Monday, January 23, 2017

Experiencing God 232 What Is Contemplation


As Mother Theresa was beginning to become known for her charitable work in India, she gained the attention of the press. During an interview, she was questioned about prayer. The reporter asked her: You must pray often to God. Certainly, she answered. And what is it that you say to God? She answered: Usually, I say nothing. I just sit there to listen. The reported then asked: "So then, what does God say to you?" Mother Theresa answered: God says nothing to me. God just listens; and if you don’t understand what I mean by this, please don’t ask me, because I can’t explain it.

Brother Lawrence was a seventeenth century lay brother who lived out his life in a Carmelite Monastery in Paris. He is most know for his book which is now a Christian classic called “The Practice of the Presence of God.” When speaking about prayer, Brother Lawrence wrote: “In prayer, I make it my business only to persevere in His Holy presence, wherein I keep myself, by a simple attention, and a general fond regard for God, which I call an actual presence of God.”

In our Christian faith tradition, we have many kinds of prayers. During the course of this hour, we will be experiencing other types of prayer: The beautiful music is prayer. We have a short period of silence, and of course we end with intercessory prayer, praying for the needs of others. Another type of prayer, which I suspect you are all familiar with, is called lecto divina. This prayer includes a reading a word or line from scripture; reflecting on that word or line for a moment, and then pondering the words to see how they speak to us. And there are many more. But one of the best kept secrets in the Catholic Church today is the prayer called “contemplation”. 


 The two stories I started with about Mother Theresa and Brother Lawrence speak about contemplative prayer.

During my diaconate formation years between 1978 and 1982, I moved deeper into “formal” prayer. As candidates, we were encouraged to do Church prayer which is very structured with psalms and responses, scripture readings, and other “form” prayers like the “Our Father”. It follows a very strict format. What I began to discover as I did this structured prayer was that after it was over, I would often move into a period of silence. With the task of reading over, my thoughts would fall away; and I would move into a stillness from which I had no interest in returning, at least right away. Over time, I discovered it was this time of stillness and silence that was the most beneficial part of the whole church prayer. These were the moments when I experienced being closest to God. As the years passed, the times and length of silence became more dominate, and the other more formal part fell to lessor importance. As a result, contemplative prayer became foundational to my spiritual journey. I’ve been practicing contemplation now for over forty years ago, so I have become quite familiar with it, but I’m still surprised at how little is known about. So I would like to speak briefly about it today. 

What does the church have to say about contemplative prayer? In paragraph 2709 of the Catholic Catechism, we read: “What is contemplative prayer? St. Theresa answers: “Contemplative prayer is nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with God who we know loves us.”

I've always practiced silent prayer, but my real explanation of contemplation came through the writings of Fr. Thomas Merton. He is certainly the most contemporary writer on contemplation in our current time. As you probably know, most of his books were written during his years as a Trappist monk at Gethsemane in Kentucky. Thomas Merton brought alive this ancient tradition which had been all but lost by the mainline church. Not that it didn’t exist: It has always been there. But over the course of time, it was principally replaced by the more formal and wordy prayers that we are all more accustomed too today. 

St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila were contemplatives in themselves and wrote much about contemplation, but it was largely considered a type of prayer reserved for those who had chosen the more strict cloistered life. Thomas Merton changed that.

In the sixties, Pope Paul the V1, recognized the need to revive the contemplative side of the Catholic church. Therefore, he encouraged the contemplative communities, such as the monasteries, to begin to explore ways to bring this dimension more to the forefront. Fr. Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk from Snowmass Colorado, took up this task, and with a few of his contemporaries, introduced contemplation to the larger community. Since the group experience of contemplation was one of being in the presence of and centered on Christ, it became known as “centering prayer”.

Thomas Keating wrote a trilogy of books which explained in detail everything that one needs to know about “centering prayer. I was introduced to his books in 1997 while on a four week retreat at the Gethsemane in Kentucky. After reading his books, I changed my own approach to the method he recommended in his book, and have followed it ever since. As with the writings of Thomas Merton, Fr. Thomas Keatings’ books have had a tremendous beneficial influence on my life.

During this same time, a Benedictine monk by the name of Fr. John Main from London England started an approach to contemplative prayer similar to Thomas Keating. John Main himself discovered this prayer while on a foreign assignment to Malaysia. Swami Satyananda, a local holy man from this country, seeing Main’s eagerness to deepen his Christian faith, introduced him to this very simple form of prayer where thoughts, images, concepts, feelings are all left behind in order to realize, first and foremost, God’s indwelling presence. Upon returning to England, and becoming a priest and monk, the Benedictine order to which he belonged would not permit him to use this type of prayer because it was unknown to them. Being a faithful monk, Fr. Main complied with their wishes. 



But years later, while exploring the teachings of the early Church fathers, he discovered that this type of prayer had been extensively used. Based on the conferences of John Cassian, a fifth century monk, Main began the task of introducing contemplation to the greater church community. He called it “Christian Meditation”.

Small groups for both “Centering Prayer” introduced by Keating and “Christian Meditation” introduced by Main, using these two streams of contemplative disciplines, now exist all over the world.


I have personally been involved with the Canadian Christian Meditation Community since my Kentucky retreat in 1997.

We all have a contemplative side, but we live in a world where it is difficult to embrace a contemplative life. Our culture measures successful living by an entirely different yard stick, usually built on activity and busyness. Even church often connects holiness with only the activities of service and ministry. The busier you are the holier you are, or so it seems.

A contemplative is not against activity. Any true faith must always find expression in in active service, but the service must spring from a source and place that lies from within. And a contemplative knows that it is only from a certain depth of silence and solitude that this can be discovered.

In all the other types of prayer that were mentioned above, except maybe the time of silence, we are actively involved in speaking, listening, pondering or reflecting. In Christian Meditation, the process is different. The connection that is made is not by speaking to God or by thinking about God in a complicated way. We do not bring our problems to God asking that these problems be solved. Meditation has to do with being in God’s presence, being attentive to God as in a close sharing between friends. This is very similar to that sense of deep inner joy or interior peace that we sometimes experience at those surprising and unexpected moments: Overlooking the ocean, sitting quietly watching a sunset, observing a view from a high mountain. But strangely, these things do not come about by our pursuing them, or running after them, or trying to catch them. They are moments that come as a gift because we have chosen to be there. They come freely as we pause from our usual busyness and move into inner stillness. “Be still and know that I am God.”

Each year, my wife and I attend a one week contemplative retreat at a monastery or retreat house. During these times, I have followed Fr. George Maloney’s “Eight Day Self-Directed Retreat” Book called “Alone with the Alone”. I’ve done this over a dozen times by now. This retreat experience is from a contemplative stance. Maloney begins his retreat book with the following:

“To contemplate is to move beyond your own activity and become activated by the inner power of the Holy Spirit. It means to be swept up into the threefold love current of the trinity. In this silent prayer of the heart, you move beyond all external activity, all thoughts, feelings and emotions. When done as a regular discipline, the Spirit becomes so powerfully operative that words, imaginings or reasoning become only noise that disturbs the silent communication of God at the core of your being. If you introduce noise by speaking words and fashioning images of God, then you are limiting His freedom to speak His words as He wishes, when He wishes. Over time, the Holy Spirit frees you so God can give Himself to you. Then with utter freedom and joy, you can respond, in deep silence and humble self-surrender, to His Inner Presence.


No comments:

Post a Comment