Monthly Osuna: Letter P
I Am Not My Thoughts
This is a monthly series on Francisco de Osuna’s The Third Spiritual Alphabet.1 In each post, we reflect on one letter from his Alphabet. The Alphabet was written as an aid to recollection. Recollection (being recollected in God) is both a form of prayer and a way of being in the world. This month’s letter is P.
This Letter Teaches Us How We Are to Correct the Soul, Saying: Always Correct Your Soul with Love and Not in Anger. Por amor y enojo corrige siempre tu ánima. (SA 360)
Be Gentle With Yourself
“Some are so tormented by their imaginings that in their effort to remedy them they strive too hard to cast them out and suffer headaches and bodily weakness and other similar difficulties. They try to correct in anger things that would be disciplined better by loving toleration, according to which our letter says: “Always correct your soul with love and not in anger.” (SA 363)
One of the things I like about Osuna is that he emphasizes our need to be gentle with ourselves. Trying to maintain a contemplative practice and a contemplative way of life is a process that takes time. Like any good habit, forming a practice will have its ups and downs. Acceptance of this fact is key. In this letter, Osuna’s primary concern is that we resist the temptation to become frustrated with ourselves as we struggle with distracting thoughts during recollection.
When we become distracted, Osuna suggests we speak gently to ourselves as we might to a tamed bird that has flown away. We might say, “Where have you flown to, my soul?” and then gently recollect our attention (SA 363). The idea is that instead of becoming frustrated, we gently reorient our attention because we know that becoming distracted is part of the process. For my own practice, I will sometimes say, “That is not You” because what has distracted me is not the divine presence for which I long. In this way, I can label my distracting thought and discard it.
In this letter, Osuna reminds us that perseverance is crucial. Recollection is particularly difficult in the beginning because mental distraction is too often our default. If we go into our practice expecting distraction as a normal part of the process, we are less likely to become frustrated than if we assume we should be proficient from the start. Of course, if the truth be told, each moment is a new beginning so that notions like “beginner” and “proficient” eventually lose their meaning. Distractions will come, and distractions will go away. What remains throughout is our awareness.
I Am Not My Thoughts
“God is true light, a support for the mind, and God is nearer to the mind than the mind is to itself. From this it follows that when the mind turns away from all things that become, God shines and radiates in it.” Augustine as quoted by Meister Eckhart (MP 127)2
“If you visualize anything or if anything enters your mind, that is not God; indeed, God is neither this nor that. Whoever says that God is here or there, do not trust him. The light that is God shines in the darkness. God is true light. To see it one must be blind and one must divest God of everything that there is. A master says: to speak of God in any simile is to speak of God in an impure mode. But whoever speaks of God through nothingness speaks of God to the point. When the mind penetrates into the One, entering in pure dereliction of itself, it finds God as in nothingness.” Meister Eckhart (MP 125-6)
“The intimacy or the proximity of God and the mind truly entails no distinction” Meister Eckhart (MP 150)
What does Eckhart mean when he says that we find God in nothingness? In one sense, he is commenting on the inscrutability of the divine, who is immanent and yet transcends all that we can comprehend. Strictly speaking, there is nothing with which we can compare the divine so that we can say God is like this or God is like that. In this sense, to think of God as like nothing is about as good as we can do. But there is another sense that is closer to Eckhart’s meaning.
The inscrutability of our own minds is an image of the inscrutable divine. This might be shocking to consider, but we cannot know our own minds because, sans thoughts, there is nothing there to know. To wit, we think with our minds, but our minds are not the thoughts they produce. And, if you take away all the thoughts, what remains is nothing but the potential to think. This nothingness, however, is verdant because it has the potential to produce every thought we could possibly think. For Eckhart, this nothingness is the image of God in us, and it is the ground of our being. The mind, which is like nothing that it thinks, is the image of God, who is like nothing that God creates. Or, to put it as Eckhart does, God’s ground and my ground are the same ground.
As I sit in recollection, it helps to remember that I am not my thoughts. There is a depth to my being, a depth that is unknowable to me via self-reflection and yet it is intimately connected to the divine presence within me. Thoughts of this or that get in the way of this depth where God is known with the heart. So, when I gently discard them, which I can do since I am not my thoughts, what remains is incomprehensible and yet overflows with fecundity. There is a depth and richness found in the stillness and silence that defies explanation, but it is unmistakably good and commensurate with our inherent desire for goodness.
Good Desire Is Prayer
“Good desire itself is prayer, and if the desire is continuous, so is the prayer.” (SA 370)
All prayer is rooted in our desire for good, and our desire for good is grounded in the divine love from which all that is good springs. In fact, as Osuna points out, good desire is prayer. We don’t have to speak to pray. We don’t even have to think to pray. God is present in the good we desire; God is the source, guide, and goal of that same desire. Prayer of the heart has no need to say or think a thing. In the stillness and silence our faith is affirmed in the desire itself, and it tells us that the steadfast love and faithfulness of God will finish the good work begun within us.
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. (Psalm 131:1-2 NRSV)
Francisco de Osuna The Third Spiritual Alphabet (Trans. Mary E. Giles; Preface Kieran Kavanaugh; Paulist Press, 1981)
Reiner Schurmann, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher (Indiana University Press, 1978)