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.

Let God kiss you

Here's a revolutionary spiritual practice that can bring you into the present and can change your experience of this moment:

With only a very few exceptions, welcome whatever you face in this present moment as if you'd asked God for it specifically.

You spend a lot of time dwelling on what you want instead of what is. You waste a lot of good energy fighting your way through this present moment, because it's not what you thought you'd signed up for or what you think God should have given you. You dream of a better job, a better body, a better friend or spouse or child or boss. And you're in essence praying for deliverance from this moment. But what if you're praying against the present God's given you? What difference would it make today, right now, if you yielded and embraced this moment---even its pain---as a gift from God?

Of course there must be exceptions. No one should accept as gift the cruel things humans can do to each other. Those are more rare than you may think. While you may suffered great cruelty at a moment the past, you're not facing it at this very moment. The pain was real, but right now it's a pain that can only live in you with the permission of your memory. Let it go. It's hurt you too long.

Come into this moment.

Be.

Here. Now.

Breathe.

Let God kiss you.

Toward inner and outer peace

My soul is buffeted, even tormented and mauled by the thought-beasts that try to drag me into the spaces and places outside of me. These spaces are increasingly crowded by obligations and demands and worries---full of thoughts that want to make me believe I'm always behind, never good enough, always living from a deficit. Unless I make space between the me-who-I-really-am and the mind-made-me, the false self constructed by these thoughts, I'll never live well. The thought-beasts will be always nipping at my heels.

This is no way to live.

Today, I'll pass through the narrow gate of my heart. Throughout the day, I'll pause and breathe my prayers again and again, drawing these maverick thoughts down into my heart. They'll meet Christ there.

Perhaps a few will be still, be silent . . . simply be . . . along with the rest of me.

And those that won't? Well, I'll refuse to follow them. I'll let them go, muttering as they march stubbornly onward.

from my journals, September 25, 2007