Session Eight
Chapter sixty-nine
“Experiencing this nothing in its nowhere miraculously transforms a person’s soul, outlook, and capacity for love.”
When you first start looking at this nothing it is a dark mirror reflecting back to you all your past sins, mistakes, and misdeeds to horrifying effect. If you stay in it, don’t retreat to worldly concerns and consolations, grace will rub these sins clean and heal you. Stay in it, and you will know peace.
Chapter seventy
Neither your 5 senses, nor the height of your intellectual capacity will help you know the depth of God. “Failure of understanding can help us. When we reach the end of what we know, that's where we find God.”
Chapter seventy-one
Moses and Aaron are mystical archetypes for two kinds of contemplatives.
Moses is the kind who must devote himself to a spiritual practice for a long time before experiencing “the God given delight called ectasy.”
Aaron is the kind who is so at home in God that he experiences this height during ordinary activity. He can go “into the temple” at any time.
The Ark of the Covenant symbolizes the grace of contemplation. The Ark contains the “jewels and relics of the temple” just as our love longing focused on God in the cloud of unknowing “contains all the virtues of the soul.”
Chapter seventy-two
Don’t make the assumption that your experience is universal.
Chapter seventy-three
The three men most involved with the Ark symbolize the three ways we “advance in the grace of contemplation.”
Sometimes we make progress by grace alone after a long, arduous journey - Moses. Even then our progress is not a reward for our effort it is by grace alone.
Sometimes we experience progress on the path using our skill aided by grace - Bazalel. He built the ark using the blueprints that Moses got from God.
Sometimes we experience contemplation through the teaching of others - Aaron. Being a priest he could see and touch the ark in the temple anytime he wanted.
Chapter seventy-four
If this type of prayer and these teachings are not for you that’s okay. Quit this and try something else.
Chapter seventy-five
Does the desire for contemplation press on your mind and heart at all times? Do you find no peace unless you make this “little love-longing” your central focus? If yes, then this way is for you.