If you talk to an old-school Trappist monk, he’ll tell you that “adoration” is something properly given to God alone.
I learned this the hard way, when in the acknowledgements section of my book Answering the Contemplative Call, I wrote a comment about how much “I adore” my wife. Reading this (in manuscript form), my old monastic mentor Fr. Anthony said, “You can love your wife all you want, but you should only adore God!”
It seemed like semantic word-splitting to me, but I didn’t want to offend the elderly monk, so I searched my inner thesaurus and changed the wording to tell my wife “I cherish you.”
Why is adoration something special we offer to God? Like so many words with spiritual or religious meanings, the secret is in etymology. Adoration comes from a Latin root that means not only “to love” but also “to worship.”
Nowadays, when many Christians and other spiritual seekers tend to stress God’s intimacy rather than God’s majesty, this kind of linguistic hair-splitting may seem arbitrary or silly. But perhaps it can be a helpful reminder that, since God is the Source of all Love, then perhaps there’s something to reserving a type of worship — adoration — strictly for God alone, even while we recognize that all forms of love ultimately have their origin in the Divine Heart.
With all this in the back of my mind, I’d like to share with you a quote I discovered that offers an interesting insight into the spirituality of adoration.
But now see what it is to adore God: it is, in the Christian faith, with great reverence and above reason, to gaze in the spirit upon God, the Eternal Power, Creator and Lord of heaven and earth and all that in them is.
The Anglican contemplative Maggie Ross is well known for her advocacy of beholding as a core expression of contemplative practice, as seen in the title of her 2011 book,Writing the Icon of the Heart: In Silence Beholding. The Curé D’Ars famously defined prayer as “I look at God, and God looks at me.” Anyone who’s ever had a lover knows the delirious joy of simply, wordlessly, gazing into the eyes of your beloved. Heaven on earth.
So it’s a delight to reflect on this little quotation from the fourteenth century Flemish mystic, John Ruysbroeck (also spelled “Ruusbroec”), whom Evelyn Underhill called “one of the greatest of Christian contemplatives.” Ruysbroeck equates adoration with beholding, by highlighting the humbly central role that simple gazing plays in contemplative prayer. He goes on to explain the heart of this contemplative beholding, using two concepts: reverence and reason.
“With great reverence” — in other words, such gazing is not lazy or indifferent — “and above reason” — which is to say, contemplative beholding is an expression of metanoia, that place “beyond the mind” where Divine nonduality may be apprehended intuitively but not “thought about” discursively.
So with great reverence, and beyond all ordinary reasons, we are invited, in love, to simply be present to the already-present presence of God. God gazes upon us, and we return the gaze. Love inspires love, and love meets Love. This mutual gaze: this is the heart of adoration.
In our gazing we do not seek to find God, but rather relax into the fact that God has already found us. And there we may cherish and relish, in a single moment within which all eternity unfolds, the boundless silence of union with Divine Love.
So cherish all your earthly loves: do so joyfully and exultantly. And recognize that the very love you cherish comes to you, lavishly and infinitely, from the One whom you are invited to adore, in the wordless silence of contemplative beholding.
A reader named Dave recently sent this question to me:
Hi Carl, could you please give me some suggestions on reading for the false self/ego? Just going through early chapters of New Seeds of Contemplation and it’s really gripped me to dive deeper.
He didn’t specify what passage(s) in New Seeds of Contemplation were speaking to him, but it’s pretty easy to see where this topic — the “false self” — shows up in Merton’s work. Consider these quotes (page numbers are from the Kindle edition):
The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self, and enter by love into union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls. (page 27)
And,
My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion. (page 36)
Of course, to talk about the “false self” leads to a parallel conversation about one’s “true” self. Here’s Merton again:
Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him. (page 38)
To the best of my knowledge, Merton was the first major Christian contemplative author in the English language to write about this “true self / false self” distinction. But he was hardly the last! His fellow Trappist monks Thomas Keating and M. Basil Pennington use this language; indeed, Pennington wrote an entire book on this concept: True Self, False Self: Unmasking the Spirit Within. The concepts of the true and false self show up in some of Keating’s most important books, like Open Mind Open Heartand Invitation to Love. Beyond the Trappists, Richard Rohr picks up this language in his book Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self.
Although New Seeds of Contemplation was published in 1962, it is in fact a revision of an earlier work, Seeds of Contemplation, which came out in 1949 — barely a year after Merton’s bestseller The Seven Storey Mountainwas published. Merton uses this language of true self and false self in the earlier edition, so the idea had been part of his thinking since his first decade in the cloister.
(Incidentally, if you look up “true self and false self” in Wikipedia, you’ll find an assertion that the language only dates back to about 1960, in the writing of a British psychiatrist named Donald Winnicott. Apparently the editor of that particular page on Wikipedia is ignorant of, or uninterested in, the religious/contemplative use of these concepts.)
Merton’s description of the false self carries a kind of theological harshness that might be expected from a pre-Vatican II Trappist monk. The false self is a “prison” and is linked to sin; in Merton’s dour assessment, “To say I was born in sin is to say I came into the world with a false self.” (page 35). Thankfully, he goes out of his way to insist that the false self should not be equated to the flesh (the body) — but this disclaimer only appeared in the “New Seeds” edition of the book, not in the original 1949 edition. It makes me wonder if Merton had to deal with readers jumping to that kind of dualist conclusion after reading the original text.
Thankfully, later writers (like Keating) have tended to shy away from equating the false self with sin. In Invitation to Love, Keating uses therapeutic rather than juridical language to describe the false self:
The false self is the syndrome of our emotional programs for happiness grown into sources of motivation and made much more complex by the socialization process, and reinforced by our overidentification with our cultural conditioning. Our ordinary thoughts, reactions, and feelings manifest the false self on every level of our conduct. (page 12).
In other words, the false self is not a sinner who needs to be disciplined, but the symptom of an illness that needs to be healed.
That’s certainly an improvement. But I think it’s still just putting lipstick on a pig. In other words, whether we see the “false self” as either symptomatic of sin or sickness, either way I think it’s language that creates more problems than it solves.
We Have Enough Dichotomies; We Don’t Need to Create New Ones
Recently I had an email exchange with another person about the notion of the true and false self. Here (edited slightly for brevity) is what I wrote:
I, personally, am very uncomfortable with the language of “true” and “false” self. I know it’s widely used — from Merton to Pennington to Keating to Rohr, etc. — but I also know this distinction is very much a product of our time, and isn’t found earlier in the mystical tradition… it seems to me that the language of true/false self is inherently dualistic and sets up a dynamic of judgment (either good or bad, but judgment either way) toward the self. It splits the self off into accuser and defendant.
My correspondent had linked the concept of the false self to the Biblical concept of dying to the old self, as seen in Romans 6:6-8, where St. Paul says, “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.”
St. Paul never uses language of “false” and “true” self, although he does talk about the “old” and the “new” self. Still, I’m uncomfortable reading this contemporary concept back into the ancient text of scripture. So I went on to say:
I also think it’s anachronistic to project true/false self language back onto biblical teachings: when we are invited to “die to self” it’s a much more radical call when we refuse to refract the self into the “true” and “false” bits. It all has to die. We are called to surrender without condition or limitation into the boundarylessness of Divine Mercy and Love.
“A Modern Expression of a Very Old Mistake”
Well, the language of the false self makes me uneasy, but let me give credit where it is due: the British solitary Maggie Ross was the first person I encountered whose dislike for this language actually helped me to realize that I, too, am uncomfortable with it. Here’s what Maggie had to say in her book Silence: A User’s Guide Volume I:
False self/true self are commonly-used phrases suggesting that there is part of the person that needs to be excised, suppressed, or destroyed; the assumption behind them is that the self is static and linear. This is a procrustean notion of the self. It is a modern expression of a very old mistake. Its modern use in the discussion of old texts is anachronistic. It is antithetical to notions of incarnation, and alien to pre-Reformation Christianity… it is a self-judgement that takes place entirely from the very limited and skewed perspective of the … virtual/conceptual self-conscious mind; this alone makes its claims untenable. … The paradox of intention—and witnesses through the ages—suggest that we can never know who we are, much less make such a judgment. The deep mind, where the person’s truth continually unfolds out of sight, is not directly accessible, although it receives, discerns, and incorporates the decisions and attitudes categorized by self-consciousness. …engaging and entering our wounds and what we most despise about our selves are fundamental to trans-figuration, to wisdom, practice, and compassion. The message of the Incarnation is that nothing is wasted. (Kindle location 1532ff.)
To put it more simply and concisely: whenever we label part of ourselves as “false,” we are disobeying Matthew 7:1, where Jesus instructs us to refrain from judgment. Even when we sin, we need to keep our focus primarily on God’s redeeming and forgiving love, which is always greater than our disobedience or our harmful actions.
Trying to split ourselves into a “true” and “false” dimension — even in the interest of understanding the difference between sin and grace, or sickness and health, at work in our lives — just creates a bigger problem than it solves. Maggie Ross’s concept of the “deep mind” is a reminder that there are dimensions to human life and experience that remain inaccessible to our wills or even to our understanding.
Merton wrote about this, in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, talking about what he called le point vierge: “At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.”
The Deep Mind and Le Point Vierge: Where Survival Mind and Playful Mind Remember That They Are One
I believe Maggie Ross’s concept of the “deep mind” may be equivalent to Merton’s concept of le point vierge: it’s a place at the center of our being where the dichotomy between “true” and “false” self simply no longer matters: for it is a place of pure love and compassion, mercy and forgiveness, continually inviting us into reconciliation and renewal. At the surface level, the so-called false self “sins” and the so-called true self “judges the sin.” Unfortunately, both of these positions miss the mark. But at the level of le point vierge, the deep mind, we recognize that both false and true self stand in need of mercy and forgiveness, both are renewed in the light of grace and love, and both are made one in Christ: one with Christ, and even one with each other.
In my very first book, Spirituality, published in 1997 (that long ago?!?), I came up with an alternative to the language of “false” and “true” self: I talked about two dimensions of consciousness, which I called survival-mind and playful-mind. As you can imagine, survival-mind is really good at filing income tax returns, managing one’s financial portfolio, keeping the oil changed and the air ducts clean, and so forth and so on. Playful-mind, meanwhile, tends to be better at writing poetry, engaging in contemplative prayer, falling in love, and embracing the encounter with mystery. Like Mary and Martha of Bethany, they are siblings, and they need each other. No judgment!
There are things that survival-mind does really well, and other things where it falls flat. The same holds true for playful-mind, but in different dimensions. Each can be judgmental of the other. In fact, I would go so far as to say that a lot of the rhetoric that we see written about the problems of the “false self” sounds like the playful-mind expressing its criticism of the survival-mind! Imagine the parable of Mary and Martha if it had been Mary complaining about Martha rather than the other way around, and you might get a sense of what I’m trying to say here.
Another approach to this distinction between our everyday awareness and the deep mind — that’s much more academically rigorous than my old book — can be found in a book called The Master and His Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western Worldby Iain McGilchrist. Read it along with Ross’s book to get an in-depth sense of what she means by “the deep mind” and how it is distinct from, and yet intimately related to, our more ordinary rational consciousness, which is analogous to my concept of the “survival-mind” — or, I believe, what many people may be referring to when they talk about the “false self.”
I know that I have no business daring to criticize the many great contemplative writers of our time who talk about the distinction between the true and false self. But like Maggie Ross, I’m just not very comfortable with the language. I worry that it’s too easy to misunderstand it and lapse into dualistic thinking around these notions. Maybe the playful/survival model could be a more helpful way of thinking about how we sometimes embrace and sometimes reject dimensions of ourselves. Maybe the notions of the deep mind and le point vierge can help us to remember that there is something bigger and deeper at work than just rejecting a part of ourself that we’ve labeled “the false self” (or “the ego” or “the older brother” or “self-righteousness” or whatever).
So… this is a very long-winded reply to my friend Dave, who just asked for a few book recommendations! Obviously, I’d suggest you check out all the books I’ve mentioned in this post.1The highlighted titles will take you to Amazon if you want to purchase any copies; please do follow the links because then I get a small commission off of your purchase, at no extra cost to you. But I hope that you’ll take Maggie Ross’s critique to heart. Contemplation is all about rediscovering the unity that is always already there. So it’s a bit of a detour to get caught up in language that just introduces new types of dichotomies into our thinking.
A Jesuit priest, a Trappist monk, and a Tibetan buddhist walked into a bar.
(No, this is not a joke).
A sign above the bar said, “Free drinks to everyone in your party, if you can all agree on a definition of the word “contemplation.”
Two hours later, the Buddhist and the two Catholics were very thirsty — and still arguing.
Contemplation is one of those words that, frankly, means different things to different people. Even religious people can’t figure it out. And as soon as you start talking about different religions (like Christian and Buddhist), or throw in secular perspectives as well, well, the water just keeps getting muddier and muddier.
So What Is Contemplation?
Here are a few definitions of contemplation — to illustrate my point.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines contemplation as “a gaze of faith, fixed on Jesus… This focus on Jesus is a renunciation of self. His gaze purifies our heart; the light of the countenance of Jesus illumines the eyes of our heart and teaches us to see everything in the light of his truth and his compassion for all men. Contemplation also turns its gaze on the mysteries of the life of Christ. Thus it learns the “interior knowledge of our Lord,” the more to love him and follow him.”
Meanwhile, in his book New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton offers this grouchy response: contemplation “is a misleading word in many respects. It raises great hopes that are all too likely to be illusory because misunderstood. It can become almost a magic word, or if not magic, then inspirational, which is almost as bad. But the worst disadvantage of the word is that it sounds like ‘something,’ an objective quality, a spiritual commodity that one can procure, something that it is good to have; something which, when possessed, liberates one from problems and from unhappiness. As if there were a new project to be undertaken, among all the million other projects suggested to us in our lifetime: to become contemplatives.” He goes on to flatly insist that “it is impossible for one man to teach another ‘how to become a contemplative.’ One might as well write a book: ‘how to be an angel.’”
This Trappist monk seems to be saying that contemplation cannot be possessed, taught, or objectified. But compare that to the perspective of a Jesuit priest who writes about Ignatian spirituality. In his book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, James Martin equates contemplation with “imaginative prayer.” Insisting that “all prayer is contemplative,” he goes on to note that, in Ignatian terms, contemplative prayer means “imagining yourself in a scene from the Bible, or in God’s presence, and then taking part in it. It’s a way of allowing God to speak to you through your imagination.”
What is contemplation? It is mixing the teachings with our experience. Contemplation is a bridge to study for meditators because it arouses inquisitiveness about the nature of meditation and postmeditation experience. Reflecting on the meaning and implications of the teachings puts meditation in a larger perspective than simply cultivating what we believe to be wholesome states of mind or trying to master a series of techniques. Study and contemplation arouse insight and give meditation direction and focus. Insight and focus make meditation an effective means of transformation.
But if contemplation links meditation and experience, the Anglican solitary Maggie Ross couldn’t disagree more. In her book Silence, A User’s Guide Volume 1, She notes that “contemplation entails relinquishing all claims to experience; it opens to what is uncircumscribed and other. It is not, therefore, an ‘experience.’” She goes on to say, “contemplation takes place in the absence of self-consciousness.” In other words, anything you self-consciously think is contemplation, therefore by definition is anything but contemplation.
Finally, here’s a word from Barbara Holmes, author of Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church. Speaking more of “contemplative practices” than simply of contemplation, Dr. Holmes defines spiritual or communal practices as contemplative when “they create intersections between inner cosmologies and the interpretive life of a community.”
I think we’re getting somewhere. But still — how does all this fit together?
Is it the path? Or is it the garden?
Can We Narrow Down Our Understanding? Is it Even Possible to do so?
Is contemplation a gaze of faith? Learning to see in the light of truth? Something that cannot be controlled or manipulated? A bridge between meditation and teaching? Or the relinquishing of all claim to experience? Finally, does it mark the intersection of our inner lives with our communal ways of knowing and discerning?
What if — in the words of the great philosopher Pete the Cat — “it’s all good”? Can we find a way of thinking about contemplation that embraces and includes all of the above? Can we help our poor Trappist, Jesuit, and Buddhist friends get a drink already?!
If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you get the joke: I’m the Buddhist, the Trappist, and the Jesuit. I work part-time at a Jesuit parish, and I’m a lay associate of a Trappist monastery. I’m also an off-and-on student of Shambhala Buddhism. So for me, this question is really important. How can we approach contemplation in a way that embraces our spiritual diversity, without making this word or concept so broad that it becomes meaningless?
Here’s what I’d like to say. Ultimately, we cannot put contemplation into words. We should be suspicious of turning contemplation into another “experience” that splits me-as-subject off from God-as-object. But if we could say anything about contemplation, it would be that it invites us within — to the arena of imagination, and/or devotional adoration, and/or meditation, and/or visionary seeing. All of this is too big for any one person to figure out on their own, so we need to balance that inner “cosmology” with the insights that come to us from others — whether that means religious instruction, spiritual wisdom, or the guidance of discerning elder. I’m not saying that our inner lives are less important than the wisdom that we learn from others — but neither is that wisdom less important than our personal experience. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.
By now you may be wondering, “But what does all this have to do with centering prayer? Or zen? Or T.M.? Or praying the rosary, or walking the labyrinth, or…” the list could go on. I think we have a tendency to confuse contemplation as a spiritual phenomenon with contemplative practices that we engage in, to grow spiritually. You can engage in a contemplative practice without entering into authentic contemplation (that’s the old catholic distinction between “infused” and “acquired” contemplation — what we do by our own initiative is acquired, but the real mystical encounter is always an infused gift from God).
But just as you can do a contemplative practice (like centering prayer) without contemplation, likewise, contemplation-as-a-spiritual gift can come to us, regardless of whether or not we are dedicated practitioners of this or that spiritual practice. Contemplation can happen without warning, to anyone, at any time, even in the most ordinary or strange of circumstances.
So what’s the point then of spiritual practices? As Thomas Keating puts it, they serve the desire to make ourselves available for contemplation. Contemplation itself is always a gift (a gift that cannot be talked about or even self-consciously ‘experienced’). But religious and spiritual traditions all over the world have developed a variety of practices that can make us more available to receive the gift — which still remains ultimately beyond our control.
In the headline of this post, I asked the rhetorical question “why should I care?” — about contemplation and contemplative practice. I think the answer to that question will vary, depending on the language of faith or spirituality that you prefer to use. A Buddhist will answer this question differently from a Trappist or a Jesuit. But it seems to me that people who have faith in God understand contemplation as authentic encounter — the encounter between “God” and “me,” even if (and often, especially if) the lines separating “me” and “God” suddenly fall away.
I can’t speak for non-theists, since I myself am a theist. But I suspect that contemplation is still an authentic encounter for non-theists, only it’s the encounter of self with self. Or perhaps you could self and Self. Ramana Maharshi talked about the “I” that encounters the “i.”
So whether contemplation brings us eyeball-to-eyeball with God, or simply with our most authentic/real/interior self, either way it matters because it ushers us into the heart of things.
Celebrating Unity within Diversity
I love reading the writing on non-Christian contemplatives, folks like Thich Nhat Hanh, or Rumi, or Aurobindo. I see the basic unity where “deep calls to deep.” But I have no interest in shedding my identity as a Christian in favor of some sort of lowest-common-denominator bland/generic spirituality. I continue to make contemplative Christianity my home because there is a rich language, history, wisdom lineage, and set of exercises that only make sense in a Christian context. That’s not to denigrate any of the other wonderful contemplative lineages out there. Contemplatives understand that you can go deep in one tradition while simultaneously respecting and affirming the contemplative wisdom found in other traditions.
Contemplative spirituality is a place where Christians can be Christians, Buddhists can be Buddhists, Vedantists can be Vedantists, etc. Granted a lot of color outside the lines to a greater or lesser extent, but I imagine most of us have a particular place we think of as “home.” But we affirm our religious diversity while also celebrating the deep unity that contemplation reveals. There are many languages, and many stories, and many teachings, but there is only one silence. And as we get to know each other’s stories and languages, we simply find more and more paths leading us into that one silence.
