I confess that I find the phrase 'keynote address' seductive and daunting. It's seductive because it hints at expertise (which, of course, especially in relation to prayer, is entirely inappropriate); it's daunting because here I am, trying with a few flimsy and battered words to try to take us all into this unknown day. Please bear in mind, then, that what I am about to say is hesitant because of the subject matter. Those who can speak easily and lightly about prayer have perhaps not prayed very much or very often or very long. I'm even more hesitant today because, taking the title of this day seriously, I too am going to try to launch out into the deep with this address – and I am neither a strong swimmer nor a good sailor.

For very many years, whenever I went to a retreat or a conference, I took T S Eliot's Four Quartets with me. I enjoyed its coolness, its enigmatic beauty, the complexity of each poem and the overall structure. In 'East Coker' are these lines:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years –
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres –
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate – but there is no competition –
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

There are two images in that section which I find hauntingly beautiful – and lovely, because true:

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.

I attempt, from time to time, to write poetry myself, and the discipline of it nearly kills me. I am never satisfied. I always feel that I have failed. I hammer out words on an anvil, with sparks flying everywhere, but all I ever seem to be able to create is a poor, crooked sentence which has had all the life knocked out of it. Let me give a reasonably trivial example: Jan and I are sitting in a square in Paris at a café. There is bright, vivacious, spring sunshine dappling the lime-trees and, at another table, is a solitary woman, looking wistful, as though she comes to this place very often and will, one day, herself write a poem. That's the scene: it's about wistfulness, memory, the passing of the years – and I feel a poem coming on. So I make a few notes and then, days later, try to explore the moment – and, of course, cannot really get near it. Now, suppose instead of trying to capture a common human experience, I am trying instead to describe the beauty of the Almighty; is it any wonder that the words fail or, even worse, come tumbling out in a series of tired and vacuous clichés.?
I know that this day is about prayer, not poetry, but prayer - like poetry - is also about truth, about language, about integrity, about honesty – and if I find the language of poetry so difficult, is it any wonder that I find the language of spirituality almost impossible? And then there's (secondly) another truth explored and expressed by the tight, lean, ascetic discipline of Eliot, and it's this:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

Suppose that that is not only a description of our own human processes of ageing, but suppose that within that there is also a glimpse of God – we begin from God ('Home is where one starts from') and yet, and yet, the world becomes stranger.

Eliot was not the first to discover the complexities of God and the complexities of language. There has been a long, long tradition in the Church of a form of spirituality called the Via Negativa, the Negative Way, a way of denial. It's a form of spirituality which in Christianity can be traced back to the sixth century and to a Syrian monk who is now known as Pseudo-Dionysius. Listen to one of his sayings:

God is above all that can be attributed to him of perfection and is even above Being itself. He is the One, ineffable, inexpressible, unknowable.

Here is a brave attempt (I do not use the word 'brave' lightly) to attend absolutely to the God-ness of God. Think of the mind-stretching paradox in that phrase: '[He] is even above Being itself'. Does that not rock us to our core? Do we not think (usually) that God is the source of all being, the Creator, and 'all things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made'? Yet here is a monk somehow suggesting that God is above Being. And why? Because as soon as we use any word about God, because our words are human and finite and limited, that word may circumscribe the Almighty. It's as though we think we can put a piece of string around the universe and then claim that we know it and can control it.

Pseudo-Dionysius had a great impact upon theologians of the eleventh century.

Here is Hugh of St Victor (1096-1141) teaching about God:

It is truly thy Beloved who visits thee. But he comes invisible, hidden, incomprehensible. He comes to touch thee, not to be seen; to intimate his presence to thee, not to be understood … to draw thy affection, not to satisfy thy desire; to bestow the first fruits of his love, not to communicate it in its fullness.

Note that God is spoken of as a lover: 'It is truly thy Beloved who visits thee'. The Via Negativa may be clear that God is beyond language, beyond description, yet the language of the Via Negativa pulsates with a most yearning passion. The Cloud of Unknowing, written in the fourteenth century by an unknown English priest, is the most well-known example of Via Negativa spirituality in English. In the first chapter, the writer says this:

In that most gracious way of his, he [God] kindles your desire for himself, and bound you to him by the chain of such longing …

The sense within the Via Negativa is not so much of an intellectual coolness as of deep and passionate longing – a longing stimulated by God. But after building up the person (a 'religious') to whom he is writing, by a series of praising statements, the mood changes dramatically:

Pause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of yourself. Who are you, and what have you deserved, to be called like this by our Lord? [Ch. 2].

It's like a bucket of cold water being thrown over the reader. The Via Negativa is nothing if not ruthlessly, blatantly, honest – and it is quite clear that if anyone is called to this form of religious life, that person had better beware of the Enemy. (That troubling parable of Jesus comes to mind about the soul being cleaned and polished and emptied – and then seven worse devils come roaring in.) But the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, having thrown the icy water all over his protégé, then continues:

But now you will ask me, 'How am I to think of God himself, and what is he?' and I cannot answer you except to say 'I do not know!' …For though we through the grace of God can know fully about all other matters, and think about them … yet of God himself can no man think. [Ch. 6]

There is in the Via Negativa a very, very important counterweight to all those writers on spirituality who seem to have a hotline to God, and He to them (they are so certain, and certain that they are certain) - the Via Negativa will have none of this, partly because God is beyond comprehension, but partly also because the Via Negativa is under no illusions about the capacity we all have to delude ourselves. The Via Negativa rates sin very, very seriously.

So, if God cannot be thought, how can He be reached? After all, the yearning for Him has been implanted by Him within us. He can be reached in this way, says The Cloud of Unknowing:

[God] may well be loved, but not thought. By love he can be caught and held, but by thinking never. [Ch. 6]

It's a reverse echo of God's yearning for us - remember in Hugh of St Victor, God is described as the 'Beloved'. And in The Cloud of Unknowing, it is very clear that the source and ground of that love is Jesus himself:

How right you are to say 'for the love of Jesus'. For it is in the love of Jesus that you have your help. The nature of love is such that it shares everything. Love Jesus, and everything he has is yours. Because he is God, he is maker and giver of time. Because he is Man, he has given true heed to time. Because he is both God and Man he is the best judge of the spending of time. Unite yourself to him by love and trust, and by that union you will be joined both to him and to all who like yourself are united by love to him. [Ch. 4]

I have spoken a little of the English form of the Via Negativa as found in The Cloud of Unknowing. In mainland Europe, apart from Hugh of St Victor in the twelfth century, it was probably Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries who explored the Via Negativa with the greatest precision. His central doctrine was of God's 'One-ness':

The ultimate principle of the universe is distinguished from all else by virtue of the fact that it is entirely one and undivided. All except this One is multiple, contingent and fractured.

The knowledge of One-ness came, Eckhart believed, through prayer – a prayer which required complete self-abandonment. The self should be:

… always immersed in God’s most precious will, having gone out of what is its own.

He went on:

Take leave of yourself. Truly, if you do not depart from yourself, then wherever you take refuge, you will find obstacles and unrest.

The Via Negativa is sharp on this point: abandonment of self to God in love is the sine qua non. It echoes much in the New Testament and the words of Christ himself:

If anyone would be a follower of mine, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.

That verse has always troubled me, because it seems so inherently true (all that truth about losing and finding) and yet so difficult to put into practice with total self-forgetfulness. It's a paradox. But then, much of the Via Negativa is paradoxical – not because it enjoys paradox, but because paradox can be found in the life of Christ (eternal yet human; dying yet living; silent yet the Word …)

I commend, with some degree of apprehension, the Via Negativa to you as a way of approaching prayer:
· it is about complete and utter self-forgetfulness
· it is about casting yourself on to the mystery of God's grace
· it is about inherent and deep, deep, uncertainty
· it is about a keen and sharp awareness of the nature of sin and evil
· it is about the yearning from and of the soul being prayer itself
· it is about Christ – crucified and risen
· it is about loss and discovery.

It is like all prayer - not to be practised, as it were, in and for itself, but because somewhere inside prayer the paradox of losing and finding, knowing and unknowing, somewhere inside of all that is the sweet and disarming beauty of God's most holy compassion. Spirituality is not about technique, it is about having the steadfast courage to be with God, and to wait patiently and longingly for Him.

The Via Negativa may not be a route for you – and even if it is, you will also have to abandon it if it gets between you and God's love for you.

The Cloud of Unknowing begins with this prayer:

God
unto whom all hearts are open,
unto whom all wills do speak,
from whom no secret thing is hidden,
I beseech thee
so to cleanse the purpose of my heart
with the unutterable gift of thy grace
that I may perfectly love thee,
and worthily praise thee.
Amen.

I end with it, praying that this day will truly be one in which we launch into the deep, knowing that the depths are the depths of God, and the depths of the depths of God are love. I wish you 'Bon voyage' and 'God speed'.

© Christopher William Herbert, 2003