A window on an active person deep in prayer

Here's a helpful description of an active person at prayer. It's from George Eliot's Adam Bede. Dinah's a Methodist minister. She's getting ready to leave the community where she's cared for people for quite awhile. Eliot shows her sitting by her bedroom window thinking of the people she's loved through good times and bad.

"The pressure of this thought soon became too strong for her to enjoy the unresponding stillness of the moonlit fields. She closed her eyes, that she might feel more intensely the presence of a Love and Sympathy deeper and more tender than was breathed from the earth and sky. That was Dinah's mode of praying in solitude. Simple to close her eyes, and to feel herself enclosed by the Divine Presence; then gradually her fears, yearning anxieties for others, melted away like ice-crystals in a warm ocean" (quoted in Martin Laird's, Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation, p. 31).

I'm guessing a number of you pray this way and know this experience. There are others who have tasted once or twice, but don't think it's real prayer. It is real prayer---the deepest, highest kind.

Do some "earthy good"

Active people often have serious criticisms of the word "contemplative." It sounds monkish, escapist, elitist. A friend recently said, "Aren't contemplatives so heavenly minded, they're no earthly good. Mine is an active life. Jesus would never have entered a monastery." If that's what the contemplative life is then she's right, let's have nothing to do with it. But it's not. That's a caricature, not the real thing.

The contemplative life is the path of true compassion, and therefore the way of real, redemptive action in the world (Dag Hammarskjold is among the best, modern and public examples; I've written of him here).

"Contemplation" and "contemporary" come from the same Latin roots: "con" meaning "with," and "tempus," or "time."

So, "contemplative" simply means being truly "contemporary"--that is, fully here, now, immersed in the present. That can't, by definite or practice, be escapist. Contemplatives, then make the best engineers and airline pilots, surgeons and chefs, mothers and teachers. Contemplative living is noble living.

Jesus did not cloister himself away in a monastery. But that that doesn't mean he wouldn't have gone there periodically. Was not his forty days in the wilderness a monastic retreat? And St. Paul's years also, when he was hidden away in Arabia (Galatians 1.17)?

The monastery's prepared many of those who's worldly actions have matter most in our world.

Contemplation is an art. Learn it and you'll do some "earthly good."

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.

Begin with a simple, affective, preparatory prayer

In the previous post, I wrote that Richard Methley urged us to begin the brief episodes of simple prayer scattered throughout the day "with a simple, affective, preparatory prayer." Here's one of my little poem-prayers I offer when I begin my morning prayers. It recognizes the wild dogs that bite and nip at my heals---the distractions that keep me unfocused and scattered. And it summons me to the one thing that really matters.

We never know what hounds us so, until the desert kills the dogs. Then naked and alone we cross the narrow gate, and find the kingdom known as God's.

Arrived, we owe no debt to yesterday, No anxious glance tomorrow's way. The present gives us all we need, for here and now our hearts are freed to love, and from Your river stoop and feed.

Toward a simple rhythm of daily prayer

Okay, so here's a lesson from the 14th century to the 21st. Maybe you'd prefer something a bit more modern, up-to-date. I assure you there's nothing more up-to-date for the living of these days than some instruction from a century a lot like our own---instruction that's been treasured now for some seven centuries. Richard Methley, a teacher of the life of prayer in our turbulent world, describes his own practice of daily prayer (this comes from James Walsh's introduction to the Cloud of Unknowing, pages 17-18).

Methley instructed those who seek God to go to their accustomed place of prayer, concentrate the whole attention on God, hide from every creature, close the eyes, and begin with a simple, affective, preparatory prayer (like the Jesus Prayer).

His own habit was to get away from the distractions of daily life for three brief episodes---at dawn, noon, and just before sleep---for up to 15 minutes. Just a brief and simple dip into the Holy. He practiced a longer season after supper---a half hour.

My own practice has settled into a similar rhythm. Most people, with a little renovation of their lives can improvise on this instruction. Lots of folks do similar things with other occupations---reading the paper, smoking breaks, watching TV, a Starbucks run.

You may tell yourself you have no real time to pray. Frankly, you'd be surprised at how much time you actually do have. But you'll have to put a little muscle behind shifting things around.

The key is not to bite off more than you can chew as you're making the renovations.  A little time here and there goes a long, long way.