Be gentle with each person

Here's a simple practice that will change the way you interact with others, and how you treat yourself.

"Be gentle with each person you meet, for each of them is actually fighting a great battle."  Philo of Alexandria, 20 BCE---50 CE

It is a deeply spiritual practice, and contemplative---that is, it rises from the unceasing, interior prayer you are practicing.

Gentleness arises from the compassion God is birthing in you as you pray.  Gentleness arises from your deep awareness of your own interior battle to be human and holy.  Practice this and you will not only change the little part of the world you inhabit, but you will change yourself, for you too are fighting a great battle.

The essential practice of everyone who desires God

This post is a continuation from yesterday: Contemplation is an interior habit. I draw my mind down into my heart, returning throughout the day over and over again to the Center where Christ dwells---no matter what occupies me exteriorly.

It's a habit that becomes virtue.  And virtue, in turn, becomes instinct---an unceasing recollecting of my being into the presence of the Beloved. This is the essential practice of every Christian, every person who desires God. It is the essence and goal of prayer.

But it doesn't come easily. It requires specific training. Without instruction and practice we live lives alienated from this Center. Jesus said "enter through the narrow gate, walk the hard road."

But many, oblivious, walk an easier path.  They don't even know there's nothing along that way worthy of their love.

Contemplation is true awareness of life as it is

This post is a continuation from yesterday: The idealization had to die for me to find the true path of contemplative living.

Contemplation is not hiding from the world. It's the deepest form of immersion, or better, communion---a true awareness of life as it is, not as it would be, should be, or could be (unhelpful idealizations, fictions, and illusions that keep me outside of and distant from this present moment).

Contemplation is living radically, here, now. Watching the face before me. Listening to her voice. Attending to beauty or pain behind those eyes. Being present in a way that really matters.

Reawakened, I worked too hard

This post is a continuation from yesterday: But even reawakened and hungry for the spiritual Reality that comes through contemplative living, my drive was still too much alive. Desperate for God, I drove my inner life, working too hard at it, always seeking but never finding.

Contemplation was still captive to an idealization.

I still saw in my mind a monk robed and silent and lost in the bliss divine Love. I longed to taste the bliss, but I was not a monk. I was busy, active, involved in the wide and wonderful and sometimes frightful world.

How could I find the way?

When I first heard of contemplation

When I first heard of contemplation, I had in mind some idealization---a picture of a mountain-top mystic enrapt by the Divine Mystery. I wanted something of that experience but the vision was not only unreachable, much of it was undesirable. I was young then, active, goal driven, wanting to squeeze the best out of life, make something of myself. To me, the contemplative life was unrealistic.

Only later, at mid-life, when many of us face a major re-evaluation of the life we're living, did I---forced by great necessity---reawaken to the gifts of contemplation for this active life.