“The You-ness of Me: Objectless Devotion of Mother and Child.” By Paula Pryce.

^{photo by Nothing Ahead}

I fished out that old medallion, the one I used to wear when I was twelve or thirteen. A golden icon of Mary that I thought I’d long since outgrown and wasn’t even sure I’d kept. For some reason, I’ve been longing to have that tiny image of the Divine feminine near again.

A need to offer devotion has been bubbling up. For decades now, my practice has been to meld with an amorphous God, the one I could trust not to be contorted by cultural and political desire. I have tried my best to sit in attention and open to the unknown God rather than to a God of doctrine and wishful thinking.

And yet for some time now, the Divine has been seeking my hand. I can sense her corporeal warmth, as though the Queen of Heaven is opening her arms to me in invitation.

Is it merely the draw of seasonal sentimentality as we begin another mystical circumnavigation of the life of Christ? Another season of waiting and hoping and dreaming. Mary waits, Joseph waits, the Magi and shepherds and livestock wait – all of us wandering toward the hoped-for God, as yet unknown, except in the strength of our yearning. An adored and adorned Child, soon to become an object of devotion.

Yes, for so many of us, centuries of theology, mythology, and practice have turned the living, breathing Divine into an objectification of our desire. An unreachable God.

Centering Prayer steers us away from the ancient love-object trope.

Rather than conjuring up a made-to-order deity, teachers of contemplative prayer ask us to commit to a courageous stance of kenosis and non-attachment. A commitment to simply sit without projection or expectation. Cynthia Bourgeault’s teachings on objectless awareness, for example, orient us beyond the everyday mind’s dualistic structure of self and other. She tells us that self-emptying in Centering Prayer – “the gap between thoughts’’ – strengthens our capacity to simply keep attention (rather than paying attention to something at a distance), and invites us into “a tensile field of vibratory awareness within which you can be conscious of the whole without having to split the field into the usual subject/object polarity” (The Heart of Centering Prayer, 129-130). Cynthia offers Rumi’s image of the quivering drop of mercury to help us understand this non-dual way of dwelling in the heart of God.

^{photo courtesy of Pixabay}

Everything can be let go, but not all is to be jettisoned: devotion is a vital companion to objectless awareness. So how do we empty ourselves into the uncontainable Divine and still allow ourselves to revere the One before us?

There is something essential about God’s you-ness. Something about the babe-in-cradle incarnate God that sparks both union and preservation of selves. More than a longing for the love object, this relationality is an intermingling of subjects.

I think on my childhood reach toward the Divine and recall a tenderness that I have almost forgotten. Children, I have observed, sometimes connect intensely with a you-ness of God. No secrets there, no hidden agenda, no attempts to be what we’re not, no worries about what we are. Nothing between us, because strangely, there is no we.

This place of mutual devotion is light filled. A sparkling jewel or a honeyed sun. Just fresh-juiced being in the sacred space of you-and-I-are-together-always.

Objectless devotion is the name I give to this union of subjects. Or, if you prefer, call it intersubjective being. 

^{photo by Daria Obymaha}

Cynthia Bourgeault tells us that objectless awareness requires energy to sustain. It demands that one strengthen a capacity for attention. Developing an adeptness for keeping attention in this way takes time and practice, she says, like becoming fluent in a new language.

Objectless devotion also requires energy. Self-emptying and attentiveness are similarly important elements of the practice. However, intersubjective union has a slightly different emphasis; it draws us especially toward vulnerability, trust, and laying oneself fully open to embrace.

We have all experienced a need for warmth. Sometimes what’s needed is just to be in one another’s company to ponder the silence or hike through the forest or tell a story. Dwelling together, neither clinging nor letting go. Like resting with a babe in arms in a sensation of pure unity and unfettered intimacy. Oneness and twoness, simultaneously. 

I think of a Thanksgiving afternoon when the snow was flying and the fire was crackling. My little children sat with me, sewing toys with colourful felt and lambswool. The contentment and warmth were magical. No desire to be anywhere else in the cosmos but where we were, with one another. The day’s shining amber surrounded us as the cloak of God.

Objectless devotion is a reverence that allows for ambiguity and fluidity of selves while also accepting the particular gifts of companions who yearn to know and be known. The edges between you-ness and me-ness blur, but its unity still has space for the incarnate and relational Lover and Beloved.    

We turn to the sacred Mother and Child to teach us about devotion. No need to crystallize that love into an object of desire, for our desires are fulfilled in the mutual flow of subjects. Devotion like this is a pure fire that unbuckles the grip of dualism to create another way of being: the unboundaried unity of the you-ness of me.

^{art courtesy of block rosary}

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Paula Pryce writes reflections for The Contemplative Society on an ongoing basis.  She is a cultural anthropologist and writer who specializes in ritual studies and contemplative religions. Her publications include The Monk’s Cell: Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity.

To connect with Paula about this reflection, please e-mail TCS at admin@contemplative.org.Your e-mails will be forwarded onto her.