Readings for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Jesus calls us to love God, others, and ourselves. This is the Greatest Commandment. This is the classic core of the Gospel. Loving God grounds love for others and oneself. It is all one love. To help us deepen this insight, crucial to living the Gospel in daily life, let us turn to the medieval English mystical treatise known as The Cloud of Unknowing.

We do not know who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. We do know when, in England in the late fourteenth century, and we can surmise who. The author never gives his name, but most scholars believe it was a Carthusian monk, probably an older monk; The Cloud of Unknowing is addressed to a younger monk. The anonymous author also wrote other, minor, works such as The Book of Privy Counseling, A Letter on Prayer, a translation of a classic called Denis' Hid Divinity, and A Letter of Discernment. In The Cloud of Unknowing, the author speaks plainly. He doesn’t write as a theologian. With common sense and some humor, he uses earthy metaphors, such as clouds. He writes as a spiritual director introducing aspects of the Christian mystical life to a spiritual directee and, specifically, the practice of contemplative prayer.

God, who is love, calls forth love from us through Jesus. For the author, this divine love is central. Intention is central. The Cloud author recognizes that our minds cannot grasp God, but we can still love God. In fact, he is quite absolute about this, for “love is the only way to reach God.” The author describes a method or way of being present to God intentionally, that is, with a simple desire for God. He instructs us on the priority of love: “gently lift up your heart to God with love . . . Direct a naked desire toward God.” Intentional presence to God, seeking only him, is an act of love.  Love is what carries us through the contemplative work he is going to teach us. It is, truly, the heart of contemplation. Hence, anyone can do the practice he teaches because it is not a practice based on skill as much as on love. “Everyone who has the desire should devote attention to this exercise.” All we need is a simple, naked, direct, desire for God.

And we desire God in the cloud of unknowing. The cloud conveys the darkness and obscurity of loving God beyond thinking. He tells us to place all things, including our thoughts, beneath a cloud of forgetting so we can love God in the cloud of unknowing. God can be loved, the author asserts, but not thought.

Loving God means letting go of all thinking. Thinking, the author frequently repeats, cannot get God; whatever we think about stands between us and God. “To the extent that anything other than God is in your mind, you are that much farther from God.” As we give our attention to thinking and become preoccupied with it, we lose awareness of God. “Let us abandon everything within the scope of our thoughts and determine to love what is beyond comprehension.” He is talking about single-minded attention to God in interior silence, which is otherwise known as contemplative prayer.

We may assume this kind of prayer is private, closed off from the world. But the anonymous author rejects this assumption. He says, “Contemplative work is love at its best…It will change your heart. It will make you so kind and dynamic in loving that when you stop doing it and mingle with the world again, coming down from contemplation to converse with or pray for your neighbor, you’ll discover that you love your slanderer as much as your friend.” To pray contemplatively is to be a source of healing and help for the whole world: “Everyone on earth has been helped by contemplation in wonderful ways. You can’t know how much. This spiritual exercise even lessens the pain for souls in purgatory. And no other discipline can purify your soul as deeply or make you as virtuous. But it’s the easiest work of all, when a soul is helped by grace to feel a pure desire—contemplation follows.” Contemplative prayer unleashes love, healing those in our lives even as we are transformed. All we need to do is lift our hearts to God in love.