Getting Ready to Discuss The Cloud of Unknowing on Tuesday, July 10

Study Guide for Tuesday, July 10, 2012
The Cloud of Unknowing: with the Book of Privy Counsel, trans. Carmen Acevedo Butcher (Boston: Shambhala Press, 2009).

Be sure to note that OUR PRACTICE AND DISCUSSION WILL BEGIN AT 9:00 AND MUST END AT 10:30 SO THAT LARRY and ANDY CAN DRIVE TO ATLANTA FOR A NOON MEETING WITH “GEORGIA LAWYERS FOR THE ARTS.”

Read Chapter 8, “Answering your doubts about contemplation; why learning curiosity, and intellect must be destroyed; and the difference between the active and contemplative life” (26-29).  

Study the text so as to share you insights during our discussion that will work with the following questions:

1.      During contemplative prayer (for us, Centering Prayer), does Anonymous want us to make a distinction between good and evil thoughts?  Why or why not?
2.    What, in the opinion of Anonymous, is the danger inherent in engaging in good thoughts?
3.    In paragraph 3, Anonymous makes a distinction between two kinds of lives in the Church, the active and the contemplative.  What’s the distinction?
4.    Anonymous also says that both the active and the contemplative lives each have two stages.  What are they?  And how do they come together?
5.    What goes on in the  mind in the “higher active stage (lower contemplative [stage])?
6.    What goes on in the higher stage of contemplation?