The Pillar of Cloud

“An elder said: The monk’s cell is that furnace of Babylon in which the three children found the Son of God; but it is also the pillar of cloud, out of which God spoke to Moses.”
—Wisdom of the Desert

A wonderful little teaching here on what the contemplative life is all about. Being a contemplative is not about being morally perfect, doing good deeds, austerities of the mind and body, etc. It is about using daily life as the stage for a direct encounter with the Ultimate Reality. The monk’s cell is the fire of Babylon and it’s the pillar of cloud.

We may not be monks, but some of us are surely called to be contemplatives, and therefore we could easily transpose the words “your bedroom,” “your office,” “your car” for the words “The monk’s cell.” We, too, are to enter the pillar of cloud.

Nearly a millennium after the Desert Fathers, the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing used the same imagery to describe the deepest states of meditative prayer. When we sit in quiet, compassionate acceptance of whatever arises and falls in our minds and hearts (which is the essence of meditation), we can after a while discern a vast, open ground from whence all the thoughts come and to which they return.

It’s as if you can watch your thoughts and feelings arise and fall in the mind and then, without ignoring them, direct your inner gaze just behind or beneath them. The author of the Cloud describes it as “looking over the shoulder” of the thought, feeling or idea. What you see beyond them is…nothing. This nothingness is variously describing as a dark cloud, or a deep pool, or even a blinding light. But the great mystics, who have persisted with their prayer until they are existentially immersed into that cloud, have testified that it is in fact the heart of God (another metaphor). Words can’t describe it, but the experience of entering the cloud is to transform one’s understanding of who and what we are. It is to see the whole world as the furnace of Babylon and the pillar of cloud.