Prayer of Docility

Holy Indifference in Contemplation

Dec 16, 2013

Saying For Today: Here, Love is not an extension of Presence, but Love is Presence Itself, and Presence is Love Itself.

Arem, a vowed Contemplative of Greenbough House of Prayer, offers an interspiritual work focusing on cultivating the Heart of Compassion. He integrates wisdom from the major spiritual Paths. To contact Arem, see the email address at the conclusion of this presentation. May you always know you are blessed!

Protestant Christians in Germany, Switzerland, and England, and Methodists in America, wrote of the “holy indifference” descriptive of the surrendering in Silent Prayer ~ or, Contemplative 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.

Active Prayer, where all persons of spiritual devotion are first trained, eventually leads into Passive Prayer. This may occur when the one praying feels that Active Prayer has opened the heart to a longing crying out to be satisfied beyond thought and word, beyond the action of the self. This is Love Itself seeking Itself.

Here the person (as in, personality) rests quiet and inactive, open to be drawn into the True Self of all. This True Self is not a personal, or individual, self, but the One. This is the Presence imbuing all life forms. Traditions speak of this differently, and they differ on whether some sense of otherness from the Divine remains. Here, however, words fail and theory is dissolved in the Light of Love before any thought or emotion.

The Feeling here is untouched by personality, and it may feel impersonal, though very real ~ indeed, profoundly Real, for truly neither personal nor impersonal. Here Love is most loving, for Love Itself is channeled through the person as self, rather than the person as self claiming reception of or acquisition of Love. Here, Love is not an extension of Presence, but Love is Presence Itself, and Presence is Love Itself.

Also, the idea of God may arise in the spaciousness of the Passive Openness; however, this arising is with the spontaneous knowing that this is an idea only reflective of the Absolute beyond all said of or thought of God or gods, Goddess or goddesses. Therefore, to most love God and others is to see them, in the Passive Receptivity, as other than one has before known them ~ indeed, to know them as Unknowable, to know them as none other than Oneself in a bliss and grace preconceptual and undefined, even by the word Mystery.