This light itself is one, and all those who see it and love it are one.
-St. Augustine
The center of our soul is difficult to define. It’s hard enough just to believe in it.
-St. Teresa of Avila
Because it is not I who look but I who am being looked through, Gloria.
-R. S. Thomas
People visit the Academy in Florence mostly to see Michelangelo’s David. The postcards and the photographs in coffee-table books simply do not reveal his corporeal dignity. David presides at the end of a long gallery, where he bodies forth an intelligence inscrutably luminous and spacious.
Easily eclipsed by David’s splendor is a less famous series of sculptures by Michelangelo called Slaves. They slot in along the side of the gallery. At first they snag the attention more than command it. In contrast to David’s shining prowess and preening sheen, they are rough and unfinished. Worry-worn and crumbling in despair of ever stepping free of the shackling stone, they remain forever incomplete.
According to ancient theory of art, the practice of sculpting has less to do with fashioning a figure of one’s choosing than with being able to see in the stone the figure waiting to be liberated. The sculptor imposes nothing but only frees what is held captive in stone. The practice of contemplation is something like this. It does not work by means of addition or acquisition, but by release, chiseling away thought-shackled illusions of separation from God. We emerge from the debris of separation and stand up, “set free from the snare of the fowler” (Ps 91:3). The third-century spiritual master Plotinus speaks of contemplation and sculpture in his treatise “On Beauty”: “If you do not find yourself beautiful yet,” he advises, “act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also, cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue.'” The Orthodox monk Amphilochios of Patmos proclaims, “You should he joyful! Jesus holds a chisel in his hands. He wants to make you into a statue for the heavenly place.'” Saint Teresa of Avila describes this process with a more succulent metaphor; she likens it to peeling fruit. “Imagine a palmetto fruit. Layer upon layer must be peeled away to reach the tasty part in the middle.”
If God is the sculptor, our practice is like a chisel that works effectively and patiently to remove stone. Just as the progress of chiseling, brushing, and blowing away debris and dust is not by way of acquisition, the way an assembly of bricks and mortar acquires us a building, so the practice of contemplation does not acquire for us some thing. Contemplative practice proceeds by way of the engaged receptivity of release, of prying loose, of letting go of the need to have our life circumstances be a certain way in order for us to live or pray or be deeply happy.
The stone that is removed is our embedded and frenzied preoccupation with the inner video and all the ego-metrics involved in trying to gauge just how our spiritual lives are progressing. With enough of this stone removed, the chiseling becomes a quiet excavation of the present moment. What emerges from the chiseled and richly veined poverty of the present moment? The emerging figure is our life as Christ (Phil 1:21; Col 3:3-4).
Saint Augustine says, “Therefore, brothers and sisters, what calls for all our efforts in this life is the healing of the eye of the heart, with which God is to be seen,” What does this inner eye see once it is restored to health? Many of the saints and sages of the contemplative tradition speak of this restoration in a language of vastness, light, awareness, and watchfulness. At the beginning of The Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila, for example, insists that “The soul is vast, spacious, plentiful. This amplitude is impossible to exaggerate ….The sun at the center of this place radiates to every part. By the book’s end she is still speaking of our depths along these lines, “We are not referring to some dark corner, but to a vast inner space.” According to St. Augustine, this vast inner space of the soul, an “abyss” as he terms it, is completely open and porous to God: “Indeed, Lord, to your eyes, the abyss of human consciousness is naked.”
This spaciousness describes not only David in his gallery of light but also the inner eye that perceives the gallery of light. Awareness, consciousness, watchfulness is this vast inner space, radiating everywhere. It is not an object; rather, all objects (physical objects or internal objects like thoughts and feelings) appear and disappear in this awareness, a “sunlit absence,” to adapt Seamus Heaney. Always luminous but never quite pinned down, this sunlit absence suffuses and embraces all, as open to the Luminous Ground as air to light. “In your light, Lord, we see light” (Ps 36: 10).
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
