‘Do Not Grasp Me’

An old Sufi story about Mulla Nasrudin tells of how he took his donkey across a frontier every day, with the panniers loaded with straw.

Each night when he returned, Nasrudin admitted that he was a smuggler. And so the frontier guards searched him over and over again. They searched his person, sifted through the straw, even burned it from time to time. All the while, Nasrudin became visibly more and more prosperous. Then one day he retired and went to live in another country.

Years later, one of the customs officials met Nasrudin and asked him, ‘You can tell me now – what was it you were smuggling, when we could never catch you out?’ ‘Donkeys,’ said Nasrudin.

Overlooking God’s presence

Having strong ideas of how God should appear (perhaps as some sort of supernatural object, or spiritual vision or feeling) can cause us to overlook God’s presence, which is always manifesting in the fabric of our ordinary life – manifesting as our life. Seeking a for a certain fixed form, for something definite to grasp onto, we can miss the reality.

Those of you who came to the launch of our recent book The Missing Peace last November, might remember Bishop Rachel Treweek saying, ‘We live in a world where people are longing for certainty, because everything feels uncertain and people are anxious…and want certainty… And I think that one of the dangers for the church is that, in our desire to give people certainty, we try and rationalise everything. And I want to say, people are longing for mystery. Don’t try and box God.’

Comprehending or apprehending?

In an interview about poetry as a door into mystery, the poet Malcolm Guite highlighted a distinction between comprehending and apprehending. ‘The idea of comprehend,’ he said, ‘is that you comprehend something by completely surrounding it, so that your mind completely understands it. ‘Apprehend is something else. When you apprehend something, you’re not saying you’ve completely got a hold of it, you’re saying you’ve grasped something of it, and are moving towards it.’

To paraphrase St. Augustine, if you are able to comprehend something, you may be sure that what you comprehended was not God. We cannot comprehend God. The infinite is always infinitely more than the finite mind can grasp. But God can be apprehended. We can know God truly without knowing God exhaustively.

Wisdom from the Desert Fathers and Mothers

‘Hold no intermediate image between the mind and the Lord when practising prayer,’ says Bishop Theophan the Recluse. The essential thing, he says, ‘is to dwell in God’ trusting that ‘God is in you, as He is in everything, and that this awareness ‘must not be accompanied by any visual concept.’ (2)

In meditation, we practice un-grasping, un-boxing.

Saying our prayer word, following our breath, we open to the mystery that will never be pinned down. We free-fall into our life in God. As we learn to release our thoughts about reality, we discover that what is left is reality. As we learn to release our thoughts about God, we discover that God is right here.

‘Do not grasp me,’ the resurrected Jesus says to Mary Magdalene (John 20:17). It is as if he is saying to her, and to us, ‘There is no need. Just open to my presence. I am holding you…’