Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 3 - April 24, 2019
Transfiguring experience is not granted to people as an easy and ready access to glory. Only in going up the mountain, rejecting and being rejected by the world, identifying with those who are most broken, does one encounter the divine refulgence.
Our substitution of consumer tourism for pilgrimage, of canned experience for life-changing risk, is symptomatic of our inability to entertain in any way the reality of our own transfiguration.
What, finally, is the truth taught by these two mountains, contradictory and complementary as they are? Simply this: that when everything is irretrievably lost, life does not end, but is at a point of new beginnings.
But in the final loss of everything that once was sure, there is also the birth of something new.
They symbolize states of growth we haven’t yet achieved.
Love as the Fruit of Indifference
Death does not extinguish the light. It puts out the lamp because the dawn has come.—Rabindranath Tagore
This purgative and loving knowledge or divine light we are speaking of has the same effect on a soul that fire has on a log of wood. . . . By heating and enkindling it from without, the fire transforms the wood into itself and makes it as beautiful as it is itself.—John of the Cross1
Gary Snyder says nature heals in the same sort of way that dreams and mythic symbols do. “In the shaman’s world, wilderness and the unconscious become analogous; he who knows and is at ease in one, will be at home in the other.”
What they fled with greatest fear was not the external world, but the world they carried inside themselves: an ego-centeredness needing constant approval, driven by compulsive behavior, frantic in its effort to attend to a self-image that always required mending.
The spiritual path, as Meister Eckhart observed, has more to do with subtraction than with addition. It is not so much a matter of adding all the active virtues to one’s practice of living as of relinquishing everything that can possibly be abandoned. How much can you leave behind? That is the desert’s question.
Imagine this exchange in the desert silence. You find yourself alone in a vast and empty terrain, standing before a naked wall of red-hued rock rising hundreds of feet above the canyon floor. Maybe it is the huge stone cliff seen from the chapel windows at Christ in the Desert Monastery in northern New Mexico. The stone never moves as you sit there facing it, but after a while it poses a question. How did the stone face of the canyon cliff change on the day of your divorce, the day your father or mother died, the day you came to admit your dependency on alcohol or drugs? Surely, it would seem,
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“unmitigated seriousness betokens a lack of virtue.”50
Only those having sustained the terrors of the cross can understand the raucous laughter of resurrection. Only the ones who have died completely to the expectations of the world are free to be truly eccentric, off-center by every standard of the majority.
The fundamental rule of the divine game is this: “He who loses, wins.”54 The carefree playfulness and freedom of God are mysteries entered only on the far side of darkness and death.
In discerning the will of God on any given matter, Ignatius insisted that one must “become like balance scales that are evenly weighted on both sides,” not pushing down one way or the other, simply resting there, waiting indifferently.11 Only in such a detached way can the ego be still enough to hear the voice of God.
That’s why the life of the monk seems so utterly foreign, even frightening. Our conditioning as members of a consumer society prevents us from abandoning hope that, with sufficient planning, we might yet be able to see and do everything. To move slowly and deliberately through the world, attending to one thing at a time, strikes us as radically subversive, even un-American. We cringe from the idea of relinquishing, in any moment, all but one of the infinite possibilities offered us by our culture. Plagued by a highly diffused attention, we give ourselves to everything lightly. That is our
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Do not lose the experience of life to the fear of death.
Yet the desert masters were careful to distinguish between “true” and “false” indifference. True indifference was a fruit of contemplation, a direct result of disciplined attentiveness. The “no” of desert apatheia could emerge only out of deep certainty about the “yes” of the gospel. Detachment from the world and its values required informed, deliberate choices about what does and does not matter in light of Jesus and the inbreaking of his kingdom. True indifference is rooted in a very conscious caring.
The deepest mystery of love is never realized apart from the experience of having nothing to offer in return. Only there does love reveal itself in unaccountable wonder.29
“All things excellent,” recalls Edward Abbey, “are as difficult as they are rare.”
This marriage of attentiveness and indifference gives birth at last to desert love. Such is the inevitable fruit of agrupnia and apatheia, the flowering of agape.
desert apatheia has a daughter whose name is love. She is a full-blooded and lovely child, this one, a desert gift awakened by attentiveness and purified through the long exercise of holy indifference.
love bursts into flame as desire and is banked by discipline into a slow and steady burn.
Devoted students, ever anxious to praise, are the teacher’s greatest danger. They bind him to an idealized image of his own spiritual accomplishments. The temptation is to use the infatuating semblance of the “other” to obtain a fullness of self, the flattering of the ego.
The answer, as Evagrius knew, lies in the exercise of apatheia as the mother of agape. Indifference, aimed at one’s exercise of desert attentiveness, turns frantic desire into focused love.
As Francis de Sales would later insist, “Contemplation is simply the mind’s loving, unmixed, permanent attention to the things of God.”
One begins to hear all that had been drowned out by the noise of the ego, how much one’s fretful anxiety had limited one’s capacity to love. At this crucial moment, the desert teachers explain, something astonishing occurs. “The ego becomes interested in its own destruction.”53 This happens as one acquires a taste for silence, and for love, in the quiet exercise of attentiveness.
Apatheia had taught them that purity of heart is to will one thing.
Until one accepts the inescapability of the cell, it is forever easier to run.
Intimacy is participation in each other’s unalterable emptiness, the sharing of a vulnerability that grows even deeper in being shared. If the desert has taught me anything, it’s that love can only blossom in abandonment.
There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokenness we find within. Moving apprehensively into the desert’s emptiness, up the mountain’s height, you discover in wild terrain a metaphor of your deepest fears. If the danger is sufficient, you experience a loss of competence, a crisis of knowing that brings you to the end of yourself, to the only true place where God is met.
Many people would rather have an “experience” of God than God himself.5 The masters of prayer in the apophatic tradition described throughout this book, however, insist that in the practice of silence ultimately there’s no experience of God to be had.
“The land of the spirit,” John of the Cross stubbornly declared, “is a land without ways.”7
Evagrius observed that “the Physician of souls heals by abandoning us,” or so it often seems.8 The desert becomes a good place for distinguishing between what is indeed a threat and what is actually another way of being loved.
I began to wonder if it’s only the people from whom we come to expect nothing that we’re ever able to perceive in all their uniquely created splendor.
What distinguishes the Christian exercise of silence in prayer is the “naked intent” of the person who, while empty of thoughts, nonetheless reaches blindly for the God that cannot be seen or even named.
What the desert teaches is a radical letting-go of the thinking-experiencing-managing self, so as to be content with God alone, a God without adjectives, without comforting signs of presence, so that at last one learns truly to delight in nothing. This nothing may be ultimately disclosed by the Christian habitus as “Something,” as the Holy Trinity hidden in light inaccessible from every effort to grasp its mystery. But the naming of the mystery is no longer an anxious concern of those who’ve been to the desert. Naming implies a control that the wilderness no longer allows.
Deliberately aiming the exercise of indifference (apatheia) at oneself, one releases little by little the anxious thoughts of the distracted ego. The false self is gradually starved by inattention. One learns also to be indifferent to others, ignoring surface impressions so as to open oneself to radically different people on the clean, level ground of an unspoken humanity.
Ultimately one becomes indifferent even to God, remaining blithely unconcerned about particular answers to prayer, about anything one might previously have wanted to “get” from God. One waits, instead, in curiosity to see what comes in the dark uncertainty of the night, content simply with God alone. Prayer becomes less a matter of petition than of relationship. Moving beyond the objectifying of one’s self, one’s neighbor, one’s God, the wilderness traveler arrives at that lonely desert place where love is now possible because it finally is wholly free, released of every frantic need to
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The miraculous becomes wholly ordinary where the ordinary itself is recognized as holy.
The desert has to lead us, at last, from aloneness with God (in a moment of great and silent emptiness) to community with others, from the loss of the fragile self to the discovery of a new identity binding us to the world. The apophatic moment, if genuine, must ever result in a recommitment to speech and engagement, a renewal of kataphatic energy. Desert attentiveness and desert indifference lead necessarily to desert love.
Philip Sheldrake discusses the significance of edge places and boundaries in his book Living Between Worlds: Place and Journey in Celtic Spirituality (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1995).
Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978),
Robert L. Cohn’s chapter on “Liminality in the Wilderness,” in The Shape of Sacred Space: Four Biblical Studies (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981), pp. 7–23.
James Hillman, “Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline,” in Puer Papers, ed. Cynthia Giles (Irving, Tex.: Spring Publications, 1979), pp. 54–74.
3. Andrew Harvey, A Journey in Ladakh
