Getting Ready to Discuss The Cloud of Unknowing on Tuesday, June 12

     As some of you may know, our small contemplative gathering (now composed of about 18 regular participants!) has been meeting every Tuesday morning at St. John Lutheran Church for 18 months.  Our meetings generally last about two hours; someone brings and serves fruit and/or pastries while another fixes coffee as we greet one another and settle in to discuss a book we’ve all been reading.  

     In the past year we have slowly and methodically read Cynthia Bourgeault’s Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (CP&IA), discussing three to five pages each week. As our gathering’s teacher, during the week prior to our meeting, I usually wrote and shared five or six printed pages of commentary.   After our generally hour-long conversation, we take a pause and enter the sanctuary of our church to begin twenty-minutes of Centering Prayer. Shortly thereafter, we say good-by to one another, many promising to be at next Sunday’s parish Eucharist and Adult Seminar.

On Tuesday, June 5, we will finish CP&IA. Having thoroughly enjoyed Bourgeault’s detailed clarification as to what Centering Prayer (and the Welcoming Prayer) gives to us as gift from God by way of the Church, we will next read The Cloud of Unknowing, the classic Middle English text that has so deeply influenced monastics and contemplatives for six centuries. Acquainted with numerous translations and editions of The Cloud, I have asked that we use Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s translation, The Cloud of Unknowing: With the Book of Privy Counsel (Boston, Shambhala, 2009). This edition of The Cloud is absolutely stunning as a “sense-by-sense” translation. As Bourgeault says in a back-cover blurb, it’s “brilliant, bold, and breathtaking.”  Everyone in our group has purchased a copy, and we are looking forward to studying what is the finest translation available. 

     Planning to spend an entire year reading The Cloud, a chapter or two at a time, we have decided, however, to format our upcoming discussions somewhat differently.  With The Cloud we will share the teaching responsibilities more directly among ourselves, each one reading in advance and working with a Study Guide that I will provide one week before our actual discussions.   Having spent several hours in preparation, each one of us will thus be able to share insights, understandings, questions, and interpretive options with everyone else in our gathering. The members of the group will thus be less dependent on me as their teacher as we will, in effect, all teach one another.

     To facilitate the distribution of the Study Guides, in addition to passing out hard copies on Tuesday, I will be posting weekly advance Study Guides here so that they will be available to anyone be unable to attend our gatherings for one reason or another. 

Here, then, is the first Study Guide.

Preparation for Tuesday, June 12, 2012 

Assignment:  Read the “Introduction” (xi-xxvii), The Cloud of Unknowing: with the Book of Privy Counsel, trans. Carmen Acevedo Butcher (Boston: Shambhala Press, 2009).

As you read the “Introduction,” don’t worry if you do not recognize any of the names (for example, Walton Hilton, Dionysius the Areopagite, Teresa of Avila, and others).  Be satisfied to get the overall drift of things.  When you think something is important, underline or highlight it.  Make notes in the margins where you have questions or don’t understand something.  What you want to do is read so that you can raise questions and follow along in our discussion next week.  Above all, don’t try to read all the pages in one sitting.  Read three or four pages carefully each day.  Mark up your text.  Let things soak in.  Go over what you’ve read perhaps two or three times.  You may even wish to treat the text as some sacred reading for lectio divina.  However, you do your reading, read with the Holy Spirit.  Jesus has promised that he will guide you into all truth, so don’t be afraid of new ideas, new ways of thinking, news ways of appreciating the contemplative life.  Here are some things to consider: 

1. Who is “Anonymous”?
2. Under what circumstances and in what kind of world did Anonymous write?
3. What is the “negative way” of talking about God?  Why do some people think positively about the negative way of talking about God?
4. Why does Carmen Butcher say we need contemplation?
5. What is Butcher’s preferred way of translating?  Why does she prefer it?

So that you have every confidence that Carmen Butcher is a good and exceptionally reliable guide to our study of The Cloud of Unknowing, next week I’ll introduce her to you more fully.  And so that you’re not intimidated by her quoting the Middle English text of The Cloud, I’ll provide you with a sample paragraph so that you get a taste for the original text.

If you wish, let us know where you found something difficult in the text to understand. Then too, let us know where you read something that made very good sense.  More than anything, come back next week ready for a good discussion, one you will enjoy.  It will be a model of what we’ll be doing as we work through The Cloud of Unknowing.  See you on Tuesday, June 12.