The way of counsel, that counsel which enlivens the heart and renews the soul, is the way of God's grace to us. Those who are His chosen instruments to spread His word and bring life to the spiritually dead, are themselves, at least in that moment of divine transference, dead to both the world's wisdom and their own deep awareness of inadequacy in the face of the ultimate mystery. The mark of true sanctity is a humility focused on a constant awareness of inadequacy. The closer one is to God in spirit, the more conscious one is of one's stain. This stain is a lack of love. It is not a morbid introspective analysis of past misdemeanours; it is an acknowledgment of the shutter between oneself and the reality of love, which is a sharing of self in service to the world. When we have acknowledged our persistent inadequacy - and even the seraphs could not bear to face God directly in Isaiah's great vision in the temple, as they called ceaselessly to one another the words of the Sanctus - God removes that shutter from our souls by His act of eternal forgiveness, and at last we can say, with Isaiah, 'Here am I; send me' (Isa. 6:1-8). Then we are completely open to God's Spirit and can proclaim His word, the word proclaimed in Scripture and interpreted by the Spirit to bring wisdom to the age in which we live and to the people we serve.
When we are dead to the world's wisdom we enter the cloud of unknowing. In the words of the spiritual classic of that name 'For when I say darkness, I mean a lack Of knowing: as all thing that thou knowest not, or hast forgotten, is dark to thee; for thou seest it not with thy ghostly eye. And for this reason it is called, not a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing; which is betwixt thee and thy God' (chap. 4). The text goes on to tell us that we have also to forget our own past and present distractions if we are to come to God. 'And if ever thou shalt come to this cloud and will dwell and work therein as I bid thee, thou must, as this cloud of unknowing is above thee, betwixt thee and thy God, right so put a cloud of forgetting beneath thee, betwixt thee and all the creatures that ever he made' (chap. 5). This is the supreme act of faith; it is the equivalent in the realm of intellectual speculation and worldly progress of following Jesus' command to give up one's life for His sake and the Gospel. The prize is the knowledge and attainment of eternal life, which is the life of the Spirit within the soul of each one of us. But it is discovered only in making the act of faith in renunciation of all that is apparently secure in order to give of oneself fully in love to God Whom one dimly knows and one's fellow men whom one believes one knows only too well.
The glorious sequel to this act of faith is that nothing God had previously given us is taken away; instead, it is confirmed and transfigured by a radiance that finds its source in the Holy Spirit. He is eternally renewing all things until that far-off, yet ever-heralded event which will witness the spiritualisation of the whole universe. The spirit of counsel reveals itself to us when we bid farewell to all preconceptions and have, by a positive act of trust, yielded ourselves naked and unprotected by any intellectual subterfuge to God.
This giving of ourself unconditionally to God entails first a frank acknowledgment of our present inadequacy that shows itself in our recurrently sinful attitude to life - in which the shutter is pulled down to shield the soul from a full exposure to and participation in the lives of our fellow men. This is the conscious confession that we make to ourselves in alert awareness in the presence of God. It is the precondition for the subsequent joyous release that follows God's unconditional forgiveness. To ask in willed intent in prayer is to receive God's love, and the proof of that love is the opening up of a new perspective of reality in which all are one, and the One Who is perfect embraces all. Now we are enfolded in the cloud of forgetting, and our gaze is directed to that One alone Who can grant us salvation and give us enlightenment, the Spirit of God. He is both our mentor and the destination of our journey into wisdom.
This is the supreme act of contemplation: the naked, unobscured soul faces the radiant effulgence of God's presence. It is filled with awe that at once is transformed and expanded into rapturous love. No one can face God directly and remain alive; this is true of ego-consciousness. But when the ego is sacrificed, and the personality is pierced in love on behalf of even one other creature, the spirit of the soul can focus so directly on to the divine presence that the person of God becomes immediately available to the one who has sacrificed himself. The Spirit of God is now fully alive in the person's consciousness, and the wisdom of God unfolds its counsel in his soul. The Spirit illumines every aspect of the personality: the soul is cleansed and purified, the rational mind enlightened, the emotions purged of selfish desires and enriched by the influx of love for all creatures, and the body made new and vibrant with living power. This is the heart of the healing process; it is nothing less than a re-creation of the human person in the divine image. When one is filled with the effulgent splendour of God, one enters more completely into the knowledge and life of God. 'And because for us there is no veil over the face, we all reflect as in a mirror the splendour of the Lord; thus we are transfigured into His likeness from splendour to splendour; such is the influence of the Lord who is Spirit' (2 Cor. 3:18).
The power from on high does not invade the personality, still less dismember or destroy it in order to replace it with something different. Instead it respects and makes full use of every gift, every experience that has contributed to the present stature of the person, and everything that has been learned through diligent study and painstaking observation. The end is that the treasury of individual endeavour may be transformed from a mere witness of past experience to an instrument of immediate usefulness for the work ahead of it. When we are able to let go of the emotional echoes of what has already passed away and relinquish the agonised charge of longing and remorse for that which is no longer within the grasp of our recall, we are filled with the warm after-glow of the experience behind us. What was summed up in the past has been realised in our growth up to the present, and now its riches are available to us for our work in the future. And at last we are able to confront a fellow human being in clarity of vision and attentiveness of soul so that we may see his burden and share his pain with an authority of inner direction that proceeds from God Himself.
God alone knows the ultimate answer to every human question for He sees each creature in its final completion, an end of growth contributed to equally by divine grace and the patient development of the will of the person struggling towards integrity of purpose and fulfilment of design. God's love to us is shown in His respect for our own individuality. God loves us so much that He does not withhold suffering from us. Rather than reduce us to the impotence of docile puppets who follow slavishly after the dictatorial will of their master, He has made us masters of our fate by endowing us with a centre of direction within the depth of the personality. This centre is the soul, and its free action is the will. The divine spark is the spirit of the soul; when we know this point as a living experience, we know God and the Word eternally begotten from Him, even Christ the Lord. This Word now directs and empowers the will, so that God's will and man's will work together in an integrated personality for the work of healing and integrating other people individually, society collectively and all creation universally.
The work of spiritual counselling is to set the client free of past psychological encumbrances so that the Holy Spirit can penetrate into his soul as a cleansing fire and a directing light. The soul can then act according to its own wisdom and the will can at last be authentically free. In God's service there is alone perfect freedom, because in doing His work the agent is liberated from the impediments that mar his own personality - the fear of past inadequacy recalled as a remorseless incubus to present action, the desire for approval by one's peers which is a way of averting one's gaze once more from one's own inadequacy by basking in the appreciation of other people, and the resentment that stems from failing to attain what one believes is one's due reward. In the way of unknowing the minister of counsel implants the word of God deeply into the soul of the one who cries out in pain. This he does through silent compassion in shared fellowship.
God's strength is always made perfect in human weakness, because when we feel bereft of any effectual encouragement or counsel, we open ourselves spontaneously to the Holy Spirit. It is, as it were, that we are calling, albeit unconsciously, on the name of the Lord in the agony of our darkness, which is shared by the one who comes to us for help. In the cloud of unknowing the still small voice of God, Who is spirit, comes to us and flows through us to the deepest, holiest part of the other person's psyche. This is the spirit of the soul, and once it is activated its own store of treasured wisdom is released and made available to the one in need. The ministry of contemplation, though focused on God, soon extends into the personality of the one in need of counsel and therapy. It not only shares the burden of his distress and substitutes its own robust strength for the vague paralysing fears that cripple him and render him impotent, but it also directs the Spirit of God deep into his naked, unshuttered soul and sets in action the work of the Holy Spirit within him. In this respect the Holy Spirit is both the universal power from on high that spiritualises all matter and raises it through death to immortality, and the focus of light that burns constantly in the spirit of man leading him to fresh endeavours that find their end in death and resurrection. That which is beyond our comprehension is nearer to us than the knowledge of our own identity. God, who is often very distant from the imagination of the intellectually proficient and scientifically erudite, is the eternal host of the small child. Indeed, we have to become once more as little children if we are to enter the Kingdom of God, for it is available only to those who have the unshuttered openness of vision of an innocent child (Mark 10:15).
Why then should we grow up to adult stature and participate wholeheartedly in the grimy commerce of worldly strife? We soon lose the glow of pristine innocence and adolescent idealism as our personalities become tarnished with the stain of the world's unrighteousness. St Paul says 'When I was a child, my speech, my outlook and my thoughts were all childish. When I grew up, I had finished with childish things. Now we see only puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we shall see face to face' (1 Cor.13:10-12). Acquiring the knowledge of worldly things gives us a closer empathy with our fellow men. The burden of possessions and the incubus of family responsibility bring us into closer relationship on a workaday level with our brethren who are similarly encumbered. The gaining of a reputation for skill in a particular occupation or profession makes us more sensitive to the demands of society that we should serve our fellow creatures with integrity and self-giving devotion. In this way the rather individualistic private life that we enjoyed as a child - assuming always that we were supported with the love of caring parents in a wholesome family unit, an assumption that becomes more problematic as family loyalty disintegrates and personal moral discipline declines - has now to be broadened and extended to include many other types of people until nothing in the world is foreign to us.
Furthermore, the wisdom of God that is an innate gift of the soul, has to penetrate and transform the whole person so that he too may assume a god-like role in the world - by this I mean one of collaborating actively in willed assent with the creative power of the Most High. The expertise of man that shows itself in the amazing scientific and technological advances of our modern age is the way in which God has imbued us with His Spirit, so that we may understand the mechanism of creation more dynamically and aid in the eternal work of renewal of the world. But until the creative potential of the human mind is redeemed from the bondage of selfish striving and predatory desire for total hegemony, man's efforts are consummated in an orgy of destruction. It is doubtful whether people are any more depraved now than in previous ages; on the contrary, there seems to be a steady increase in international concern for the conservation of resources and social justice embracing all the world's population irrespective of race or creed. But unfortunately this acknowledgement of the oneness of all life is too slow in comparison with the tumultuous advance of technological knowledge and scientific understanding that has characterised the modern world.
We are today rather like power-intoxicated adolescents, but a return to innocent childhood is both impossible and undesirable. What is needed is a full growth into mature adult stature in which the vast scientific power at our disposal can be used responsibly and with compassion for the needs of all creation. This is achieved by being constantly open in love to God in acknowledged ignorance and to our brethren in self-transcending devotion. The way is one of contemplative prayer; the end is a fertilisation of the power-weary personality by the fragrant balm of the Holy Spirit Who both renews us personally and shows us the way of beneficent employment of the scientific resources at our disposal, a gift that is bestowed on us by the power of that Spirit. In this way the wisdom of man, also a gift of God's Spirit, is led into new fields of exploration and endeavour by a participation in the foolishness of God, which alone simplifies the abstruse and makes wise the simple.
The innocent child we are to become in order to accept God's kingdom is therefore not the self-centred baby we once were. It is the simplicity of the adult shriven of all conceit and selfishness by the slow attrition of experience, suffering and fellowship, so that he is at last open to and aware of the one thing needful for salvation: the presence of God Who is closer to him than his awareness of his own identity. The person young in spiritual knowledge clings to and relies on the intellectual opinions of the present age as his arbiter of wisdom and authority. The more experienced soul opens itself to God in joyous unknowing and self-forgetting. In the words of the Magnificat 'The hungry he has filled with good things, the rich sent empty away' (Luke 1:53). The good thing that comes to us by the way of unknowing is the inspiration of the Holy Spirit Who leads us into a more comprehensive understanding of the truth. This He does not only by a fresh revelation but also by enabling us to use the knowledge we already possess to greater advantage. When the ego is put in its right place, the Spirit of God can make all wisdom available to us. Not a little of that wisdom is already ours by virtue of what we have read, even in the distant past of our childhood and youth, and have subsequently relegated to the backrooms of our mind. These apparently forgotten fragments of our memory can be recalled in an emergency when we are still and open to God's Spirit within us. But now they cease to be mere pieces of disconnected information and are instead welded into a coherent whole, the wisdom of the ages concentrated into a single moment of time, by the power of the Holy Spirit. At the same time a new perspective is given us so that the well-worn teachings of Scripture are suddenly invested with a contemporary meaning. All genuinely spiritual teaching is on this account of timeless value, because it speaks from the depth of human experience and issues forth from the soul of the one who is inspired to the end that all who listen may be changed into real people. Its truth is not dependent on the cultural background of the teacher, but speaks universally to all people of all ages according to their willingness and ability to receive and assimilate the message. Thus the young Jesus spoke with a unique authority that at once arrested and transformed the common people who heard Him. Today His words have a similarly transforming effect, but only to those who have been jolted out of their customary indolence and complacency, usually by some life-shattering event. The person who comes for counsel is often in that situation, and the one whose privilege it is to lead him into a fresh appreciation of truth must be the agent of the Holy Spirit and not merely the purveyor of worldly wisdom. The wisdom of the worldly ones tends merely towards a more contemporary version of the status quo. The wisdom of God, tapped in the way of unknowing, acts as a catalyst and evokes a new and entirely heightened response so that a changed person emerges from the encounter with truth.
Our own life story is in the end our manual of discipline as well as our book of wisdom. It is our unique gift to all who meet us, and it is, at least when we die, our presentation of ourselves to God as part of the judgment, however we attempt to visualise it, that follows our death and resurrection in a new form. We do not need to provide others with an autobiographical account of our own lives and struggles, so as to compare them with those of the ones whom we are trying to help. Indeed, it is unwise to compare oneself with anyone else, at least in his presence, even when the desire is to encourage him on the way. Although we may have much in common with certain types of people, the personal flavour is always distinctive in its uniqueness. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit uses our past experiences and the wisdom that has accrued from their patient assimilation to guide and encourage all who approach us for help. The Spirit puts the right words in our mind apposite to the immediate situation, so that a point of contact between an aspect of our past life and that of the person seeking counsel is made apparent. It is far better not to discuss one's own past with the one needing counsel, but rather to let that past speak for itself through the personality that presents itself to the world in general and to the client in particular. What I am as a person shouts out to anyone with sensitivity by the psychic currents that emanate from me. These are much more revealing pointers to my authentic nature than either my mental prowess or my professional qualifications. It is the psychic currents that link, or repel, the souls of others and mine. If I am repulsive to the other person, no amount of technical knowledge will be of any avail. If I can effect psychic rapport, healing will flow out to the one in need even if my academic knowledge of psychology is limited. The best result occurs, of course, when psychic sensitivity is aligned to specialised psychological knowledge. This is not, in my experience, a very usual concurrence, since psychological erudition tends to separate the practitioner from the one needing help by making him feel superior and act in an officious way. But when the counsellor has already traversed his own hell, he may then attain the priceless ability of relating psychically as well as intellectually with his client. At this point the spirit of counsel becomes the spirit of healing also.
The way of unknowing is the way also of humility. It sees the ongoing process of life as an adventure to be experienced and enjoyed rather than a foregone conclusion merely to be confirmed. The humble of the world are able to receive the joy of the present moment with a childlike wonder that never grows stale with familiarity. When all preconceptions are separated from one's field of response by the cloud of unknowing and all personal prejudice divested from one by the cloud of forgetting, one enters a completely changed understanding of life. One can greet each fresh event with enthusiasm, for every new thing that confronts one is also a means to one's liberation from the narrow confines of the world's vision. What is unknown but followed in faith leads us to an experience of God's unending providence. St Paul speaks of 'things beyond our seeing, things beyond our hearing, things beyond our imagining, all prepared by God for those who love Him' (1 Cor. 2:9). To love God means to be open to His grace in silent contemplation. The fruit of that contemplation is the ability to bring down love to the world. Its proof in action is the capacity to bear another person's burden as a preliminary to making him responsive to the Holy Spirit Who is both our leader into truth and the One who fills us with holy counsel. By the way of unknowing one can enter into a life-transcending relationship with an ever-growing number of people until the mystical unity of all life in God is revealed in its splendour.