Starting when I was ten years old, I spent a month each summer at sleep away camp. Yes, a month. The cabins were almost all historic log cabins from around Middle and East Tennessee, and while they had enough electricity to power a few lights, there was no plumbing. There were, instead, pit latrines about 25 yards from where we slept. So if one were to wake up in the middle of the night and need to use the restroom, he (it was all boys) would have to walk an unlit path to the urinal with a sign above it that read, “We aim to please, so you aim too, please.”
Having received strict instructions not to pee off the trail near the cabin (it was all boys), there was nothing for a young man with a distended bladder to do but navigate down the path. I was not terribly afraid of the dark, but I was afraid of alienating my cabin-mates by inadvertently shining a flashlight in their sleeping faces. I therefore went out into the night sans torche. Going barefoot was de rigueur, so I developed a practice of navigating by feel rather than by sight. I think I got pretty good at it.
In a dark night,
With anxious love inflamed,
O, happy lot!
Forth unobserved I went,
My house being now at rest.In darkness and in safety,
By the secret ladder, disguised,
O, happy lot!
In darkness and concealment,
My house being now at rest.In that happy night,
In secret, seen of none,
Seeing nought myself,
Without other light or guide
Save that which in my heart was burning.That light guided me
More surely than the noonday sun
To the place where He was waiting for me,
Whom I knew well,
And where none appeared.– from “Dark Night of the Soul” by St. John of the Cross
First of all, I am not a mystic. Or maybe I want to be a mystic, if being a mystic means being a person who has a direct experience of the presence of the divine, but I’m not John of the Cross or Theresa of Avila or even James Finley. It is, in one sense, quite impossible for me to be them, given that I am me. Where I get tripped up is in thinking that I can simply follow the path they have walked in order to get where they have gotten. The problem, as you may have already discovered, is that they each followed a path to a personal encounter with someone or something holy. I don’t know James Finley would say that he has had a personal encounter with something holy, but I would be willing to bet he would own that he is trying to follow a path which by its nature has to be personal. I cannot follow James Finley’s path to James Finley’s direct experience of the presence of the divine. I have to follow my path to my experience.
Now, I can take that in a James Dean “Rebel Without a Cause” kind of way or I can take that in a David Carradine “Kung Fu” kind of way, but I think it is some of both and actually neither. One does have to be willing to adopt at least a bit of a counter-cultural attitude to pursue a mystical experience because so much of culture — at least Eurocentric culture — is filled with false promises that the desire that pulls John of the Cross out of the house in the middle of the night can be satisfied by a technological advance. (This has been true since at least the Enlightenment, if not before, so it’s not just the digital age that has this problem.) At the same time, following a spiritual path doesn’t ipso facto mean wandering the earth like a latter day Cain with a ponytail.
Between the arrogance of Dean’s character and the isolation of Carradine’s is a space for friendship.1 John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila cannot tell me what my path is, but they can relate what the experience of walking a path might be. How do you describe the difference between the way packed dirt at the center of a path feels on your bare soles versus the loose dirt at the side of the path? How do you determine between leaves freshly fallen on the trail and being off the trail entirely? Reading a guidebook is helpful, but conversation with another person, who has hopefully been on a path for a while and sensed a thing or two, seems invaluable. Spiritual direction, which is something I did not understand and did not seek out for a long time, might be described as just this: a spiritual friendship with a fellow pilgrim.
Our aim, and our friend’s aim, may start out as an aim to please God, which in one sense may be as difficult for us as it is for a ten year old boy to urinate in an eight inch diameter pvc pipe at 2:30 in the morning. Not impossible, but difficult because God so often lets us give ourselves a grade, and I, at least, am always aware that there was more I could have done on the assignment. There’s no winning because if what we say we believe is true, it’s already won. How disappointing.
Trappists are interesting. Technically, they are members of the “Order of Cistercians of Strict Observance.” Somewhere along the way, they started talking again, but they still keep things pretty simple. I kind of suspect that one of the points of doing things this way is how it gives them almost immediate awareness when they step off the path. By signing up to be a monk, Trappists, and others, sign up to have an abbot tell them that they are off the path. Sort of like a teaching assistant who does all the grading. I imagine that it is not always fun, but maybe the level of difficulty turns into a kind of gift when a monk starts to experience a bit of spiritual growth, when he can look back and see path behind as well as in front.
The Abbey of Gethsemani is surrounded by relatively short but steep hills that are called “knobs” in that part of Kentucky. Trappists do not believe in switchbacks, apparently, because their trails attack the knobs head on, rather than going back and forth across the face of them. As I ascended one of these quad-busting paths, drenched in sweat on a hot, humid late-August day, swatting the largest, meanest black flies I had encountered south of Ontario, I came cross a sign that read “Enjoy God’s Creation.” Maybe the koan was a nod to Zen monasticism? How the hell was I meant to enjoy this? Or maybe the difficulty was the point, and the invitation is to turn to it as a kind of gift. Navigating by feel rather than by sight might get uncomfortable sometimes, some toes might get stubbed, but we can get better at it, especially if we don’t try to do it alone.
- The writings of Aelred of Rievaulx are collected in a book called “On Spiritual Friendship” which I clearly need to read. ↩︎