in ourselves where earthquakes happen and volcanoes well up, as the deepest stringencies of striving to do the truest art grind up against the even deeper stringencies of seeking the face of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses, and the Father of Jesus Christ.
* * *
I may seem hyperbolical or melodramatic here, luridly emphasizing the dangers and volatility of a life of prayer, and of a life of art, and suggesting that the dangers and volatility may be, as Jacques Maritain says in the epigraph, multiplied, even exponentially, when the two are brought into conjunction. But I’m more inclined to suspect that I am not being hyperbolical or melodramatic enough. Real prayer, true faith, as O’Connor spent her heartbreakingly short and illness-ridden writing life showing in the most lurid and grotesque ways, through volatile character after mad volatile character, is the strait gate onto a very narrow way of life that only seems narrower, the more you miss it, crashing and burning along the broad ways that pass for prayer, among those whose faith has not yet led them to understand that the country of prayer is a dangerous and volatile place requiring, at a beginner’s minimum, a long schooling in the most basic virtues, a sane and genuine ascesis, and a motivation indistinguishable much of the time from desperation, a motivation deep and unassailable enough to get the cross all the way up the hill to the place of the skull. It is a fearful thing, in many ways and for a very long time, to fall into the hands of the living God, even if it is always and only God who invites us to do so. Knowing that this is the beginning of wisdom doesn’t make it any less fearful, but it’s a start.
* * *
This is the front lines of both art and belief, as I see it, for the Christian novelist. There are no atheists in these foxholes; and in these foxholes, everyone is a theologian. “If you are a theologian, you truly pray,” said Evagrius of Pontus (345–399), in his Chapters on Prayer. “If you truly pray, you are a theologian.” A theologian who doesn’t pray is like a scientist who doesn’t do any experiments to test his theories. Or like a breathologist who doesn’t breathe.
Evagrius was one of the second or third generation of the original monks, the solitaries who went out into the wastes of the third- and fourth-century Egyptian desert determined to abide by the Gospel’s most severe and daunting and even scandalous commands, knocking until it was opened unto them, in search of the mostly deeply authentic Christian life they could find. They had sold everything they had and given it to the poor, quite literally, had abandoned house, and family, loved ones and lands, and had taken nothing for their journey, neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses; they had no second coat, and were often known to give their first coat away; they had no shoes and they made their own sandals. They were seeking first the kingdom of God and losing their lives to find them, taking up their crosses to follow Jesus, led by the Spirit out into the wilderness to wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, armed with nothing but Jesus’ word.
With Scripture, that is, practically speaking. Or, more often, scraps of Scripture: In those days, texts of the Bible were extremely rare, and one of the earliest traditions among these hermits and ascetics was to go to an elder monk and ask for “a word,” a single phrase of Scripture in most cases, although over time the solitaries and communities of desert monks accumulated a trove of pithy wisdom sayings and story teachings of their own. (Thomas Merton’s exquisite little book, The Wisdom of the Desert, is a good introduction to the richness of this often neglected tradition, as well as a taste of what can only strike the modern palate as its somewhat maniacal aspects.) “Pray without ceasing,” Paul’s exhortation from 1 Thessalonians 5:17, was one of the “words” the elders found most fruitful, to send these petitioners back to their own cells with as the seed of their meditation, along with Ephesians 6:18— “Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit”— and Luke 21:36, “Watch ye therefore, and pray always.” It was not a matter of technique: it was a given among these monks, as it was with Paul originally, that they knew not how to pray as they ought (Romans 8:26), but that the Spirit itself would make intercession for them in their infirmities; and it was in relentless effort, through all manner of groanings which cannot be uttered, to pray without ceasing, and always, that they laid much of the foundation for contemplative Christianity in the centuries to come.
* * *
Flannery O’Connor knew her Desert Fathers well, as Richard Giannone has scrupulously shown in his illuminating (if occasionally procrustean) study Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist. Steeped in her fascination with the Christian solitaries of the fourth century, Giannone writes, O’Connors’s stories address “the darkness shrouding the empty places in which her lonely searchers live to reveal a transformational space where solitude and warfare against demons prepare her embattled sojourners for an encounter with God.”
It actually helps a lot, to read O’Connor in this light, to see her Christ-haunted, demon-ridden South in the glare of the Nitrean sun. She was her own species of Desert Mother, praying without ceasing in the “very muddy and manurey” wilderness of Milledgeville, Georgia.
* * *
It is also of these first monks, and their dangerous and volatile prayer lives, unfashionably severe and even more unfashionably haunted by demons, of whom T. S. Eliot is speaking, from his own place in the wasteland where we go to pray, in “Burnt Norton”:
“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.”
* * *
It is one of the most stable paradoxes of Christianity that contemplative prayer is so often viewed with profound suspicion by many, if not most Christians, at any given moment. Pressed by a scholar in the Temple courtyard, and challenged, as one who had come not to destroy the Law of Moses but to fulfill it, to name the most important of the Torah’s commandments, Jesus answered him, “The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31) As a distillation on the fly of the Torah’s 613 mitzvot, it was a perfect answer in context: the first mitzvah Jesus offers here is a direct quotation of the Shema, the central prayer of the Jewish faith, found in Deuteronomy 6; and the second, Golden Rule mitzvah, appears in Leviticus and is pretty much impossible to argue with in a Temple courtyard.
In practice, of course, the second of these two commandments is the only one we can actually observe in action, unless we pray “as the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.” If we do it truly, entering into our closet and shutting the door, and praying to our Father who seeth in secret, the love we may have for God will always be invisible. It is only when you let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven, that the fruits of prayer can be known and judged. There is no denying the public nature of service to the battered neighbor by the side of the road, to poor and the outcast and oppressed, to the widow and the orphan and the prisoner.
The problem, though, in focusing as we naturally do on the palpable fruits by which we know them, is that it is easy to forget where the fruits come from. Human nature being what it is, indeed, it is pretty much inevitable that if you spend any significant inward-directed time with the first commandment, tending to the roots and soil, trying to fulfill the Shema itself and cultivate some love for God in your hard heart and stiff-necked body and scattered mind, it is just a matter of time before someone busier on the firm and troubled ground of the second of Jesus’ crucial commandments is probably going to say something along the lines of “Idle hands are the devil’s plaything, you know,” or “Surely you could be doing something more productive than just kneeling there.”
The tension here goes more or less back to the ministry of Jesus himself: in Luke 10, we find him visiting a household in Bethany, and being received by a certain woman named Martha, whose sister, called Mary, also sat at Jesus’ feet and heard his word. “But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, ‘Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? Bid her therefore that she help me.’”
Jesus’ response would be the classic first line of defense of Christian contemplatives for the next two thousand years: he said, “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.” There are innumerable exegeses of the passage over the centuries, considering both the apparently obvious surface meanings and the nuances and outright paradoxes— Meister Eckhart, for instance, says that it is clear that Martha is by far the more spiritually advanced of the sisters, and that what Jesus is saying is that Mary, as a fragile beginner, needs time to mature— but the basic issue is clear enough. Martha, occupied entirely with the patent and palpable demands of holy and humanitarian service, will always find it hard to not demand that her sister, sitting there in mere adoration, take the next shift. Even in the ostensibly contemplative sanctuary of his Cistercian monastery in Kentucky, Thomas Merton suffered tremendously under what he always felt were the excessive demands of a misguided ethic of holy activism, an emphasis on the second of Jesus’ two crucial commandments at the expense of the first, and spent decades trying to get into a hermitage where people would just let him pray for a while in peace. John of the Cross, that notorious scourge of the tepid, the benighted, and the half-hearted, saves his most blistering screeds for spiritual directors who fail to recognize the early stages of the grace of contemplation in their charges, who mistake the dawn of true prayer’s purgative and passive silence for laziness or sloth and send their people back to good old by-the-numbers discursive mental prayer and the holy application of the will, if not housecleaning: “A little of this that God works in the soul in this holy idleness and solitude is an inestimable good, a good much greater at times than a person or her director can imagine,” John notes, mildly enough, in The Living Flame of Love (3:39); and then goes on for thirty uncharacteristically— indeed, uniquely— vehement paragraphs, addressing himself at times directly to the misguided directors themselves: “What, I ask you, will the statue look like if all you do is hammer and hew, which, in the case of the soul, is the active use of the faculties? . . . You tyrannize souls and deprive them of their freedom, and judge for yourself the breadth of evangelical doctrine,” concluding at last (3:68) that these directors should recognize the hand of God at work in the souls under their care, out of sheer holy humility, and lighten up when their directees’ prayer gets supernaturally quiet, before finally getting back to what he was really talking about when he started the rant many pages ago, which is . . . what was it again? Oh yes, the deep caverns of the faculties of the soul.
* * *
The eternal tension between Mary and Martha, between attending to the first of Jesus’ crucial commandments and the second, is complicated further in our own times by the obvious fact that an actual working belief in the God of the Shema, asking first for the entirety of our love, heart and mind and soul and strength, is a whole new kind of age-old scandal in a contemporary civilization where, as Charles Taylor put it in his brilliant philosophical-historical, root-and-branch study of the phenomenon, A Secular Age, “it [was] virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable.” In his complementary earlier work, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Taylor spends considerable time exploring the ways in which our deepest moral intuitions are still very much Old and New Testament-flavored and rooted in the long development of Judeo-Christian ethics; but what is most to the point for my purposes here is his typically mild remark that, “for all its obvious roots in Christian spirituality, and perfect compatibility with it, the secular ethic of altruism has discarded something essential to the Christian outlook, once the love of God no longer plays a role.”
This is Martha triumphant, of course, an entire civilization embracing, in vague principle, Jesus’ humanly-oriented second crucial commandment, more or less, in good works toward one’s neighbor as an ethical and moral ideal, while dismissing his first, God-oriented mitzva entirely. Better people than I am have addressed themselves to the profound question of whether a morality deracinated from its transcendent source can do anything but eventually wither into a dry and diffuse relativism, and will continue to do so, but that is something for another essay. My point here is that to pray in an environment suffused with such activist presumptions is going to seem idiotic, if not perverse, and possibly immoral. I mean, if Martha, the sister of Lazarus, and by all accounts one of the sturdiest believers in the Gospels, thinks Mary is wasting her time, sitting in unserviceable love before the incarnate Lord, what will Martha say when her own faith is long gone and Jesus himself is just a culturally-biased rumor?
We’ve actually seen one of the worst case scenario answers to this question in recent history: when social service for the good of all humanity attains its undisputed and unqualified supremacy in a secular state bent on realizing its altruistic vision in all the immanence of history, a slacker like Mary is a subversive and even a saboteur; as Solzhenitsyn has shown so meticulously, it was in the Gulag Archipelago, where many of the recent Soviet empire’s people truly learned to pray.
Daniel, thrown into the lions’ den in the sixth century B.C., for his own unlawful prayer under Darius, king of the Persians and the Medes, would have recognized the dynamic perfectly. As would John of the Cross, who spent almost a year locked in an unlit closet, a literal dark night, beaten and starved, by old school Carmelites with shoes, for his efforts, along with Teresa of Avila, to re-introduce a deeper contemplative prayer life among Carmelites prepared, like Moses approaching the burning bush that was not consumed, to leave their shoes behind.
* * *
It is no accident that John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila are still two of the safest and most reliable guides to the life of deep prayer. In many ways, their work of back-to-the-basics renewal and reform in the Carmelite order during the sixteenth century was a last flowering of the long and more or less direct tradition of trying to pray without ceasing that had its roots in the monks who formed their paradoxical communities of prayer-driven solitaries in the Egyptian desert. Martin Luther had already thrown out the contemplative baby with the monastic bathwater in Germany by then, and there would never be much of a contemplative element beyond discursive meditation among Protestants. To this day, the general Protestant view is that contemplative prayer is either Eastern or, worse, Catholic, and that it amounts to opening the door to demons. (This is true, of course: from Jesus confronted by Satan in the wilderness, and emerging to cast out devils as a matter of course in his ministry, to the Desert Fathers’ pervasive combat with them, through Eliot’s Word in the desert assailed by the shrieks of disconsolate chimera, most contemplatives are quite explicit about the necessity of dealing properly with demons. But again, that is beyond the scope of this essay.)
The Roman Church’s reaction to Luther and Calvin, the Counter-Reformation, began with the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius of Loyola, whose Spiritual Exercises, written between 1522 and 1526, are a systematized program of gradated prayer, moving from what the Church traditionally called mental prayer, or “meditation,” an active prayer involving the mind, imagination, emotions, and will, through affective prayer, a more spontaneous and simpler movement of the will as the fruit of these reflections, and finally to contemplation, in which the active will yields to passivity in infused prayer which has its supernatural source in God’s action. This simple prayer, or prayer of quiet, as Teresa of Avila called contemplation’s first stage, in her Interior Castle, was regarded as the normal development of a devoted prayer life; but already the pressures of a divided Christianity were hardening party lines across the board. This is also the period when the Inquisition came into its own, of course; orthodoxy inevitably grew narrower, by the light of the bonfires, and by 1574, Everard Mercurian, Loyola’s successor as Father General of the Jesuits, had forbade the bulk of Loyola’s exercises, allowing only the first stage of active mental prayer or meditation, a decision which effectively institutionalized an astonishing and explicit anti-contemplative bias in the entire Catholic Church. In the seventeenth century, Miguel Molinos attempted a sort of contemplative renewal against the grain, based on the writings of Teresa of Avila, which brought him into conflict first with the Jesuits and then with the Inquisition itself; Molinos’s writings, stressing the passivity of Teresa’s prayer of quiet to a degree that seemed to undermine the more active foundations of prayer, were eventually condemned as what came to be termed the heresy of “Quietism,” and Molinos spent the last nine years of his life in the Spanish Prison of the Holy Office, where he died in 1696. By 1700, even the writings of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila were beginning to be seen as dangerously Quietistic, and basically no one dared to really raise the issue of contemplative prayer in the western Catholic Church for the next two centuries. If anyone was praying during these centuries in a way that brought them to the frontier of silence in the cloud of unkowing, they generally had the good sense to keep quiet about it.
* * *
It is worth dwelling on these recent centuries for a moment, and on the profound irony of the Church’s policy. The first stage of Ignatius’s exercises is the prayer we are all familiar with, an active prayer, consciously turning our mind and heart toward God, in the myriad ways, and with the myriad applicable techniques, that a long-term believing culture has devised; and it was here that the Church chose to draw its line in the sand. Ignatius’s second stage of prayer, affective prayer, which for a millennium and a half had been seen as the natural progression of prayer beyond words and techniques into a spontaneous movement of the heart and will, was banned; and the third stage, the further, radical simplification of the simple prayer of the heart and will into a silencing of all the faculties and the dawn of a passive infusion of the grace of contemplation, the divine gift of an intimate and supernatural encounter with God that had been seen as both the natural fulfillment of prayer and the desired goal of every praying Christian, was also banned.
To put it baldly: At the very moment when the effects of not just the Reformation but of what we have come to think of as modernity began to be felt— at the moment, that is, when the culture at large began to move from it being nearly impossible to not believe in God to disbelief becoming not just easy but practically inescapable, as Charles Taylor put it— the Catholic Church formally shut down every avenue of prayer that was based on anything other than human will and knowledge and effort.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the degree of wrong-headedness here; it was the institutionalization of what amounted to a panic. If prayer does not lead beyond what may be accomplished by human effort into some meaningful encounter with That which is beyond all human accomplishment and comprehension, and bear its fruits through the astonishing and ever-renewing gift of that, then the whole God thing is much ado about nothing, which of course is exactly what the Enlightenment thinkers were beginning to say, and which our own era now takes almost as a matter of course. At the epochal, civilization-defining moment when faith began to be most deeply questioned, when the division of grace from nature began to acquire its full nihilistic force— hundreds of years before Nietzsche— the Church itself shut down all prayer that invited grace, for all the world as if it had lost its faith in grace’s unforeseeable efficacy in the surrendered soul, and retreated into enforcing a kind of prayer that was human, all-too-human, and nothing more.
* * *
I hope my readers will forgive the apparent historical digression, and rant, in an essay on “the novelist and prayer.” I am trying to establish at least two points here, the first being that the kind of prayer I am talking about has never been an easy thing to practice, even if the Church itself wasn’t going to kill you for it, since Jesus flung himself down on his face and sweated blood through the night in the garden on the Mount of Olives, or Moses climbed alone through the thunder and lightning, into the cloud of darkness shrouding the mountain of God.
The second point is that the writings of the great Discalced Carmelites, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, which were never quite actually condemned and have reemerged in the last century as the epitomes of orthodox contemplative theology— John was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XI in 1926, and in classic Catholic better-late-than-never fashion, Teresa, along with St. Catherine of Siena, was named the first female Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970— remain the gold standard for any Christian approaching contemplative prayer, to this day. When T.S. Eliot, beginning to lose his modernist audience as he moved toward the ever-fresh scandal of faith, asked, in “Ash-Wednesday,” “Where shall the word be found, where will the word/Resound?” he concluded, “Not here, there is not enough silence.” Seeking enough silence, after hundreds of years of nothing but talk on the part of even the Church’s finest, one of the few sure guides he found was John of the Cross. When Eliot says, in “East Coker,” “You say I am repeating/Something I have said before. I shall say it again./Shall I say it again?”, what he is repeating, and saying again, for the entire stanza, is John of the Cross 101, lifted more or less directly— with characteristically felicitous Eliot nuances— from some of John’s most dauntingly ascetic verses, in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, book 1, chapter 13.
* * *
The thing is, it is not only possible, it is natural and almost inevitable, for a devoted soul, in all sincerity, to get good at Ignatius’s first stage of discursive prayer and meditation, and to enjoy all manner of relatively replicable comforts in such prayer. It is also natural and almost inevitable, human nature being what it is, that such a soul grows proud of this. The dark nights, as John of the Cross conceives them, are precisely God’s cure for this pride, and its associated faults. It is not a failure, to arrive at this point, John says; it is the simple and very real limits of human nature itself that we reach here: “No matter how much an individual does through his own efforts, he cannot actively purify himself enough to be disposed in the least degree for the divine union of the perfection of love. God must take over and purge him in that fire that is dark for him.” (The Dark Night, I, 3:3):
What God does here first, John says, is take away the gratifications of prayer. The glow in the heart, the surge in the will, the lucidity and delight of the mind making sense of things: all the comforting evidence of our holiness and righteousness up to this point is removed by God’s purgative action of love, and we are left, quite literally, to our own devices, which are revealed to be entirely useless. After elaborating the spiritual logic of this abrupt and pervasive onset of God’s gift of the most desolate internal emptiness in these formerly contented souls, John adds, with what strikes me as a very dry touch of contemplative humor, “This change is a surprise to them because everything seems to be functioning in reverse.” (The Dark Night, I, 8:3)
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally,” Flannery O’Connor wrote (Habit of Being, 100). “A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.”
Indeed. But one of the points all those individual saints are making is that the dark night, for all its terrors and aridities, is in fact a supernatural grace. “God it is who is working now in the soul,” John says (Dark Night II, 8:1), “and for this reason the soul can do nothing.”
This is, quite literally, the crux of the matter. The soul, at this point, seeing to its dismay that it can do nothing, by the incomprehensible grace of God, quite naturally feels abandoned. God, for all intents and purposes, has disappeared. And this disappearance, John assures us again and again, through all his writings, doing his pastoral best to help the souls under his care not freak out completely, is God’s living flame of love doing its deepest purifying work. It is part of John’s daunting reputation— and Flannery O’Connor’s, for that matter— how much he stresses the deep human horror of the dark night. But think of bougainvilleas, the beauty of a fence-full of fuchsia-colored glory. Why do we have to go so far south to see that beauty? It is not because of the summers that bougainvilleas don’t grow in Michigan, or even Virginia. It is the winters. John of the Cross is bearing witness to a variety of bougainvillea that blooms at the South Pole in the dead of the southern hemisphere’s worst winter. That he should dwell on what it takes for those flowers to appear under such conditions— speaking as a gardener here— seems eminently practical to me.
* * *
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” If Jesus asked that question, from the depths of his own abandonment on the cross, do we really think we can avoid asking it ourselves at some point? It is at that point that we truly know that the whole of creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. We are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope. “And so I said to my soul, Be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” For we know not what we should pray for as we ought. If we don’t wonder why God has forsaken us, in this moment, we are not human. If we don’t try everything we can to get out of this apparent dead end of blindness to the good, this feeling of utter helpless abandonment to a world without grace, we are not human. But this is not the moment when our efforts can do anything. God it is who works here, John of the Cross says. In this impenetrable darkness.
Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name behind the hands that wove the intolerable shirt of flame, which human power cannot remove. But love here would be love of the wrong thing.
* * *
This is as far as I ever intended to get, in this essay on the novelist and prayer: the place in prayer where our human conceptions of God crap out, by the grace of God, the place where the human mind and heart founder in a bottomless abyss, freed from “God” by God, conscious only of the soul’s own poverty and incapacity for self-generated meaning. It is a place that is remarkably congruent with the deepest insights of all our best modern and post-modern artists and philosophers, all things considered. “There’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth,” Hazel Motes, one of the earliest of Flannery O’Connor’s passionate nihilists declares; and O’Connor herself was clear enough on the question: “If you live today you breathe in nihilism.” Nihilism is the ultimate modern ecumenicism; we can all gather under its tent for our symposia. The human encounter with the human ex nihilo at the heart of human being is the common groundlessness of us all. “Nada nada nada nada nada nada,” John of the Cross wrote on his rarely-translated hand-drawn sketch of the path up Mt. Carmel: “And even on the Mount, nothing.” “Our nada who art in nada,” Hemingway wrote, in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” “Nada be thy name.”
The Christian novelist has no argument with the macho nihilist here: Every honest story we tell begins on this same utterly reliable basis of nothing whatsoever in the world or self to rely on, in the foul rag and bone shop of our helpless and impoverished heart, with a mind baffled and blinded in the cloud of human unknowing. The difference faith makes, the difference that is the love of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is as invisible here as ever, and now under conditions that seem unpropitious. But by their fruits we shall know them.
The Novelist and Prayer
“Do not say that a Christian art is impossible. Say rather that it is difficult, doubly difficult— four-fold difficult, because it is difficult to be an artist and very difficult to be a Christian, and because the total difficulty is not simply the sum but the product of these two difficulties multiplied by one another . . . ”
Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism
Flannery O’Connor, who is on the short list people with whom I would truly love to have a beer or two, and talk shop, began her potent essay “Novelist and Believer,” by saying, “Being a novelist and not a philosopher or theologian, I shall have to enter this discussion at a much lower level and proceed along a much narrower course” than everyone else at the particular symposium on art and religion at Sweet Briar where she first gave the talk. I like that modest, vocation-circumscribed approach to these matters, which does a lot to keep everyone honest, though I think O’Connor is being a little sly here, if not disingenuous: practicing a deft sort of philosophical/theological ju jitsu with the unwieldy weight and age-old momentum of various presuppositions about both art and belief: a side step, a flick of the wrist, a pivot, leaving the bulk of the crap on the floor behind her with a minimum of effort and moving on. Honestly, it’s hard to think of anyone who was a fiercer theologian than Flannery O’Connor.
* * *
It is also worth noting that O’Connor, after asserting the modest but crucial integrity of her novelist’s approach to the issue of “Novelist and Believer,” went on to assert a similarly modest but crucial integrity in her approach to the issue as a believer: in the face of the symposium’s suggested course of conceiving religion “broadly as an expression of man’s ultimate concern,” rather than identifying it with a particular institutional religion, she said, “I shall have to remain well within the Judeo-Christian tradition. I shall have to speak, without apology, of the Church, even when the Church is absent; of Christ, even when Christ is not recognized.” Amen, I say; and let the church say, Amen.
* * *
I am certainly not faulting Flannery O’Connor for proceeding cautiously on this holy ground, in the place of solitude where the three dreams of philosophy, theology, and art cross between blue rocks; approaching the burning bush that was not consumed, even Moses had to take off his shoes. It is the fear of presuming before God, even more than the prudent desire to avoid unnecessary squabbles with the experts and professionals, that enforces such modesty.
But frame it as you will, and say what you will to indicate the tiny place you stand, any Christian novelist worth his or her salt and trying to not lose the savor is going to find her- or himself working very precisely on this same dangerous and volatile ground, this fault line, this plate tectonic rift in our culture and in ourselves where earthquakes happen and volcanoes well up, as the deepest stringencies of striving to do the truest art grind up against the even deeper stringencies of seeking the face of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses, and the Father of Jesus Christ.
* * *
I may seem hyperbolical or melodramatic here, luridly emphasizing the dangers and volatility of a life of prayer, and of a life of art, and suggesting that the dangers and volatility may be, as Jacques Maritain says in the epigraph, multiplied, even exponentially, when the two are brought into conjunction. But I’m more inclined to suspect that I am not being hyperbolical or melodramatic enough. Real prayer, true faith, as O’Connor spent her heartbreakingly short and illness-ridden writing life showing in the most lurid and grotesque ways, through volatile character after mad volatile character, is the strait gate onto a very narrow way of life that only seems narrower, the more you miss it, crashing and burning along the broad ways that pass for prayer, among those whose faith has not yet led them to understand that the country of prayer is a dangerous and volatile place requiring, at a beginner’s minimum, a long schooling in the most basic virtues, a sane and genuine ascesis, and a motivation indistinguishable much of the time from desperation, a motivation deep and unassailable enough to get the cross all the way up the hill to the place of the skull. It is a fearful thing, in many ways and for a very long time, to fall into the hands of the living God, even if it is always and only God who invites us to do so. Knowing that this is the beginning of wisdom doesn’t make it any less fearful, but it’s a start.
* * *
This is the front lines of both art and belief, as I see it, for the Christian novelist. There are no atheists in these foxholes; and in these foxholes, everyone is a theologian. “If you are a theologian, you truly pray,” said Evagrius of Pontus (345–399), in his Chapters on Prayer. “If you truly pray, you are a theologian.” A theologian who doesn’t pray is like a scientist who doesn’t do any experiments to test his theories. Or like a breathologist who doesn’t breathe.
Evagrius was one of the second or third generation of the original monks, the solitaries who went out into the wastes of the third- and fourth-century Egyptian desert determined to abide by the Gospel’s most severe and daunting and even scandalous commands, knocking until it was opened unto them, in search of the mostly deeply authentic Christian life they could find. They had sold everything they had and given it to the poor, quite literally, had abandoned house, and family, loved ones and lands, and had taken nothing for their journey, neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses; they had no second coat, and were often known to give their first coat away; they had no shoes and they made their own sandals. They were seeking first the kingdom of God and losing their lives to find them, taking up their crosses to follow Jesus, led by the Spirit out into the wilderness to wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, armed with nothing but Jesus’ word.
With Scripture, that is, practically speaking. Or, more often, scraps of Scripture: In those days, texts of the Bible were extremely rare, and one of the earliest traditions among these hermits and ascetics was to go to an elder monk and ask for “a word,” a single phrase of Scripture in most cases, although over time the solitaries and communities of desert monks accumulated a trove of pithy wisdom sayings and story teachings of their own. (Thomas Merton’s exquisite little book, The Wisdom of the Desert, is a good introduction to the richness of this often neglected tradition, as well as a taste of what can only strike the modern palate as its somewhat maniacal aspects.) “Pray without ceasing,” Paul’s exhortation from 1 Thessalonians 5:17, was one of the “words” the elders found most fruitful, to send these petitioners back to their own cells with as the seed of their meditation, along with Ephesians 6:18— “Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit”— and Luke 21:36, “Watch ye therefore, and pray always.” It was not a matter of technique: it was a given among these monks, as it was with Paul originally, that they knew not how to pray as they ought (Romans 8:26), but that the Spirit itself would make intercession for them in their infirmities; and it was in relentless effort, through all manner of groanings which cannot be uttered, to pray without ceasing, and always, that they laid much of the foundation for contemplative Christianity in the centuries to come.
* * *
Flannery O’Connor knew her Desert Fathers well, as Richard Giannone has scrupulously shown in his illuminating (if occasionally procrustean) study Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist. Steeped in her fascination with the Christian solitaries of the fourth century, Giannone writes, O’Connors’s stories address “the darkness shrouding the empty places in which her lonely searchers live to reveal a transformational space where solitude and warfare against demons prepare her embattled sojourners for an encounter with God.”
It actually helps a lot, to read O’Connor in this light, to see her Christ-haunted, demon-ridden South in the glare of the Nitrean sun. She was her own species of Desert Mother, praying without ceasing in the “very muddy and manurey” wilderness of Milledgeville, Georgia.
* * *
It is also of these first monks, and their dangerous and volatile prayer lives, unfashionably severe and even more unfashionably haunted by demons, of whom T. S. Eliot is speaking, from his own place in the wasteland where we go to pray, in “Burnt Norton”:
“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.”
* * *
It is one of the most stable paradoxes of Christianity that contemplative prayer is so often viewed with profound suspicion by many, if not most Christians, at any given moment. Pressed by a scholar in the Temple courtyard, and challenged, as one who had come not to destroy the Law of Moses but to fulfill it, to name the most important of the Torah’s commandments, Jesus answered him, “The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31) As a distillation on the fly of the Torah’s 613 mitzvot, it was a perfect answer in context: the first mitzvah Jesus offers here is a direct quotation of the Shema, the central prayer of the Jewish faith, found in Deuteronomy 6; and the second, Golden Rule mitzvah, appears in Leviticus and is pretty much impossible to argue with in a Temple courtyard.
In practice, of course, the second of these two commandments is the only one we can actually observe in action, unless we pray “as the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.” If we do it truly, entering into our closet and shutting the door, and praying to our Father who seeth in secret, the love we may have for God will always be invisible. It is only when you let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven, that the fruits of prayer can be known and judged. There is no denying the public nature of service to the battered neighbor by the side of the road, to poor and the outcast and oppressed, to the widow and the orphan and the prisoner.
The problem, though, in focusing as we naturally do on the palpable fruits by which we know them, is that it is easy to forget where the fruits come from. Human nature being what it is, indeed, it is pretty much inevitable that if you spend any significant inward-directed time with the first commandment, tending to the roots and soil, trying to fulfill the Shema itself and cultivate some love for God in your hard heart and stiff-necked body and scattered mind, it is just a matter of time before someone busier on the firm and troubled ground of the second of Jesus’ crucial commandments is probably going to say something along the lines of “Idle hands are the devil’s plaything, you know,” or “Surely you could be doing something more productive than just kneeling there.”
The tension here goes more or less back to the ministry of Jesus himself: in Luke 10, we find him visiting a household in Bethany, and being received by a certain woman named Martha, whose sister, called Mary, also sat at Jesus’ feet and heard his word. “But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, ‘Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? Bid her therefore that she help me.’”
Jesus’ response would be the classic first line of defense of Christian contemplatives for the next two thousand years: he said, “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.” There are innumerable exegeses of the passage over the centuries, considering both the apparently obvious surface meanings and the nuances and outright paradoxes— Meister Eckhart, for instance, says that it is clear that Martha is by far the more spiritually advanced of the sisters, and that what Jesus is saying is that Mary, as a fragile beginner, needs time to mature— but the basic issue is clear enough. Martha, occupied entirely with the patent and palpable demands of holy and humanitarian service, will always find it hard to not demand that her sister, sitting there in mere adoration, take the next shift. Even in the ostensibly contemplative sanctuary of his Cistercian monastery in Kentucky, Thomas Merton suffered tremendously under what he always felt were the excessive demands of a misguided ethic of holy activism, an emphasis on the second of Jesus’ two crucial commandments at the expense of the first, and spent decades trying to get into a hermitage where people would just let him pray for a while in peace. John of the Cross, that notorious scourge of the tepid, the benighted, and the half-hearted, saves his most blistering screeds for spiritual directors who fail to recognize the early stages of the grace of contemplation in their charges, who mistake the dawn of true prayer’s purgative and passive silence for laziness or sloth and send their people back to good old by-the-numbers discursive mental prayer and the holy application of the will, if not housecleaning: “A little of this that God works in the soul in this holy idleness and solitude is an inestimable good, a good much greater at times than a person or her director can imagine,” John notes, mildly enough, in The Living Flame of Love (3:39); and then goes on for thirty uncharacteristically— indeed, uniquely— vehement paragraphs, addressing himself at times directly to the misguided directors themselves: “What, I ask you, will the statue look like if all you do is hammer and hew, which, in the case of the soul, is the active use of the faculties? . . . You tyrannize souls and deprive them of their freedom, and judge for yourself the breadth of evangelical doctrine,” concluding at last (3:68) that these directors should recognize the hand of God at work in the souls under their care, out of sheer holy humility, and lighten up when their directees’ prayer gets supernaturally quiet, before finally getting back to what he was really talking about when he started the rant many pages ago, which is . . . what was it again? Oh yes, the deep caverns of the faculties of the soul.
* * *
The eternal tension between Mary and Martha, between attending to the first of Jesus’ crucial commandments and the second, is complicated further in our own times by the obvious fact that an actual working belief in the God of the Shema, asking first for the entirety of our love, heart and mind and soul and strength, is a whole new kind of age-old scandal in a contemporary civilization where, as Charles Taylor put it in his brilliant philosophical-historical, root-and-branch study of the phenomenon, A Secular Age, “it [was] virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable.” In his complementary earlier work, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Taylor spends considerable time exploring the ways in which our deepest moral intuitions are still very much Old and New Testament-flavored and rooted in the long development of Judeo-Christian ethics; but what is most to the point for my purposes here is his typically mild remark that, “for all its obvious roots in Christian spirituality, and perfect compatibility with it, the secular ethic of altruism has discarded something essential to the Christian outlook, once the love of God no longer plays a role.”
This is Martha triumphant, of course, an entire civilization embracing, in vague principle, Jesus’ humanly-oriented second crucial commandment, more or less, in good works toward one’s neighbor as an ethical and moral ideal, while dismissing his first, God-oriented mitzva entirely. Better people than I am have addressed themselves to the profound question of whether a morality deracinated from its transcendent source can do anything but eventually wither into a dry and diffuse relativism, and will continue to do so, but that is something for another essay. My point here is that to pray in an environment suffused with such activist presumptions is going to seem idiotic, if not perverse, and possibly immoral. I mean, if Martha, the sister of Lazarus, and by all accounts one of the sturdiest believers in the Gospels, thinks Mary is wasting her time, sitting in unserviceable love before the incarnate Lord, what will Martha say when her own faith is long gone and Jesus himself is just a culturally-biased rumor?
We’ve actually seen one of the worst case scenario answers to this question in recent history: when social service for the good of all humanity attains its undisputed and unqualified supremacy in a secular state bent on realizing its altruistic vision in all the immanence of history, a slacker like Mary is a subversive and even a saboteur; as Solzhenitsyn has shown so meticulously, it was in the Gulag Archipelago, where many of the recent Soviet empire’s people truly learned to pray.
Daniel, thrown into the lions’ den in the sixth century B.C., for his own unlawful prayer under Darius, king of the Persians and the Medes, would have recognized the dynamic perfectly. As would John of the Cross, who spent almost a year locked in an unlit closet, a literal dark night, beaten and starved, by old school Carmelites with shoes, for his efforts, along with Teresa of Avila, to re-introduce a deeper contemplative prayer life among Carmelites prepared, like Moses approaching the burning bush that was not consumed, to leave their shoes behind.
* * *
It is no accident that John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila are still two of the safest and most reliable guides to the life of deep prayer. In many ways, their work of back-to-the-basics renewal and reform in the Carmelite order during the sixteenth century was a last flowering of the long and more or less direct tradition of trying to pray without ceasing that had its roots in the monks who formed their paradoxical communities of prayer-driven solitaries in the Egyptian desert. Martin Luther had already thrown out the contemplative baby with the monastic bathwater in Germany by then, and there would never be much of a contemplative element beyond discursive meditation among Protestants. To this day, the general Protestant view is that contemplative prayer is either Eastern or, worse, Catholic, and that it amounts to opening the door to demons. (This is true, of course: from Jesus confronted by Satan in the wilderness, and emerging to cast out devils as a matter of course in his ministry, to the Desert Fathers’ pervasive combat with them, through Eliot’s Word in the desert assailed by the shrieks of disconsolate chimera, most contemplatives are quite explicit about the necessity of dealing properly with demons. But again, that is beyond the scope of this essay.)
The Roman Church’s reaction to Luther and Calvin, the Counter-Reformation, began with the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius of Loyola, whose Spiritual Exercises, written between 1522 and 1526, are a systematized program of gradated prayer, moving from what the Church traditionally called mental prayer, or “meditation,” an active prayer involving the mind, imagination, emotions, and will, through affective prayer, a more spontaneous and simpler movement of the will as the fruit of these reflections, and finally to contemplation, in which the active will yields to passivity in infused prayer which has its supernatural source in God’s action. This simple prayer, or prayer of quiet, as Teresa of Avila called contemplation’s first stage, in her Interior Castle, was regarded as the normal development of a devoted prayer life; but already the pressures of a divided Christianity were hardening party lines across the board. This is also the period when the Inquisition came into its own, of course; orthodoxy inevitably grew narrower, by the light of the bonfires, and by 1574, Everard Mercurian, Loyola’s successor as Father General of the Jesuits, had forbade the bulk of Loyola’s exercises, allowing only the first stage of active mental prayer or meditation, a decision which effectively institutionalized an astonishing and explicit anti-contemplative bias in the entire Catholic Church. In the seventeenth century, Miguel Molinos attempted a sort of contemplative renewal against the grain, based on the writings of Teresa of Avila, which brought him into conflict first with the Jesuits and then with the Inquisition itself; Molinos’s writings, stressing the passivity of Teresa’s prayer of quiet to a degree that seemed to undermine the more active foundations of prayer, were eventually condemned as what came to be termed the heresy of “Quietism,” and Molinos spent the last nine years of his life in the Spanish Prison of the Holy Office, where he died in 1696. By 1700, even the writings of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila were beginning to be seen as dangerously Quietistic, and basically no one dared to really raise the issue of contemplative prayer in the western Catholic Church for the next two centuries. If anyone was praying during these centuries in a way that brought them to the frontier of silence in the cloud of unkowing, they generally had the good sense to keep quiet about it.
* * *
It is worth dwelling on these recent centuries for a moment, and on the profound irony of the Church’s policy. The first stage of Ignatius’s exercises is the prayer we are all familiar with, an active prayer, consciously turning our mind and heart toward God, in the myriad ways, and with the myriad applicable techniques, that a long-term believing culture has devised; and it was here that the Church chose to draw its line in the sand. Ignatius’s second stage of prayer, affective prayer, which for a millennium and a half had been seen as the natural progression of prayer beyond words and techniques into a spontaneous movement of the heart and will, was banned; and the third stage, the further, radical simplification of the simple prayer of the heart and will into a silencing of all the faculties and the dawn of a passive infusion of the grace of contemplation, the divine gift of an intimate and supernatural encounter with God that had been seen as both the natural fulfillment of prayer and the desired goal of every praying Christian, was also banned.
To put it baldly: At the very moment when the effects of not just the Reformation but of what we have come to think of as modernity began to be felt— at the moment, that is, when the culture at large began to move from it being nearly impossible to not believe in God to disbelief becoming not just easy but practically inescapable, as Charles Taylor put it— the Catholic Church formally shut down every avenue of prayer that was based on anything other than human will and knowledge and effort.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the degree of wrong-headedness here; it was the institutionalization of what amounted to a panic. If prayer does not lead beyond what may be accomplished by human effort into some meaningful encounter with That which is beyond all human accomplishment and comprehension, and bear its fruits through the astonishing and ever-renewing gift of that, then the whole God thing is much ado about nothing, which of course is exactly what the Enlightenment thinkers were beginning to say, and which our own era now takes almost as a matter of course. At the epochal, civilization-defining moment when faith began to be most deeply questioned, when the division of grace from nature began to acquire its full nihilistic force— hundreds of years before Nietzsche— the Church itself shut down all prayer that invited grace, for all the world as if it had lost its faith in grace’s unforeseeable efficacy in the surrendered soul, and retreated into enforcing a kind of prayer that was human, all-too-human, and nothing more.
* * *
I hope my readers will forgive the apparent historical digression, and rant, in an essay on “the novelist and prayer.” I am trying to establish at least two points here, the first being that the kind of prayer I am talking about has never been an easy thing to practice, even if the Church itself wasn’t going to kill you for it, since Jesus flung himself down on his face and sweated blood through the night in the garden on the Mount of Olives, or Moses climbed alone through the thunder and lightning, into the cloud of darkness shrouding the mountain of God.
The second point is that the writings of the great Discalced Carmelites, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, which were never quite actually condemned and have reemerged in the last century as the epitomes of orthodox contemplative theology— John was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XI in 1926, and in classic Catholic better-late-than-never fashion, Teresa, along with St. Catherine of Siena, was named the first female Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970— remain the gold standard for any Christian approaching contemplative prayer, to this day. When T.S. Eliot, beginning to lose his modernist audience as he moved toward the ever-fresh scandal of faith, asked, in “Ash-Wednesday,” “Where shall the word be found, where will the word/Resound?” he concluded, “Not here, there is not enough silence.” Seeking enough silence, after hundreds of years of nothing but talk on the part of even the Church’s finest, one of the few sure guides he found was John of the Cross. When Eliot says, in “East Coker,” “You say I am repeating/Something I have said before. I shall say it again./Shall I say it again?”, what he is repeating, and saying again, for the entire stanza, is John of the Cross 101, lifted more or less directly— with characteristically felicitous Eliot nuances— from some of John’s most dauntingly ascetic verses, in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, book 1, chapter 13.
* * *
The thing is, it is not only possible, it is natural and almost inevitable, for a devoted soul, in all sincerity, to get good at Ignatius’s first stage of discursive prayer and meditation, and to enjoy all manner of relatively replicable comforts in such prayer. It is also natural and almost inevitable, human nature being what it is, that such a soul grows proud of this. The dark nights, as John of the Cross conceives them, are precisely God’s cure for this pride, and its associated faults. It is not a failure, to arrive at this point, John says; it is the simple and very real limits of human nature itself that we reach here: “No matter how much an individual does through his own efforts, he cannot actively purify himself enough to be disposed in the least degree for the divine union of the perfection of love. God must take over and purge him in that fire that is dark for him.” (The Dark Night, I, 3:3):
What God does here first, John says, is take away the gratifications of prayer. The glow in the heart, the surge in the will, the lucidity and delight of the mind making sense of things: all the comforting evidence of our holiness and righteousness up to this point is removed by God’s purgative action of love, and we are left, quite literally, to our own devices, which are revealed to be entirely useless. After elaborating the spiritual logic of this abrupt and pervasive onset of God’s gift of the most desolate internal emptiness in these formerly contented souls, John adds, with what strikes me as a very dry touch of contemplative humor, “This change is a surprise to them because everything seems to be functioning in reverse.” (The Dark Night, I, 8:3)
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally,” Flannery O’Connor wrote (Habit of Being, 100). “A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.”
Indeed. But one of the points all those individual saints are making is that the dark night, for all its terrors and aridities, is in fact a supernatural grace. “God it is who is working now in the soul,” John says (Dark Night II, 8:1), “and for this reason the soul can do nothing.”
This is, quite literally, the crux of the matter. The soul, at this point, seeing to its dismay that it can do nothing, by the incomprehensible grace of God, quite naturally feels abandoned. God, for all intents and purposes, has disappeared. And this disappearance, John assures us again and again, through all his writings, doing his pastoral best to help the souls under his care not freak out completely, is God’s living flame of love doing its deepest purifying work. It is part of John’s daunting reputation— and Flannery O’Connor’s, for that matter— how much he stresses the deep human horror of the dark night. But think of bougainvilleas, the beauty of a fence-full of fuchsia-colored glory. Why do we have to go so far south to see that beauty? It is not because of the summers that bougainvilleas don’t grow in Michigan, or even Virginia. It is the winters. John of the Cross is bearing witness to a variety of bougainvillea that blooms at the South Pole in the dead of the southern hemisphere’s worst winter. That he should dwell on what it takes for those flowers to appear under such conditions— speaking as a gardener here— seems eminently practical to me.
* * *
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” If Jesus asked that question, from the depths of his own abandonment on the cross, do we really think we can avoid asking it ourselves at some point? It is at that point that we truly know that the whole of creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. We are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope. “And so I said to my soul, Be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” For we know not what we should pray for as we ought. If we don’t wonder why God has forsaken us, in this moment, we are not human. If we don’t try everything we can to get out of this apparent dead end of blindness to the good, this feeling of utter helpless abandonment to a world without grace, we are not human. But this is not the moment when our efforts can do anything. God it is who works here, John of the Cross says. In this impenetrable darkness.
Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name behind the hands that wove the intolerable shirt of flame, which human power cannot remove. But love here would be love of the wrong thing.
* * *
This is as far as I ever intended to get, in this essay on the novelist and prayer: the place in prayer where our human conceptions of God crap out, by the grace of God, the place where the human mind and heart founder in a bottomless abyss, freed from “God” by God, conscious only of the soul’s own poverty and incapacity for self-generated meaning. It is a place that is remarkably congruent with the deepest insights of all our best modern and post-modern artists and philosophers, all things considered. “There’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth,” Hazel Motes, one of the earliest of Flannery O’Connor’s passionate nihilists declares; and O’Connor herself was clear enough on the question: “If you live today you breathe in nihilism.” Nihilism is the ultimate modern ecumenicism; we can all gather under its tent for our symposia. The human encounter with the human ex nihilo at the heart of human being is the common groundlessness of us all. “Nada nada nada nada nada nada,” John of the Cross wrote on his rarely-translated hand-drawn sketch of the path up Mt. Carmel: “And even on the Mount, nothing.” “Our nada who art in nada,” Hemingway wrote, in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” “Nada be thy name.”
The Christian novelist has no argument with the macho nihilist here: Every honest story we tell begins on this same utterly reliable basis of nothing whatsoever in the world or self to rely on, in the foul rag and bone shop of our helpless and impoverished heart, with a mind baffled and blinded in the cloud of human unknowing. The difference faith makes, the difference that is the love of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is as invisible here as ever, and now under conditions that seem unpropitious. But by their fruits we shall know them.
