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Opening Prayer
My Friend, Teach me the blissful silence, in which I rest alone in you, apart from all created things, and, thereby to love all things in you and you in all things. Grace me with the courage to bear my own being in your presence, and bear my own presence as born and alive in your Life, O Christ. Amen.
Spiritual Teaching
All forms of mystical meditation and contemplative practice are intentional experiences in surrender to "God." We find ourselves by abdicating ourselves.
Possibly, one reason that most Christians resist meditation is that such Prayer entails willing relinquishment of even our personal and collective holy intents. In such abandonment, we yield our passions and capacities to the Wisdom and Purpose of Grace. The relinquishment is not denial of the good aspects of human nature, rather, the surrender is that these natural capacities and passions will be enhanced, shaped, and directed to the maximum potential of their intended purposes. Through such abdication the Christ Presence is born in and through us, individually and collectively.
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Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon (French, Catholic, mystic, 1648-1717), whose teachings have been embraced by Protestants in Germany, Switzerland, and England, and Methodists in America, wrote of the “holy indifference” descriptive of the surrendering in Silent Prayer:
When the soul is docile, and leaves itself to be purified, and emptied of all that which it has of its own, opposite to the will of God, it finds itself by little and little, detached from every emotion of its own, and placed in a holy indifference, wishing nothing but what God does and wills. This never can be effected by the activity of our own will, even though it were employed in continual acts of resignation. These though very virtuous, are so far one's own actions and cause the will to subsist in a multiplicity, in a kind of separate distinction or dissimilitude from God.
*Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon. Autobiography of Madame Guyon.
Therefore, the essential, revolutionary attribute of contemplative practice is the intentional surrender of all felt need of the self to be virtuous and self-effort at pleasing God, for these efforts, even though good, are still deriving from the self. The self is still trying by itself to please God or live up to some external standard, even if the external standard is the perception of an external God, separate from the essential Self within and at one with God.
In contemplative prayer, one, then, moves—or is moved-from trying to please a God outside oneself to being pleasing to the God who is omnipresent, residing equally in every aspect of creation, as well as within the Heart, as the Inner Sanctuary of Love. Therefore, it is difficult to see how self-righteousness can be avoided except in some form of such contemplative self-abdication, whether it is associated with the term "contemplative" or not.
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Psalm 131.2 is a text often referred to in regard to the Quiet of Contemplative Prayer. I will quote the entire Psalm, for the entirety is pertinent to the subject of contemplation:
1O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
2But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
3O Israel, hope in the LORD
from this time forth and forevermore.
This repose, writes Walter Brueggemann (Message of the Psalms), is not an abdication or resignation; rather, the Psalm presents the recognition of how life with God is. The Psalm links this receptive posture with intentional choice. A designed life practice is needed to enact this self-oblation and nurture its continuance. Likewise, a posture of receptivity and being with is linked to the hope of the collective faith community. One cannot, apart from an organic relating with faith community, live the contemplative life or practice this surrender to Grace. In Christian terms, even when one is alone in Prayer, the person is still acting as one member of the whole mystical Body of Christ. Thus, this experience of calm, as seen in the Psalm, will lead into prayer for the larger faith community and seeing the possibilities for its sustenance in hope.
Brueggemann, rightly, affirms that this Psalm is a theological affirmation about the correct ordering of life. Such ordering of life is not about being spiritual as opposed to being otherwise, or being religious as contrasted with being secular. The Psalm presents the normal state of faithful, dignified humanness. The dignity of the human is discovered in a right ordering of life in relationship to God, regardless of the varied images of this Being that differ among persons and faith communities.
The Psalm, then, presents a contrast between “creatureliness” and “autonomy.” The “faithful human creature … has no inclination for autonomy.” Also, the Psalm presents that this “glad, submissive reliance” is the antidote to anxiety. Thus, Brueggemann offers the contrast of this Psalm and the natural, spiritual law underlying it, to the drive toward autonomy within the modernist [and now Post Modern and Post Post Modern] ethos: "Unless there is submission, there will be no hope, for autonomy and self-sufficiency are finally postures of hopelessness in which free gifts are excluded and one is left to one’s own resources."
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We are part of a larger, dynamic, organic, and emergent Whole. This Whole, however we speak of it, is God. We are, in contrast to much modern sentiment, creatures of cosmic dependency. The only way to draw off, or be gifted with, the blessing, or the positive Energy of God, is to remain in companionship and union with the Whole. Therefore, to do so is to benefit from the Whole, or God, even as God benefits from receiving the joy of partnership with the human in reciprocal affection and action. God, then, does not decide to bless some and withhold blessing from others, as though God is capricious. God is the All-Potential with a Nature to give totally and constantly of the Being God Is to all derived beings.
Surrender, then, is not the loss of anything; rather it entails openness to the vitality of Christ, the Thriving Life of Divinity. And, this is well illustrated in John 15:
1"I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. 2Every branch of mine that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. 3Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. 4Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. 5I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.
*St. John 15.1-5 (ESV)
Surrendering, then, is the ongoing act, which removes one from the poverty of self-reliance to the gift of Eternal Life, now, in this moment. To surrender is like the branch acknowledging, in thought and experience, that its life is reliant on the Life it receives from its Source, or the Vine, and its good is reliant on the Good.
Therefore, your contemplative practice is a renunciation of even your own goodness, a goodness that will block your enjoyment of Grace. We set aside time daily to sit in this Calm, open in Loving Openness to the Christ within, as a practice of learning to release our resistances to Divine Providence and to learn the joys of abdicating all sense of personalized privilege. In giving all, then, we receive God.
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Evelyn Underhill, in her The Golden Sequence, speaks well of this “prayer of simple recollection”:
Yet, because this prayer is indeed a supernatural act, a movement of spirit towards Spirit, it is an act which the natural creature can never begin or complete in his own power. Though it seems to him to be by his own free choice and movement that he lifts up his soul towards God, it is in truth this all-penetrating God, who by His secret humble pressure stirs man to make this first movement of will and love. The apparent spontaneity, the exercise of limited freedom—genuinely ours, and most necessary to the soul’s health—are yet entirely dependent on this prevenient and overruling Presence, acting with power and gentleness in the soul’s ground. Progress in prayer is perhaps most safely measured in our increasing recognition of this action, the extent in which Spirit ‘prays in us' and we co-operate with it: till, in the apparently passive and yet most powerful prayer of the great contemplative, the consciousness of our own busy activity is entirely lost in the movement of Divine will, and the soul is well content to ‘let Another act in her.’
Underhill is cautious to remind us that Silent Prayer is a willed passivity. This willed passivity is an act of will to bring our will into union with the Divine Will, even if we do not know the contents of that Divine Will. That is, one does not have to know the full Will of God to surrender to God, and in surrendering to God, one offers oneself to be transformed to meet the particular callings to fulfill that over-all Will in one’s own life. Thus, the willed passivity is a joyful release of even one’s scurrying and busy need to discover the Will of God. Rather, in this passivity, one opens oneself to discover the Will of God, within God’s times and by means of God’s designs, and the consequent transformation involves pliability to the mysterious overtures of active and activating Love.
Quietly Responding
1) Contrast willed passivity in Silence to the willfulness of much prayer. What makes the passivity more than a mere silence or doing of nothing?
2) Do you practice a daily time of Silence in Prayer. If not, would you consider trying such a practice? If so, try beginning with one period of twenty minutes a day, either in the morning or at night. Contact this writer at the email below for further directions in Silent Prayer.
3) The Gospel speaks of our union with Christ as vine and branches. What are some other metaphors apt for referring to our oneness with Divine Love?
Brian Kenneth Wilcox July 24, 2009
briankwilcox@yahoo.com
Facebook: Brian Kenneth Wilcox
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*OneLife Ministries is a ministry of Brian Kenneth Wilcox, SW Florida. Brian lives a vowed life and with his two dogs, Bandit Ty and St. Francis, with friends and under a vow of simplicity. Brian is an ecumenical-interspiritual leader, who chooses not to identify with any group, and renounces all titles of sacredness that some would apply to him, but seeks to be open to how Christ manifests in the diversity of Christian denominations and varied religious-spiritual traditions. He affirms that all spiritual paths lead ultimately back to Jesus Christ. He is Senior Chaplain for the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office, Punta Gorda, FL.
*Brian welcomes responses to his writings or submission of prayer requests at briankwilcox@yahoo.com . Also, Brian is on Facebook: search Brian Kenneth Wilcox.
*Contact the above email to book Brian for preaching, Spiritual Direction, retreats, workshops, animal blessing services, house blessings, or other spiritual requests. You can order his book An Ache for Union from major booksellers.
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