Some Facts About Contemplation

As Mother Theresa was beginning to become known for her charitable work in India, she gained the interest 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. This book is 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. There is formal prayer like the "Our Father".  There is spontaneous prayer.  We have intercessory prayer where we pray for others or ourselves.  Music can also be a prayer.  But one of the best kept secrets in the Church today is the prayer called “contemplation”. The two stories I started with about Mother Theresa and Brother Lawrence are 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 as you know, is very structured with psalms and responses, scripture readings, and other form prayers like the “Our Father”. It follows a fairly 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 now 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 a period of time, I discovered it was this time of stillness and silence that was the most beneficial part of the whole church prayer. This was the time when I had the experience of being closest to God. 

 As the years passed, the times of silence became dominate, and the other fell to lessor importance. Contemplative prayer became foundational to my spiritual journey. I’ve now been practicing contemplation for over forty years ago, so I have become quite familiar with it, but I’m still surprised at how few know about it. So I would like to speak briefly about it in this posting.

My first exposure to contemplation was through the writings of Fr. Thomas Merton. He was certainly the most contemporary writer on contemplation in our current time. As you probably know, most of his books were written during his many years as a Trappist monk at Gethsemane in Kentucky during the forties and fifties. His little book called “Contemplative Prayer” is one of my favorites. Thomas Merton brought alive this ancient tradition which had been all but lost by the mainline church. Not that it didn’t exist. Over the course of church history, it was very present in the contemplative monastic communities. Among the many saints, John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila were contemplatives themselves and wrote much about it, but it was largely considered a type of prayer reserved for those who had chosen a 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 centered on Christ, it became known as “centering prayer”.

Thomas Keating wrote a trilogy of books which explained in detail everything that one needed 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 contemplative approach to the method he recommended, and have followed it ever since. Next to Thomas Merton, Fr. Thomas Keatings’ books have had the greatest influence on my life.

During this same time frame, 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 that 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 monk, the Benedictine order to which he belonged would not permit him to use this form of prayer as it was unknown to them. Being a faithful monk, Fr. Main complied, but later he discovered through his reading of the conferences of John Cassian, one of the early fathers of the church, that this type of prayer had been used extensively in the past. Thus he began his task of introducing contemplation to the greater community. He called it “Christian Meditation”.

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

 I’ve 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 the activities of service and ministry. The busier you are the holier you are, it seems. A contemplative is not against activity, but the service provided must spring from a source 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, 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. 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, a sunset, 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 come to us as a gift 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 follow 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. I would like to conclude with Maloney's introduction to this retreat experience.

“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 the silent prayer of the heart, (a gift of the Spirit praying with you) you move beyond feelings, emotions, even thoughts. The Spirit is so powerfully operative that imagining or reasoning can only be 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. The Holy Spirit frees you so God can give Himself to you. With utter freedom and joy, respond always in deep silence and humble self-surrender to His Inner Presence."