A naked intent

"You are all I want/ You are all I need/ And I'll find peace beneath the shadow of your wings."- 'Malibu', Mumford and Sons

"Lift up your heart to God with a meek stirring of love... For the first time you do it, you find but a darkness and, as it were, a cloud of unknowing- you know not what but that you feel in your will a naked intent unto God. This darkness and this cloud is, in whatever you do, between you and your God, and leaves you so that you may neither see Him clearly by light of understanding in your reason nor feel Him in sweetness of love in your affection."- 'The Cloud of Unknowing'- An Unknown Mystic

For the past few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about the above song, 'Malibu', the chorus quoted above. It is the second single released by Mumford and Sons, from their highly anticipated album, 'Rushmere', which strikes many, as well as myself, as a return to their classic form, of wonderful banjo strings reverberating along with Marcus' distinctive vocal timbre. The simplicity of their above single, 'Malibu', is what has remained with me since its release. Clearly echoing (if not directly quoting) the Psalms in the Bible, the song tells a story of a return to faith, the moving lines in the pre-chorus presenting the narrator as dumbfounded at their own inability, or reluctance, to return to this posture a long time previously:

"But I don't know how it took so long to shed this skin, to live under the shadow of your wings"

Running parallel to this song being released, I had started to read a book called 'The Cloud of Unknowing', the writer unknown, the short essays within them believed to have been written around some point in the fourteenth century, and were used to help monks in their pursuit to connect with God. I haven't as of yet finished the book, but a central focus which the writer returns to is this idea of 'a naked intent unto God', of the importance for the individual and community to not concern themselves with that they feel about God in prayer, or even what they think, but simply to allow oneself to connect to God without utilising our natural means to do so. As the writer says, "But of God himself can no man think. And therefore I would leave all that I can think and choose to love what I cannot think. For He may well be loved, but not thought".

Embroiled in this maelstrom of quite arbitrary thought has also been the own steady shaking up of my faith. My reluctance to settle for nicely contrived answers to personal doubts led me into opening my world up to really interesting and compelling thinkers, people such as Bart Erhman and Alex O Connor, who challenged my previously unquestioned assumptions about the Bible in particular. I felt myself opening up so wide that I was unable to hold onto anything concrete, leaving me confused and somewhat embittered towards the people around me who seemed so able to believe and trust in something quite simply unknowable. Was it a willful blindness on their part? Or did they have some kind of faith that I didn't? Or maybe both?

What I found which changed my approach has been an approach which is beautiful in its simplicity, yet robust in its wisdom. What 'Malibu' expresses in its linearity is what has actually been fortified by generations of wisdom previously, as exemplified in 'The Cloud of Unknowing'. For too long, my understanding of God, of faith, of my own life and where it is heading, had been held captive within my own desires and the extremities of what my intellect could reach at. Even when trying to pray or spend time in the 'presence of God' (whatever that means), I was not aware as to how much I was thinking about things, even good things, to a point in which prayer essentially becomes a private reflection on my inner life. Whether that is right or wrong, I am not really aiming at answering, but it felt limiting, and to be honest, quite pointless. I would mutter to God in the same formulaic structure I had become accustomed to, before opening my eyes and starting the day.

What 'The Cloud of Unknowing' has helped me to discover is that I have not really been aiming in the right direction. This 'naked intent unto God', of truly God being 'all I want... all I need' is not something which my natural functions of receptivity to the world, in thought and feeling, are able to aid me in. That is not to say that I shouldn't think or feel about God, but that a 'naked intent unto God' is not concerned with either of those mediums. This cloud of unknowing, of not being certain and sure, of being blind as we willfully become smaller and smaller, is the pre-condition to aiming in the right direction towards this connection to God.

Much like Marcus Mumford in 'Malibu', I don't know how it took so long for me to shed that skin.

What is so humbling about this to me, and is radical in its nature, is how this individual practice brings us so intimately together as a community of people. We live in a world, as we know, where we are both culprits and victims of the human impulse to separate and morally quantify, to place value on 'good' and 'bad', on 'right' and 'wrong', and to curate our own diet according to how we conceive of the options we have to feed ourselves upon. In the Christian world, this happens too. What is 'orthodox', what is 'holy', who is 'blasphemous', who is 'heretical'. This then permeates into social issues, such as homosexuality and identity politics, women in leadership positions, as well as our own views about the Bible, what the 'word of God' actually means- the list is endless.

But, under this laying down of thought and feeling, of the language of love directing our connection towards God, suddenly, our theology and our viewpoints are on a plain below us. They of course matter, as practically churches and its leaders need to make up its mind about which direction they want to head in. But, somehow, it feels like these aspects of faith and belief have taken centre stage. The language of love is tongue-tied when concerned with matters of thought and feeling. This place which 'The Cloud of Unknowing' points to, which I have not yet experienced, which exists above us and is face to face with our own 'unknowingness', where to connect with God is all we truly want- that is what unites us. Even more than that, it liberates us in our own uncertainty, when facing this cloud of unknowing. God is God, whether what we believe about Him is correct, or not. Whether our image of His righteousness or His mercy aligns with reality, whether our views on sex and marriage and sin and the Bible coherently paint a picture of which to gaze upon- is by comparison, irrelevant. In this place, our soul is one with God, who knows who He is and what He ordains.

Whether its Marcus Mumford or an unknown monk from the fourteenth century, perhaps we can learn, for people who believe and don't, who hold to a particular dogma or don't, that what unites us all is not what we think or feel about God, but that we all can learn to share this 'naked intent' to connecting to God. A connection which is stripped of our own mediums of understanding, and empowered by a sincerely loving desire to become one with Him. A connection that is as intimately close to your uncertainty, as it is to your God. Where that 'naked intent' finds the love it has always longed for.