‘There is a crack, a crack in everything…that’s how the light gets in…’
A recent online zoom conversation with a dear contemplative friend left me, for some time afterwards, in a state of profound but ‘just so’ sadness. We’d kept in touch over the course of recent months, mostly exchanging audio messages via WhatsApp every few days, but also finding time for sporadic zoom chats as family life and time differences between Malaysia and England have allowed for. This particular recent conversation held a different movement between us, as we fell into a reverie-soaked reflective mood about the last few months and what our contact has potentially meant to ourselves and to each other. Neither of us could remember the details of our chats so much as the richness of cultivating space and emotional depth that invited a shared noticing and verbalising of our respective struggles at this time. We heard each other, often in pregnant silence, at a time of difficulty, and without feeling the need to change anything. We contemplated life together. In the ensuing days it’s led me towards some reflections on the nature of contemplation at times of personal and collective uncertainty, and the importance of spiritual friendships planted in contemplative soil.
A spiritual practice simply disposes us for something to take place. We find in our friendships, especially those which hold deliberate space for spiritual depth and authenticity, that new terrain can be discovered, worked over and nurtured. A shared bearing witness to the mysterious heart of things invites a dialogue that spans what Thomas Merton described as the ‘pre-verbal, verbal and post-verbal’ domains of relating. The book of Sirach (6:36), in the Orthodox Bible, counsels that one ‘should seek a person of understanding, cleave to a person that is wise, then go to that person who is wise, letting one’s feet wear away the steps of their door.’ I like that image of worn steps. Spiritual friendship is a practice that helps us to focus our attention on the wisdom currents within and between us. It’s tough otherwise, even for this seasoned introvert. A friendship that can hold a dedicated and loving field of spiritual curiosity, is an invaluable complement to the inner work of solitude.
A secure silence develops within spiritual friendship, that carries no latent expectations for verbal exchange or convention, instead providing an opportunity to dwell wordlessly in human presence. This silence might ultimately be a vehicle to safely extend feeling beyond the relationship itself. A spiritual friend makes no attempt to eradicate the reactive fear of fear that we might express when feeling low or in a disorienting darkness about our life. It is often enough within a deep friendship that has weathered the storms of emotional life over some time, to relate existentially or archetypally to what is going on and to suffer life’s vicissitudes together. No solutions offered or needed. Just worn steps. Vulnerability and uncertainty occurs naturally in some seasons of life or when certain events unfold. In a secure and trustworthy space between friends, fear might just run its natural course. We are both changed for the experience. We grow. And so when we return to our practice in solitude, we are renewed and resourced for the long hours of personal silence.
Lately, when in a contemplative moment or when solitarily sitting in a deliberate time of practice, subtle energies of fear and sadness, restlessness and worry often take up more space. I’m glad, then, of the memory of time spent in contemplative company. Right now so many people are grieving, are displaced socially, economically and emotionally, or confronted internally with states of pain, shame or exhaustion. It weighs upon me. I recognise that I am a part of it all. There is an immediate and prospective hopelessness haunting the collective imagination as lives and livelihoods are suddenly falling apart and existential uncertainty is teetering into states of dread for many. We are witnessing a collective stretching and breaking of the psychic skin of communities torn apart by historical injustices of race and socio-economic disjointedness. People are dying and people are mindlessly killing each other. Sudden panic and persistent ache are unusual psychic bedfellows but thrown together all the same in this collective political and pandemic soup. And yet I sit, in my earnest attempt to respond to underlying reality, and to live a contemplative or spiritual life that will inspire and inform my actions in this world. What else is there to do?
Something happens when you practice contemplation, but it will never likely be what you expect. In my experience, no one starts a contemplative or meditation practice without expecting to change something, go somewhere or get something out of it. But the doorway into silent practice is a wound and the silence we enter into lays things bare. We do not practice for long before this wound (of the human condition) makes itself known and we recognise the wisdom of settling into a practice that honours both our individual hurts and our collective uncertainty. We hopefully discover along the way that life has a rhythm that we can trust, one that is essential to our existence and extinguished existences. But in the midst of a sudden wave of immense global suffering, practice often means sitting in the very painful slit of a broken (and psychologically split) humanity. There is a deeply ingrained human tendency to recoil from our own personal and collective brokenness, to judge it as others have judged it, to avoid it as we have been taught over a lifetime to avoid it. In doing so we ignore the profound wisdom and shared psychological truths of the world’s great spiritual traditions. Within a Christian (contemplative) context, Thomas Merton expresses this movingly:
The Christ we find in ourselves is not the identified with what we vainly seek to admire and idolize in ourselves - on the contrary, he has identified himself with what we resent in ourselves...we will never find peace if we listen to the voice of our own fatuous self-deception that tells us the conflict has ceased to exist. We will find peace when we can listen to the ‘death dance’ in our blood, not only with equanimity but with exultation because we hear within it the echoes of Christ’
This is precisely where contemplative practice places us, where the suffering becomes apparent in us and the balm of divinity anoints a broken humanity. The practice of contemplation teaches us how to be in this wound of living and to dwell softly and patiently within its molten and messy core. Within the centre of the cave of the heart, we discover a place of non condemning affirmation and of silent, loving communion and compassion for all. Nothing is forgotten. Our individual and collective wounds don’t often strike us as anything but brokenness, shame or failure. But when we enter further into silence, what we make of human failure and brokenness begins to look subtly different.
Of course, we might also discover that an encounter into anxiety just might re-order us back to our own safe keeping. It might be the doorway through which we are forced to slow down and recalibrate, and be subsequently reminded of the unrepeatable quality of every moment. How else sometimes, without a jolt to our personal or collective protected reality, might we be reminded that spiritual health is oft-maintained by attending to an even tension between (simultaneously) feeling significant and insignificant? Or that, if we’re not careful enough, we forget that ‘...attention without feeling,’ as Mary Oliver observed, ‘is only a report.’
As much as many people are currently thrown into a time of significant existential and global uncertainty right now, any wise fool knows the inevitability over a lifetime of facing up to and dwelling within the ambivalent space in us all, of good and bad, love and hate, health and disorder. Christopher Bollas describes this as an ‘evocative space’ where we receive news from within, where we feel alive and meaning can potentially be felt in the most dark situations. For Carl Jung, its resolution relies upon integrating our ‘religious instinct’, a force that is archaic and immanent, inevitable and intense, into our consciously lived psychological lives. The Eastern orthodox spiritual tradition describes this perilous inner movement as ‘holding the mind in the heart’. But the Eastern monks also knew well that in order to know the God that dwells deep within, one must first come to know the unbidden emotions, the secretive passions, which surround our centre and which one must relate to in order to bring under some kind of paradoxical sway. ‘Swink and sweat’ in all that thou can’st and mayest’, writes the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing, ‘for to get thee a true knowing and feeling as of thyself as thou art’. There is no contemplative path that does not include a trial by experience of unconscious and numinous dynamism.
So what might sustain us as contemplative practitioners in times of uncertainty, pain or psychic-flux? I find it useful in my work as a contemplative psychotherapist to keep this question close to heart and mind. It renews my memory of people’s innate ability to navigate pain, find a way through crisis, and gain genuine wisdom; A confirmation, perhaps, of the contemplative dimension of mind. The Dalai Lama refers to the ‘suffering of suffering’ as one of three categories of distress, alongside the suffering of change and all pervasive suffering. The suffering of suffering, a movement well known to depth psychotherapies, describes those apparently objective forms of anguish that can be alleviated when we find within ourselves the (often reluctant) urge to meet them squarely and honestly. But we often need first to recognise our own vulnerability and inescapable human fragility, before attending to the problem at hand, and subsequently moving forward. Only then does the modern fascination with ‘resilience’ have value; We potentially ‘bounce back’ only once we have paid fullest attention (with the heart) to the new shape life has bent us into. We might find, along the way, that the new shape holds wisdom not immediately available to our demands for consistency or only ill fitting of dysfunctional societal norms.
There’s a lovely story about vulnerability within the Zen tradition that resonates with both my innate clumsiness and intuitive experience of sitting in the heart of self-doubt. Pat Enkyo O’Hara, the social activist and abbot of Village Zendo in New York, at some point during her Zen Buddhist training with Maezumi Roshi in the San Francisco Jacinto Mountains, was in charge of the Zendo altars and its various ornaments. One day, the beautifully ancient wooden cup she was carrying fell from her hands and cracked badly. The cup was so beautiful and she knew the Zen centre was financially precarious. Feeling upset with herself, she went to her teacher and with earnest apology promised to replace the broken cup. In tender reply, Maezumi Roshi said ‘Look at the cup, Enkyo; it’s more beautiful now than it was before.’ This exchange took place at a time when Maezumi Roshi had been publicly and privately humiliated, and rejected by many of his students, following scandals about his sexual indiscretions and related issues with alcohol. O’Hara writes, ‘here he was still teaching, still doing this work, and he was more valuable after all those scandals than he was before... I just saw the beauty of our humanness through him’.
At the heart of our ability to heal lies an inner awareness of our mortality, a lived acquaintance with human fragility, and an intimate knowledge of the complex nature of all things psychological. In a social media age of an adoration of amplified collective ideals and filtered presentations of reality, we risk losing the human capacity for finding beauty in the brokenness of things, or in the wrinkles and scars that whisper the stories of our lives. The Japanese have a tradition, Kintsugi, of mending broken cups using a gold lacquer which is thought to make the cup more authentically beautiful than when it was whole. That’s always made sense to me.
There is a natural beauty of things modest and humble, mirroring the unconventionality of life as it is despite our best efforts. The depressive wisdom of Leonard Cohen offers comfort to those souls in a moment of struggle; ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.’
I guess we’re all just trying to let the light in without falling apart along the way.