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Contemplative Prayer entails simplification. Contemplative Prayer is openness to the living Principle within, a being with Being in solitude and silence. The simplification is a withdrawal from the busyness and wordiness that characterize our society and, sadly, many of our churches.
In contemplation we learn a love that does not rely on acts or words. In contemplation we learn a love that issues forth in effectual words and acts, arising from a will purged by making the sense of a separate self, the ego, fast from the constant gorging on action and speech. When most persons speak of fasting, they mean some form of reduction or elimination of food intake for a specific time. Still, the better fast for most of us would be a fast from words and action. For how can we learn to speak rightly, if we do not practice silence rightly? How shall we learn to act rightly without learning to be still rightly?
Without this learning how to be silent and still, we will find ourselves reacting to other persons’ words and actions, and often in ways that are not helpful, even as we esteem ourselves being helpful in our words and actions. The separate self-sense is glad to feel itself righteously helpful by prodding where we have no business and trying to assist where we need to refrain from assistance for the good of another person.
Love does not place priority on responding to another person’s sense of need, for that sense of need can arise from the separate self-sense. Therefore, the wisdom of contemplation addresses the deep, subtle ways in which we use religion and our felt-need to be good as means through which we do what we want and in doing so claim we are being righteous thereby.
But, how do we learn this intentional practice of contemplation? Thomas Merton wrote, “In meditation, we should not look for a ‘method’ or a ‘system,’ but cultivate an ‘attitude,’ an ‘outlook’ … . (Contemplative Prayer) What is the “outlook,” according to Merton? The “outlook” is “faith, openness, attention, reverence, expectation, supplication, trust, joy.”
Christian contemplation is, then, not simply a passive and slothful recess from speech and action. This means of grace is a graceful passivity, while one rests in silence and stillness, yet, the whole environment of the practice is one imbued with the very qualities Merton mentions. Therefore, the false accusation of quietism and sloth directed against contemplation is a misunderstanding of the practice, for this passivity is encapsulated within the very virtues that mark the Christian as imbued with trust and love. Indeed, how can I claim to be a man of love, if I cannot be still to receive love? And, how can I profess to trust God, if I am so busy that I give no evidence that I am not in control, not God myself?
My experience bears witness to the role of love in meditation and contemplation. Merton remarks that all the qualities he mentions “finally permeate our being with love.”
Therefore, contemplation provides the context of openness for the virtues of the Christian life to be taken up into what the writer of the Book of James called the “royal law”: 8You will do all right, if you obey the most important law [lit. royal law] in the Scriptures. It is the law that commands us to love others as much as we love ourselves. 9But if you treat some people better than others, you have done wrong, and the Scriptures teach that you have sinned. (James 2, CEV)
Consequently, through contemplation one grows more to fulfill this “royal law” of love, not because she is supposed to love, but because she becomes more infused with love. Finally, she who had to rely principally on external standards, even religious ones, like custom, Scripture, and commandments, to decide right behavior, begins to speak and act spontaneously from a higher order Reality, that of Love. Therefore, she grows less to need the encouragement and guidance of the external, for she is being transformed into the love of Love. Then, the externals provides a motive, but the externals, even the external of religion, are not subjected to the inner, royal law of love, which arises from being wedded to the will of Love.
The contemplative grows more into the awareness of the adequacy of love and, likewise, how the human tendency to treat love like another talent among others does not so much increase love as foster a love that is less than Love. So, methods are taught to beginners in contemplative practice. However, over time the Spirit weans her off the methods, teaching her that the naked awareness and emptied heart is a fair way of being with the Beloved. Then, love is spontaneous, even in the absence of the affections often identified with love at lesser stages of spiritual emergence, where we must have a defined range of felt-emotions to believe that we are loving and being loved, as well.
Yes, contemplation is a counter-cultural and counter-church practice. How? Culture and church often define love by actions, words, and feelings. However, the contemplative learns a love, or loving, which is not defined principally by actions, words, and feelings. Rather, this love defines actions, words, and feelings. This love, while manifesting in many ways, is defined by none of them.
Spiritual Exercises
1. Define contemplative prayer? Contrast contemplative prayer with other forms of prayer?
2. In what sense is contemplation a practice of fasting?
3. Why are most persons afraid of silence? Stillness?
4. How might refraining from helping someone be an act of love?
5. How might we treat love like another talent? What is the love prior to learning to love?
6. Which statement do you agree with?
a. Love is a feeling.
b. Love is the source of loving feelings.
7. What do you think Merton means in the following statement?
“We know him in ‘unknowing.’”
8. Do you believe all Christians are to practice contemplative prayer? Why? Why not?
9. Do you practice contemplative prayer? Why? Why not?
10. How does contemplation evidence trust in God’s Word and Action?
Prayer
Above all fasting, Lord, teach me to guard my mouth from speaking unwisely and speaking too often, even from long prayers and many words of wise counsel, and teach me to refrain from the frazzled activity that I excuse by claiming that my refusal to rest with you is because I cannot be still or because others need me so much. Teach me to listen more than speak and to act with an action tempered by the peace and balance that arises from stillness.
Brian K. Wilcox
OneLife Ministries is a pastoral outreach and nurture ministry of the First United Methodist Church, Fort Meade, FL. For Spiritual Direction, Pastoral Counseling, spiritual formation workshops, Christian meditation retreats, or more information about OneLife, write Rev. Dr. Brian K. Wilcox at briankwilcox@comcast.net.
Brian's book of mystical love poetry, An Ache for Union, can be ordered through major bookdealers.
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