Читать книгу Seduced by Grace - Michael Bernard Kelly - Страница 9

When I am asked these days, ‘What do you do?’ I am stumped. The monk Thomas Merton wrote: ‘What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.’ The southern Mornington Peninsula, with its clean winds and endless ocean, is a good place to learn to live and breathe.

In 1988, exhausted after years of teaching and ministry, I moved down here to rest and live alone for a year. I walked the beaches and sat by the fire, and slowly I fell in love with a contemplative way of being. Contemplatives, they say, are not people who have solved the mystery of God. They are those who can no longer keep the mystery at bay.

My life here is quiet and unremarkable, often enough boring and lonely. I have my times of prayer and meditation, but mostly I just ‘chop wood and carry water’, as Zen puts it. It’s all quite ordinary, but somehow the plainness and spaciousness of it keeps calling me home, often in spite of myself. Living simply, attentively, it becomes hard to sustain your illusions and ambitions, and impossible to miss the restless striving of your spirit. You start to live through the different ‘shapes’ your longing takes, and you enter the longing itself. In the still centre of your soul, you begin to taste deep silence.

The Spanish poet Machado wrote: ‘Is my soul asleep? No, my soul neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its clear eyes wide open… and listens at the shore of the Great Silence.’ I remember walking up the track from Bushrangers Bay on a windy afternoon five years ago. It was a time when the endless letting go asked of me seemed almost overwhelming. I looked across to the old hills sweeping down to the sea and was suddenly struck dumb by the sense that all our religions, sciences and philosophies are just toys and bones tossed on the edges of this Unknown Sea. We sit on the shore and play games with them to keep away our fear. We must face our fear, stop our games and turn our gaze to that sea. Living contemplatively means shaping your life so that you will be led continually to do just that.

For me this has meant learning the tough lessons of silence and solitude, but also coming to terms with chronic health problems. Together these have imposed a discipline and rhythm that have kept me slow-dancing on that empty shore as my old games have been inexorably exposed. For many contemplatives this all happens amid structured rituals, rules, robes and regulated practices, and sometimes I miss them in my dishevelled way of living. They have great value, but if you take them too seriously they can also insulate you against the rawness of life and the shock of the unknown. In time, they too must be let go.

At a deeper level still, all doctrines, concepts and images of God must be lived through and allowed to crumble. Leaving them, at last, on the shore, we enter the dark waters, allowing them to lift and carry us in naked simplicity and trust. Here we come to the heart of the matter. Contemplatives long to experience, unmediated, the Divine Mystery itself, to breathe ocean winds, to become one with the deep. For this they risk everything – like people in love. These words are, I know, cryptic and obscure – but what words will do? Call this a ‘ray of darkness’, a ‘cloud of unknowing’, a ‘divine wasteland’ – it remains more simple, silent and subtle than words can describe.

I often ask myself: ‘Who wants this emptiness, this desert?’ For this is not just about inner prayer, but also actual, everyday life. ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing…’ wrote St John of the Cross, and some days that’s exactly how it feels. Yet the same John also wrote: ‘My Beloved is the mountains, the solitary wooded valleys, the whispering of love-stirring breezes at the rising of tranquil dawn, resounding rivers, silent music.’ In the emptying is the embrace. Gradually, gently, you come to know this. I sometimes say that contemplative experience is nothing much –but it’s a ‘nothing much’ I’d give everything for.

Of course, it’s important to keep balanced – this is a way of living, not a short retreat or a week at the beach. Merton sometimes used to slip out of his hermitage to drink whisky and listen to jazz in nearby Louisville. I know I often need to get to the city, have a drink at the Portsea pub or catch a film in Rosebud. The company of friends and the warmth of a sensuous embrace are also sweet gifts of God that I delight in when I can.

In the simplicity of this life, you come home to yourself. You slowly become who you truly are, you breathe deeply, open to the wonder of what is. On a wild beach, in the silence after midnight, over a quiet coffee on a sunny afternoon, you trust and let go. ‘I cast the anchor of my life down and let its line run deep into the heart of the ocean of God on whose breast I rest.’

In the resting, and from the silence, you may sometimes be asked to speak, and you may then discover a strange freedom that comes, in part, from having little left to lose. Contemplatives, they say, have often been troublemakers.

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Published in The Age as a Faith column in December 1998.