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© 2002 Brian C. Taylor, Cowley Publications. All rights reserved. Excerpts may not be copied or distributed in any form.
Available June 2002 from St. Michael's Parish Office or though the publisher at www.cowley.org.
Introduction:
For some, the term contemplative prayer may be intimidating. Perhaps when we think of contemplation, we envision pious, holy mystics who are lost in rapture. While a few such saints have always existed (and many of them have been contemplative), there are also other ways of being contemplative that are far more ordinary. Silent prayer that has no other purpose than to be present to God is also contemplative.
I assume that because you hold this book in your hands, you are attracted to this way of being with God. I do not assume that you are experienced in it. Nevertheless, if you are, my hope is that you will benefit from what I have to say about my experience with contemplative prayer. I share with you a particular approach which I have learned over years of practice. I suggest that you try it long enough to get to know in your own experience what I am talking about, instead of reading it simply out of curiosity.
And so we begin with instruction and discussion about the doing of silent prayer. Before we talk about what it means or where it leads, it is best to just pray, and see for ourselves what happens. The first chapter in this section presents a practical instruction and orientation to the kind of contemplative prayer with which I work. The second chapter goes into more depth about how we can pray contemplatively with our whole being, and the third suggests ways of praying contemplatively in Christ.
Introduction:
A regular practice of contemplative prayer is challenging for anyone who undertakes it. We sometimes get bored with it, find ourselves lacking stimulation and direction, and at times we even lose our way. To move as pilgrims towards an agenda-free, open-hearted encounter with the living God is a potentially overwhelming thing. It is a journey into a sacred mystery, beyond the limitations of our little worldview, beyond even our capacity to comprehend.
This is why we must put our private practice of contemplative prayer within the larger context of the church's life. The contemplative needs the church's saints, sacraments, community, spiritual directors, traditional disciplines, scripture, theology, and other seekers. We need experienced guides, companions, maps, signposts, and food for the journey.
The chapters that follow in this section explore the many ways in which the rich tradition and resources of the church can support a private practice of contemplative prayer. For me, this support has been critical for the long haul, and has removed from my shoulders the burden of continually renewing and maintaining something I cannot, on my own. This context has also proved to be a source of great joy and discovery, the end of which I will never reach in this lifetime.
Introduction:
For the Christian, the purpose of faith and prayer is the transformation of our lives, so that they resemble the quality of being that Jesus Christ shared with us. He called this quality the kingdom of God, and promised that we could come to know it, in some measure, in our lifetime.
As we give ourselves to God through a practice of regular contemplative prayer, and as we live out this life of prayer within the context and support of the church, transformation by the grace of God takes place. We were created by God with great potential, and fulfillment of this potential is possible in Christ. "Be perfect [whole, complete] as your heavenly Father is perfect," Jesus said (Matthew 5:48). Just before he died, he declared to his disciples "I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete" (John 15:11). Contemplative prayer is one way of moving, by grace, into this fulfillment.
However, the journey of transformation only begins in earnest when we move beyond the initial delight of discovery, into the darkness of our hearts. We must encounter our inner demons and falsity, walk through suffering and the way of the cross, and detach from all that keeps us captive. The chapters that follow address the contemplative movement into this darkness, by which God brings us into the light of resurrection.
Most who seriously pursue a spiritual path eventually learn that the journey they have undertaken must encompass all of their life. Over time, nothing is left out. We must bring into our faith the relationships we live with, our work, the world we inhabit, our beliefs about life, our heart-felt longing for God, our emotions and personal struggles, our physical health, and everything else. When any one of these dimensions of our life suffers, our whole being is affected. Spirituality cannot be cordoned off as one discreet dimension, having only to do with the "soul," as if our lives were like a popular magazine, with a spirituality section distinct from those that have to do with politics, economy, health, and human interest.
One common and useful way of seeing the holistic nature of our life in God is to invoke the familiar balance of body, mind, and spirit. Our physicality, our mental-emotional states and our spirituality are inseparable, completely intertwined. Jesus himself recognized this when reminded us of the first commandment, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength (Mark 12:30). We must learn to love the Lord in ways that employ all our God-given capacities: emotion, intellect, will, activity, and soul. In the most influential spiritual tradition of the Christian West, monasticism, this holistic approach to life in God includes the practices of prayer, study and work (in another book, I explore these traditional Benedictine disciplines).
But the holistic claim of God on our life not only has to do with these large dimensions of our being and activity. Wholeness must also extend into the way we pray, too. Every historic religion tradition of prayer and meditation has methods of doing this. Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Christians all have ways of praying that include body (bowing, incense, chanting, sitting, and breathing). All include the mind (study and reflection, watching the mind). All involve the heart (devotion, opening the heart, surrender, and letting-go into God).
In this chapter I would like to go deeper, beyond the rudimentary instructions of the first chapter, into a holistic way of praying contemplatively. I offer this 3-dimensional model in order to not only present the wholeness of prayer, but also to address the differing needs of a diversity of people. At varying times, each of us might be better served by an approach to prayer that emphasizes either the heart, the soul, the mind, or our strength. In any given period of prayer, it is also possible to flow from one of these dimensions to the next.
One way of seeing how we can pray with heart, soul, mind, and strength is through the traditional model of the individual's journey of faith that has been taught throughout Christendom, East and West, especially in the middle ages. This model sees the journey as including purification, illumination, and union with God. Purification can be seen as the approach to God that includes strength, the body, effort, and the will. Illumination involves the mind, and union the heart.
Many of the medieval authors on the subject tended to see this schema as a kind of ladder, suggesting that the rank beginner must first focus solely on purification: repentance, change of behavior, the use of the will and determination in order to turn to a more holy life. For these authors, purification is the process of moral conversion, which starts when one stops sinful behaviors and begins pious ones. The intermediate, having mastered moral purification, then moves on to illumination: being guided by the Spirit into a greater understanding of the self and God. Illumination is the process of study and reflection whereby one develops faith and learns about what the Bible and the Church's theology teaches. The advanced few then climb to the heights of contemplative union, leaving behind all else. Union is seen as the state of being completely under the influence of God's grace, whereby all separation between human and divine is overcome, and one receives the inflow of God's joy, peace, and other fruits of the Spirit.
There is some truth to this ladder-like view. It is hard to grow in our understanding of the faith if we haven't yet put behind us behavior that prevents such understanding. It is hard to find union with God unless we've done some conversion of life and also examined our faith. However, the medieval ladder approach as such is more hierarchical, systematized and linear than the teaching of earlier writers who proposed it in the first place.
More ancient Christian mystics understood that every Christian has to continually employ the will and effort, since the process of spiritual purification goes on through all of life; every Christian must always seek spiritual illumination through understanding and learning; and every Christian has access to conscious union with God, at least from time to time, no matter how "rudimentary" or "advanced" we are spiritually. They are really just three overlapping dimensions of our relationship with God, rather than three distinct stages we must pass through. While one of these practices may need to be more dominant in our lives at times than others, we will always need to attend to all three. As Thomas Merton said about the accessibility of union to all who seek it:
Any moment you can break through into the underlying unity which is God's gift in Christ.
And so if we look at purification, illumination, and union in this way, we can see that this model proposes not only a ladder of perfection, but also a way of entering into relationship with God through various means, each of which is called for at various times.
Traditionally, in this three-fold schema, purification has usually addressed that part of our faith life that has to do with moral behavior, the avoidance of sin and the practice of virtue. Illumination has had to do with study and learning, and union with contemplative prayer. However, for the purposes of this chapter, which concerns itself with the development of a practice of contemplative prayer, I will confine my discussion of these three dimensions to the ways in which they relate specifically to contemplative prayer.
Purification can be practiced in contemplative prayer through our will and effort.. To begin with, we must get up in the morning, we must try, we must work at developing a habit of contemplative prayer. We must also bring awareness through our body in a concentrated way, sitting still, keeping our consciousness fixed on our breath, our senses, on a word or phrase. By employing our will, we bring attention to our practice. The Buddhist training in mindfulness is a good example of this part of prayer. Our lives become more purified through this attentive effort in prayer.
Illumination comes as we learn about ourselves in the silence of contemplation. We watch our mind and emotions at work in the form of involuntary thought and emotional activity (commonly called "distractions"). By doing so we come to understand more about ourselves as we really are; we grow in self-awareness. Prayer developed by Ignatius of Loyola and his religious order, the Jesuits, is an example of this kind of prayer, which examines both the conscience and what comes up in the imagination. Our lives become more illumined through this process of prayerful self-awareness.
Union is the underlying reality of our life in God, of which we seek to be conscious in contemplative prayer. Specific practices for this include surrender, not being effortful or self-aware, letting go of all thought, and sitting in silent, loving devotion to the One who is all in all. We open the heart to that which already is: our union with God. Centering Prayer focuses on this particular dimension of contemplation. We see our unity with God more and more, through this prayer of opening and surrender.
Here, then, is the way in which I'll be approaching a holistic contemplative practice. Loving God with our strength includes effort and will, physical dedication, attention, and concentration, and this leads to a kind of purification, simplification, and clarification of our life. Loving God with our mind and heart includes watching involuntary thought and emotions in the silence, coming to illumination through self-awareness. Loving God with our soul includes opening the heart and surrender, which leads to an experience of our union with the divine.
My own orientation to contemplative prayer is through the Eastern Christian prayer of the heart. This kind of prayer is also known through one of its forms, the Jesus Prayer, or by the Greek word for "stillness," hesychasm. While its name "prayer of the heart" seems to emphasize only the third dimension of prayer (union) that has to do with surrender and opening the heart, it actually encompasses concentration (purification) and self-awareness (illumination) as well.
I will say much more about this in the next chapter, but for now it might be helpful to know that in this most ancient and continuous of Christian contemplative traditions, all three dimensions I address here come together: the will, the mind, and the heart (attention, awareness, and opening to God). It is for this reason that many of my examples and quotations come from this tradition. But in using these examples, I do not mean to imply that this holism is absent from other Christian contemplative paths. The same patterns can be seen throughout the wide diversity of our rich history of spirituality and mysticism. It is just that for me, the clarity of this three-fold inter-relationship is more evident in the prayer of the heart.
Again, it may be that right now, one of these three dimensions of prayer will speak to you more than the other two. It may be that your personality is generally more oriented to one than the other. But as every religious tradition teaches, we are called to broaden our practice of prayer and meditation so that it utilizes, eventually, our whole being: the will, the mind, and the heart. We can do this through praying with concentration, self-awareness, and opening to God. By the grace of God, we are lead through these means to greater purification, illumination, and union.
The first section of this book is concerned with the development of a practice of contemplative prayer. This is primary, for we can only look at contemplation from the inside out, by becoming people of prayer. And as Thomas Merton said, "if you want a life of prayer, the way to get to it is by praying."
Now it is time to consider the essential context for that life of prayer, which is, for the Christian, in one form or another, the Church and her tradition that is embodied in worship, teaching, community, and service. I believe this context is essential for all Christians who seek spiritual growth and maturity for several reasons. The first is that community is something basic to the very nature of Christianity. Secondly, left on one's own, it is all too possible to develop spiritually in unhealthy and unbalanced ways. Finally, without the broader context of the faith tradition and its community, we will eventually run up against our own personal limitations and stop growing. The Church provides a wisdom, challenge, depth, diversity, support, corrective, historical continuity, and ritual life that simply cannot be found on one's own.
At the outset, however, let me be clear about what I mean by Christian community. The modern American parish form is not the only kind of Christian community. In fact, it is entirely possible that whole segments of our population are never likely to feel drawn to parish life because of the parish's tendency to take on cultural qualities that have nothing to do with the faith: dressing up, sitting quietly in rows, listening to and singing particular kinds of music, forming committees, creating and fulfilling ambitious goals, etc. So when I say that Christian community and tradition in some form is essential to every Christian, I recognize that not everyone is going to benefit from the parish as it tends to be in our culture.
There are other models of Christian community where the tradition is celebrated and handed down, which operate under slightly different cultural norms: monasteries, spirituality centers, seminaries, street ministries...far too few, really. But until additional alternatives begin to be more common, the parish as we know it in our culture is the most likely place to find Christian community and its traditions, and quite often, it is a good place to do so.
For a contemplative in particular, remaining grounded in the Church and her tradition may present particular difficulties. We can be introverted, individualistic, wary of external forms of religion, and rooted in our own personal experience. The parish, by its very nature, is more extroverted, institutional, and based upon objective and external forms of authority and teaching.
I can't count the number of times I've been told by someone that they're "into spirituality, not organized religion." I'm certainly glad that our generation has seized the importance of a personal, meaningful appropriation of faith, I fully understand the serious failings of our institutional Church, and I also know how much more deeply some experience God when they are alone in a mountain meadow than when they're in Church.
But I am also afraid that we are left with a lot of people who lack the kind of depth, continuity, balance, commitment, and wisdom that comes from an immersion in a faith community and its tradition. Any form of spirituality, if it has any depth, is rooted in and carried forward through history by "organized religion" and its rituals, stories, teachings, and community, even its hierarchy, buildings, and budgets. The institution is what holds together and passes on the spiritual experiences of great numbers of people over a long period of time (as the Church has done for the contemplative tradition).
The Church offers to the spiritual seeker, to the contemplative, a community of other seekers, who will offer both support and challenge. She offers deeply symbolic, historically grounded rites that express humankind's deepest longings and truths. There are opportunities to serve those in need, time-tested disciplines of spiritual practice, sacred texts and theological and moral guidance. The Church is certainly not perfect. But even her imperfection is of benefit to the spiritual seeker, who must find ways of being spiritual in an imperfect world, and who must also encounter his or her own limitations as they bump up against those of others.
A documentary film called "Monastery" was done many years ago on the Trappist community in Spencer, Massachusetts. One young monk made a comment in an interview that has remained with me every since I saw it. He said that the monastery "is just like everyday life in the world; the only difference is that we put a frame around it." I believe that the same thing could be said of the Church in general.
In the local, regional, and worldwide Church we gather all sorts of people together to engage in all the normal sorts of human activities that we do elsewhere: administration, education, fundraising, social service, community-building, and personal relationships. The only difference is, we put a frame around all of this life. The frame is Jesus Christ and what he called the kingdom of God: love, forgiveness, justice, and worship of our Creator. This is an enormous difference, for it tells us that as the Church we are invited to live our everyday life together in a certain way. Agreeing to this ground rule, we can then set about doing administration, relationships, education, and service to others with a very different kind of orientation and goal.
As such our Church life together becomes a microcosm of everyday life, focused in a particular kind of way so that it will serve as a training ground for the rest of life. St. Benedict called the monastery "a school for the Lord's service." For the seeker, life in the Church becomes a training school that prepares one for the rest of life.
How can a contemplative, in particular, learn in this school? How we expand our practice of contemplation so that it is not limited to formal times of prayer, but includes our life in the Church? In the pages that follow, I hope to offer some responses to these questions.
Becoming Christ includes an embrace of the cross. Jesus' path must become ours, and his path includes the cross. After all, Jesus spoke frequently of his own suffering and death which would come as an essential part of his journey. When Peter tried to deny this fact, Jesus rebuked him, even calling this denial demonic: "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things"(Mark 8:33). Jesus then extended his cross into the lives of his followers: "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross."Just after he said this, he was transfigured in glory on the mountain top, in the presence of Peter and James and John. In this series of sayings and story, glory is related somehow to suffering, and Jesus will not let others deny this reality. Not only that, he teaches them that their own spiritual transfiguration will somehow involve suffering.
In our day there is a kind of popular spirituality that denies the cross, that runs away from darkness and difficulty instead of embracing it as part of our journey into holiness. This spiritual positivism claims that we can experience joy and enlightenment by getting rid of anything "negative," and by focusing on the "positive." While endemic to new age spiritualities, spiritual positivism is not limited to them. A tendency in this direction is found in the church as well. This is why we had to move the liturgical celebration of Good Friday (with its very sobering reading of the Passion Narrative) to Palm Sunday: in order to "catch" the worshipers on Sunday who would otherwise avoid Good Friday, thus skipping directly from the Hosanna! of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem to the Alleluia! of the resurrection.
For some, there is a benefit to the practice of positive thinking, and it is certainly human to try to avoid suffering. But I'm afraid that Jesus would respond to spiritual positivism that denies the cross by saying that its followers have set their minds not on divine things, but on human things. For the path that leads to God leads through the cross, at some point.
A practice of contemplative prayer brings us to the cross. Certainly life will do the same, but in contemplative prayer we are given a way of working with the cross. The difficulties of our life will arise in silence with God, and God will not magically fix or take them away. We must learn patience and humility, sitting through our pain with an open heart. We must learn to just be present, with our difficulty, to God. Instead of closing down around it, we open it up in love and adoration, in complete trust and vulnerability. By doing so, our pain is joined to God, and it is redeemed. We are transformed. Our suffering is no longer just "ours," a private possession: it is part of the pain of the world, part of the cross. Gazing at the cross, our private suffering is lifted up into Christ, who shares it and thus helps us transcend our prison of pain. But even more than that, Christ redeems our suffering, moving us into resurrection, so that we are made new people in him.
The early contemplative fathers of our tradition developed this spacious way of seeing all without judgment, accepting whatever came in life as part of the tapestry of existence. They would intentionally put themselves in situations where they knew that their attachments would be challenged, and where they would learn to take on the wider perspective of life in God.. Such radical practices loosen the grip that is clenched around the way we want life to be, and allow for a movement into a greater freedom of spirit.
This spacious, freedom of spirit was called, in the desert tradition, apatheia. Despite this Greek word's obvious connection with the word apathy, contemplative apatheia is anything but apathetic. While some may believe in the stereotype of the contemplative as a self-absorbed, uncaring and unfeeling person removed from the passions of life (and some contemplatives may fit this description), it is a false stereotype. Contemplative detachment, true apatheia, leads to a spacious view of life as God sees it, which leads to freedom and love. For the contemplative, detachment is freedom from attachments, not a distancing from people and from life. Detachment is liberty from the prison of all that enslaves us and keeps us from engaging in life with joy, peace, clarity, and love.
All of us struggle with attachments: how we think we're supposed to be, look or feel; possessions; being liked; being a "winner" or even a "loser;" having a certain lifestyle; particular beliefs about others; and even the smallest, most insignificant details working out the way we want them to (like getting through an intersection before the light turns red). As long as we live, we will always, to some degree, be attached, at least from time to time. Such is the human condition. Detachment is the process of de-attaching. It is not the process of becoming an unfeeling automaton; it is de-attaching from the things that enslave us. As a contemporary commentator on the desert fathers noted:
Apatheia destroys the attachment to "passions," but these refer not to the God-given emotions...but rather to sinful, inner attachments to selfishness, rooted by sin in the natural passions. The sign of having attained this state of integration on the body, soul, and spirit levels is when the Christian can occupy his or her mind and heart with the continual presence of God.
This integration, this liberty of spirit is apatheia, which frees us from everything that stands in the way of our enjoyment of life, of God, and of others. The path to this detachment is, I believe, feeling and observing our true attachments in the moment (especially in silent prayer), then learning how to dis-identify with whatever has captured us, and moving into a place of seeing our attachments within the context of whole picture.
This spacious, big picture, which includes our human attachments but also the beauty and truth of life within and around them, is the divine perspective, a gift of the Spirit. It is seeing with God's eyes. This spacious perspective gives us the ability to be free and present to God in ways that are impossible when we are caught up in our attachments instead. Spacious detachment, apatheia, moves us out of our illusions and brings us back to reality, back to our true selves. Two contemplative fathers put it this way:
When the intellect is no longer dissipated among external things or dispersed across the world through the senses, it returns to itself; and by means of itself it ascends to the thought of God.
—Basil the Great
The one who has apatheia has returned to himself, has entered into the treasure house that is within. - Isaac the Syrian
Returning to ourselves, we are able to be the person that we actually are in Christ. We are able, at least at times, to experience freedom from sin, suffering, and all the things in life that temporarily possess us.
End Document — St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church