A Cloud Full of Rain and Faith
The struggle to live in the clouds when the rain of life pulls you down
My dog has a hard life. Snoring like an old man this morning caused me to stir from bed. Bladder aching, I stumbled in the dark hitting my toe on the edge of the bed. Back to my warm blankets, I laid there trying to fall back asleep. Her snoring began again, and the window began creaking with the wind. Chimes rang from the patio and neighboring homes. Rain began. It was four fifty-five in the morning. I was up for the day.
The night before, I wrestled with God-Impatient with my feelings of disconnected-ness. The closeness created during my spiritual memoir writing project fell away and I was left with a vapor trail of agnostic confusion. Nothing would be solved that evening. Seinfeld played in the background as I tried to leave room for silence inside my head. The weight of the day sank me into a deep sleep.
Back on my feet, I filled hot coffee in my favorite mug, placed a blanket on top of my legs, and sitting cross-legged on the couch, I began my morning reflections with three grocery-store donuts and a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing. One bad choice.
I returned to “the cloud,” having completed it a few months back. In my attempt to cover all the ancient contemplative works, I didn’t absorb the content as well as I could have. But, with a quick refresh, the message became apropos. My struggle to remain with God frustrated me and I fell into questioning and ambivalence.
The cloud of Unknowing is the metaphorical space between yourself and God. Your work is to focus on that cloud and contemplate the sometimes dark places within it, in an effort to keep returning. Don’t expect to be pulled through -keep up the work of showing up. Everything else gets lumped into the cloud of forgetting. Personally, I think it is all just a single cloud. But, I speak with a small education modern psychology. The author is part of the Via Negitiva (A.K.A. apophasis) tradition where God is not finite, not knowable, not comprehensible through human categories—we approach through unknowing, stripping away all concepts, resting in silence.
I don’t know about you, but I personally prefer certainty through categories and meaning. But, that is where us humans suck. We are built to question and make meaning. Additionally, modern life is transactional, and my ADHD likes to move quickly rather than sit and relish possibilities with unknown. At least not without a reasonable return on investment. Just as an aside: a deluge of rain just began as I wrote this. Is this a sign? I obsess with discerning signs. Did the thread I was going down need examination? Certainly. I wonder if the unknown can ever be considered transactional. My reason needed to solve the abstract.
The author of the cloud challenges us to sit without expectation: in the dark, nothing known, showing up, no clarity, still craving, still seeking, and finding satisfaction enough to keep going until your inevitable demise. Then, the author suggested that you will rightly be in eternal knowing and love of God. Meanwhile, reason and faith never disappear. Most of us do not live in a place where we have the freedom to contemplate all day long. Even monks have work to do.
We live in the here and now. Especially when we are woken up early or caught in the rain and we say to ourselves, “Why me?” So, we struggle in contemplation and we struggle in the day to day to survive as well as keep faith.
I’m working my way through another book, “Agnostic, A Spirited Manifesto” by Lesley Hazleton. Her definition of agnostic refers to us who are in conflict between reason and faith. Not disbelief and not evangelism. An acceptance of balance. It’s raining much harder now, and there was even a thunderclap. Am I on to something here, or is it just the weather?
A storm moves in as I feel encouraged to settle into the human/eternal conflict. The curtains blow from my patio door and I decide to wrap it up.
If you are looking for clarity from me, I don’t have it. All I can say is this: in this answerless eternal push-pull of faith and logic we must accept our small confusing lives between the obtuse clouds and terra-firma. It is the only worship of God that I can see; coffee breath and all.
Show up in awe, tension, and frustration. Stop rushing to relax and get more intimate with this world that I reside. I demand this of myself. The rain is dying down and bringing with it the first sounds of folks on their way to work. Thanks for reading.
P.S. I am editing, now much later, and there are threats of tornados. I must have hit a cosmic nerve.