‘The Naked Now’: A Guide to Seeing How the Mystics See
A review of ‘The Naked Now’, by Richard Rohr; PublishDrive, 2009.
Pablo d’Ors, Catholic priest and writer of several outstanding books including Biography of Silence and Friend of the Desert, claims Christianity has lost its ‘mystical core’. It is surely true that many in the West are unaware that contemplative practices—zazen, say, or yoga—even have a Christian equivalent. Yet in the fourteenth century, mysticism thrived in the Christian world. Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and Mechthild von Magdeburg are among its most famous devotees. And there are Christian writers and thinkers in our time who have sought to renew that tradition – often by looking East. The Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton exchanged letters on the subject with Daisetz Suzuki. John Main, the English Benedictine monk, learned mantra meditation from Dr Swami Satyananda in what was then Malaya. D’Ors, inspired by Franz Jalics and others, practised Zen meditation for a number of years. (He lyrically relates his experience in Silence.)
The restoration of contemplative prayer to its proper place in the Christian tradition would surely be a good thing. This is not just because, by dint of my own experience and what I hope is a careful reading of the science, I am convinced of the worth of meditation. It is because through contemplative eyes religion starts to look, as it were, less like prose and more like poetry, less procedural and more experiential. Moreover, practically speaking, it will be difficult for the would-be contemplative to keep meditating if her practice is divorced from that which helps make sense of her experience. So I am glad that Pablo d’Ors has set up Friends of the Desert, a network of Christian meditators, and that Laurence Freeman, whose mentor was John Main, runs the World Community for Christian Meditation, the W.C.C.M.. And I am heartened, too, that Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, has made it his aim to help us shed our Cartesian dualism. He wants us to rest in the present moment, where ‘past and future and gathered’, to quote Eliot, in what Rohr calls ‘the naked now’.
The restoration of contemplative prayer to its proper place in the Christian tradition would surely be a good thing.
In his book of that name, Rohr claims that true spiritual, that is, deep psychological growth comes only when we let go of black-and-white, ‘either/or’ thinking. In this, he echoes great minds like Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Nicolas of Cusa (sometimes called Cusanus) and Iain McGilchrist, creator of the hemisphere hypothesis. These thinkers are untroubled by paradox, viewing it, I think rightly, as reflective not of error but flaws in ordinary perception. For the world is paradoxical, something shown by recent findings in quantum physics. (Not for no reason did the great Simone Weil call contradiction ‘the criterion of the real.’) Rohr suggests there is a third way of seeing things, and it asks of us that we cultivate a mode of open, non-judgemental awareness. We must ‘learn to accept paradoxes, or we will never love anything or see it correctly,’ he writes. This is what it means to overcome dualistic thinking. Pablo d’Ors puts it thusly:
‘Human beings tend to define ourselves by contrast or in opposition, which is the same as saying by separation and division. In dividing, separating, and opposing we distance ourselves from our very selves. Defining a person and not accepting their radical mutability is like putting an animal in cage. A caged lion is not a lion, but a caged lion; and that is a very different thing.’
‘We divide in thought what is undivided in nature,’ says Rohr, quoting Alan Watts; and this habit of categorisation has made us spiritually shallow, driving us away from God. If we could just learn once more to see the freshness in all things and all moments, then we would find out that ‘the world is God’s icon’, to quote the philosopher Sebastian Morello, author of Conservatism and Grace. For Rohr, we misunderstand Christianity because we consider its stories and teachings too rationally; we must see ‘as the mystics see’. To do this is to be freed from the isolating ego, the ‘small I’, as d’Ors calls it; and to live more truly, beautifully and well, able to see things from different viewpoints, to rest in Eliot’s ‘still point in a turning world.’ ‘There the dance is,’ Eliot writes in his magesterial Four Quartets – ‘and there is only the dance.’
If we could only learn once again to see the freshness in all things and all momenta, we would find out, suggests Rohr, that ‘the world is God’s icon’.
But that all sounds very cerebral. You may be glad to know, dear reader, that Rohr himself is more practical than I suggest. Although he freely cites the Upanishads, Teresa of Ávila and a wide range of other religious, thinkers and spiritual texts, he is chiefly interested in shifting our thinking. He keeps his chapters short, is unafraid to use bullet points for the easy consumption of material, and, in general, tries not to bombard his reader with ideas. He seems sincerely to want to get across the importance of being present. The flaw in his book may well be its simplicity, which paradoxically lends itself to shallow reading, not deep learning. I also detect in The Naked Now a frustration with the way things are.
His vision is bold. For Rohr, God is bigger than our ideas of Him, which are bound to shrink Him and, in the end, banish Him from our lives. For God is not something we can understand. St. Augustine wrote that ‘Si comprehendis, not est Deus’ (‘If you understand, it is not God.’) To seek to understand God in the style of a scientific naturalist is unavoidably to enrol in Mary Midgeley’s ‘school of nothing buttery’: love is ‘nothing but’ chemical reactions in the brain; the Mona Lisa is ‘nothing but’ pigment on canvas, Bach’s B Minor Mass is ‘nothing but’ several thousand sounds made in a sequence, etc. What Rohr exhorts us to do is build the mindfulness needed to see that there are different ways of attending to the world, and to face the world in a posture of open, sustained, non-judgemental attention is to see the sacred in the everyday.
