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.

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.