With Longing Love

Here beginneth a book of contemplation, the which is called the Cloud of Unknowing, in the which a Soul is Oned with God.

So, some 600 years ago, an unknown English mystic began writing a little book addressed to a young man who planned to devote his life to the contemplative worship of God. It is still one of the great manuals of the devotional life.

Published this week is a new version of The Cloud of Unknowing (Harper; $1.50) --this time an "interpretation" by an anonymous student at a Quaker center. Greatly abridged and rearranged, the language of the new version is pared down to plain English as spare as a Friends' meetinghouse. The result is far less colorful than the conventional editions but perhaps more useful to the modern reader.

Prayer is the subject of the Cloud--the wordless, upthrusting prayer of the soul seeking direct experience of God. Such a soul, says the author, must approach God with a "meek, longing love" and a "naked intent unto God alone, and not to anything that He has made." Meditation, even upon the goodness of God, is distracting; he who would follow this path must put aside all thoughts and images and concentrate his whole being on a yearning hunger for God. "The first time that you try you will find only a darkness, as though it were a Cloud of Unknowing, which you do not understand. . . . Strike upon that thick Cloud of Unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love--and do not leave it no matter what happens."

If words seem necessary to focus the intention, "take but one little word of one syllable, for one is better than two; the shorter the word, the better it harmonizes with the work of the spirit. Such a word is this word GOD or this word LOVE. . . . [A single word] pierces the ears of the Almighty God, quicker than any long psalter unmindfully mumbled in the teeth. Therefore it is written that the short prayer pierces heaven."

Sinners need not hang back, says the Cloud: "No man needs to think that he is presumptuous in daring to offer himself to God as a contemplative even though he has been the worst kind of a sinner in this life. He may offer to God the meek longing love of his heart and in secret set himself to beat on this Cloud of Unknowing. . . . Our Lord said to Mary [Magdalene], a sinner above all sinners . . . 'Thy sins be forgiven thee.' He said this not because of her deep contrition for her sins, nor because she knew and felt her own wretched state, nor for the meekness that she had because of it. Why then? Surely because she loved much. Here one can see what a silent contemplative love will secure from God. . . ."

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