I expect that most readers have never asked where the title of this blog comes from. But occasionally, someone has asked. Less frequently, someone has wagered a guess themselves.

The most creative conjecture came from a friend whom I’d known for quite a while before the blog started. She wondered if the source was the Buddhist image of the lotus that is planted in the mud at the bottom of the pond and that only slowly emerges to the surface. Since I was living in Thailand at the time, the guess was not exactly out of left field. But it really had nothing to do with what I was thinking about. I have hardly had any temptation to think in Buddhist terms or images. My engagement with the contemplative elements in Christianity far predates my time in Thailand. A culture of encounter, still less any eclecticism, was far from my mind in naming the blog.

To be honest, at the conscious level, all that I was thinking about is the quote of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain that serves as a mission statement here: “The great need of our age, in what concerns the spiritual life, is to put contemplation on the roads of the world.”[1] But I realized that this sounded too optimistic by itself. Quite frankly, these roads are muddy. Contemplative life outside a cloister is no Sunday picnic driven to on a modern asphalt-paved highway. The roads are grimy. At the surface level of my thinking, that’s all I was going for.

As time has gone by, I’ve realized that the metaphor is much more useful—indeed, much more polyvalent.

Recently, in this Season of Creation, I’ve started to talk about contemplation in the mud of the earth; this is not at all something I had in mind a decade ago. But it fully accords with the idea of Christian contemplation, without distorting it in any direction that would make contemplation mean something other than thinking about God and loving him at the same time.

I’ve also become aware that, somewhere in the back of my mind, familiarity with the story of Saint Charles de Foucauld may have conditioned my choice of a name for the blog. He uses the image of mud in some of his more famous quotes. Although English translations of these passages sometimes obscure the underlying similarity, it’s there in the original French.

The mud of our sins

One of these passages has Charles tell of his earlier life, before his conversion in the confessional with Abbé Huvelin. At the deepest, darkest point of his life, the image he chooses to express the horror is “mud” (la boue):

In the first period, my love for my family was very ardent; in the second [period], it was still lively, even if diminished. It was my beacon, my last light, in the midst of this deep darkness. In the third period, it drops itself. It does not go out, but it drops a lot. From then on, I am in the night, I have nothing left. I no longer see God, nor men. There [is] only me, and by “me” I mean my sensuality: gluttony, laziness, pride, shameful passions. It is absolute selfishness in darkness and mud [la boue]. Writing later to a friend of mine from that time that I had changed a lot, he answered me: “I congratulate you.” The most worldly people, my comrades, did not esteem me. I disgusted them. I repelled them. I was less a man than a pig. There you are, my God, in what mud [quelle boue] I was rolling! … And to think that you had the kindness to pick me up there![2]

Here, mud is a stand-in for our own willed filth. It indicates our sins—both as acts and as residual states within us. Charles’ language is reminiscent of what happens to the young man who takes his inheritance in the parable that usually goes by the name of the Prodigal Son (but might be better named something like the Parable of the Two Lost Sons or the Parable of the Father and his Sons). At his lowest point, he lives no better than pigs (Lk 15:15–19).

What I take from this is that we are contemplative in the mud, not only because of our location and our suitability for (and docility to movements of the Spirit which tend towards) contemplation of Christ in his human life in historical Palestine and in his members spread out in time and space, rather than that bright light that the saints often speak of, being contemplation of the Trinitarian Persons themselves. We are contemplative in the mud also because of our state. Our sins cover our eyes and ears like muck. To be sure, God can meet us even here. He is all Mercy. But in itself, this mud hinders, not helps.

The mud of our inadequacy to God

The second passage of Brother Charles that may have unconsciously influenced me is this even more famous one:

When we can suffer and love, we can do a lot, we can do as much as we can in this world: we feel that we are suffering, we don’t always feel that we are loving—and that is one more great suffering! But we know that we would like to love, and to want to love is to love. We find that we don’t love enough. How true that is! We will never love enough. But the good Lord, who knows from what mud [de quelle boue] he has formed us, who loves us much more than a mother can love her child, and who does not lie, has told us that he would not reject anyone who comes to him.[3]

Here we have one of the last letters Charles wrote, on the very day he died, to his cousin. The main thrust is that wanting to love can feel like hell, but it is in fact just Purgatory—if that. Maybe it is even more than purgation, for it might just be like the moment of Jesus on the Cross. There is nothing lacking if our will to love is right. Feelings are feelings. But love is where the will throws itself out to.

In this context, Charles again uses the word “mud” (boue). This time, he isn’t saying that we’re mud-covered because of our sins. Rather, we are made from mud originally. There is a Biblical reference lurking in the background here, too. This time it is not the New Testament, but rather the Old. The language reminds one of the second creation account, wherein YHWH “formed man from the dust of the ground” (Gen 2:7 NRSV). Not mud? Well, perhaps not. But dust is just mud that needs water—which is something you need to add if you’re going to mould it and form it and shape it.

From this passage, I take the simple message that, well, we are simple creatures. We’re little. We’re small. We’re made from fragile and weak stuff. We’re made even from something that can be shaped and reshaped. In itself, it’s not so great. But in God’s hands—that’s another story entirely. He can do much with little.

This kind of mud imagery says that we are, by our nature, not sinful, but still inadequate to God. But for God, the impossible is what betokens the oncoming of his compassionate gaze.

Four muds

What I see so far, then, is four different muds, and I either love each of them or know that I need to live in God’s Mercy with them.

First, there is the mud that is a property of the roads. This contemplative life we have isn’t the Beatific Vision, and it’s not the relative tranquillity of contemplation in a cloister either; finding Christ in our neighbour is, for instance, a question about the dust and mud of the road itself.

Second, there is the mud of my own sins, which forms an unsightly coating that impairs vision and hearing.

Third, there is the muddy origin of our human nature, radically disproportionate to God, but for that a still greater object of his Mercy.

Finally, and in fact related to the previous mud, is the mud of the earth itself—that mud from which we are made and thus a natural soil in which all Christian contemplation is interconnected, whether that be contemplation of the Trinitarian Persons (the Creator), the mysteries of Jesus (his gaze for Creation), or Christ in others (those affected by any disruption or damage to our common home).

We’re contemplative in the mud in several distinct but interrelated senses. I’ve counted four so far. But far beyond anything I’d planned, this is one of those metaphors that just keeps on multiplying and one of those gifts that just keeps on giving.

[1] Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Liturgy and Contemplation, trans. Joseph W. Evans (New York: P.J. Kenedy, 1960), 74–75.

[2] Charles de Foucauld, La dernière place (Paris: Nouvelle, Cité, 2002), 94, in Jean-Claude Boulanger, La prière d’abandon. Un chemin de confiance avec Charles de Foucauld (Paris: Artège, 2020), 89–90. My translation.

[3] Letter to Marie de Bondy (December 1, 1916), in Jean-Claude Boulanger, Le chemin de Nazareth. Une spiritualité du quotidien (Paris: Artège, 2019), 376. My translation.