Contemplative Prayer An Introduction St. Luke s ~ San Lucas Episcopal Church 426 East Fourth Plain Boulevard, Vancouver, WA 98663 360-696-0181
How Our Group Will Work St. Luke s ~ San Lucas is now offering a group to cultivate the practice of contemplative prayer each Thursday from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm. Agenda: The group will begin each evening with a discussion of some facet of contemplative prayer in the varied forms of our rich heritage as Christians and from other traditions. Silence will follow in a 30 minute interval. A bell will signal the return to reflect on our experience. It is recommended that you wear comfortable clothing and perhaps bring a pillow to help find a comfortable position to remain in for 30 minutes. Sharing: The group will share leadership of the first part of the evening, the discussion or presentation on contemplation as prayer. An Introduction: The following pages serve as an introduction, in a most generic fashion, to Christian Contemplation. Many traditions of prayer, some new and some ancient, subsist under the heading of Christian Contemplation, and a renewed interest in the Christian stream of the great religions contemplative traditions has arisen in the latter decades of the century past. To An Experience: Contemplative Prayer is meant to be experience, hence the 30 minutes of the practice of silence in the center of each evening s schedule. You are welcome to join the group at any time to experience this form of prayer called union with God. Jaime Case+ 2
An Introduction to Contemplative Prayer Every human being has some experience of the divine, the numinous presence of God. Recognizing those moments is the work of religion. Religion asserts that such transcendence exists, that it is conscious, benevolent, and seeks out each human being. It (God) is Love. It is gentle, mysterious, tremendous, and endeavors to attract us into a relationship. When we first learn prayer, the model we have from scripture is the disciples request, Teach us to pray. The minimalist form of the prayer in the gospels is so bare that we say more words and add pieces from other places in scripture to fill out our idea of prayer, of elaboration. Yet the minimal nature of the prayer fits with the ideal of contemplation, where words, and all types of symbols, fail, and our spirit stretches out to meet the ineffable divine presence. Contemplation is a convenient name for the prayer after the words, or beyond anything symbolic. Our incarnate nature as beings with bodies, which the Creator declared good, means that we are reached, and reach out to God through material things. Material things, all of creation itself, are possible symbols of the great Love which tries to disclose itself to us. The Burning Bush is a great illustration: When God saw that [Moses] had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush. (Ex. 3:4a). What can capture our attention, God can use to speak to us, to communicate the divine Love for us. This conforms closely to the theology of a sacrament in our catechism: An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. 3
Contemplative prayer is the end and goal of all prayer. It receives the attempts of the divine to commune with us, as it communicates ourselves to the divine. Union, perichoreisis, being in the unmediated presence of God are concepts used to describe this form of prayer. Perichoreises, or interpenetration, or participation, is a way of describing the union of the Three Persons of the Trinity. To pray this way is meant to lead to such an intimacy with God. Contemplation is often induced by methods that help us to use our Right Brain, our intuition, to become open to the divine. The process is to arrive at the silence, where symbols fail, and the unmediated encounter with God becomes possible. The methods may range from the most incarnate, body oriented (Body Prayer, Hesychasm, dance, physical exhaustion) to the most abstract ( Reading Icons, Lectio divina, Centering Prayer, mental prayer, intellectual exhaustion). Each one of us may find one or method or another more suitable to the uniqueness as we have been created and called to be by God. This prayer group will try to let each member of the group chose a prayer or meditation to share with the group, as a way to enter the space to meet God. At the end of the evening reflection on what has transpired in the silence will take place. To sum up, the Catholic Catechism reads: What is contemplative prayer? St. Teresa answers: 'Contemplative prayer [oración mental] in my opinion is nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.' Contemplative prayer seeks him 'whom my soul loves'. It is Jesus, and in him, the Father. We seek him, because to desire him is always the beginning of love, and we seek him in that pure faith which causes us to be born of him and to live in him. In this inner prayer we can still meditate, but our attention is fixed on the Lord himself. 4
Stages of Contemplation In the beginning of a new discipline, many alien experiences and concepts assault the mind like a list of items which must be memorized. Like riding a bicycle, a child must learn to pedal, balance, lean, hold the handle bars, and brake. The list of things that a child must remember to do fades after some practice and repetition into a place of automatic or intuited discipline. Contemplation will also be a learning exercise, a discipline, which may, at first, seem to only contain frustration and failure. The model for the contemplative is the great Love we call God: patience, perseverance, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, and forbearance, that characterize the attention we give to the self. Starting over is the essence of the story of the Prodigal Son, returning, repenting, trying again, because God is always searching the road to find us on our way home. Letting go of frustration, anger, remorse, sorrow, even great gladness will take time and application, practice and repetition. Contemplation of the mundane sort, which we may find naturally taking place and connecting us with peace, comfort and wholeness, is called acquired contemplation. The silences in Sunday worship, the parent s gaze on a child, the journal entry, the enjoyment of music are acquired because of the habitual and incarnate root of the experience. We come to this experience through natural phenomenon. Many persons first experience contact with the numinous through accident, by the sudden and unexpected encounter that appears to raise the soul up while overwhelming the self with an intuition of the connectedness of all things. Artists of 5
all kinds find this moment palpable in the best of their creative endeavors, while many of us encounter it in birth, death, sunrise, sunset, and other daily events. This kind of experience is called infused contemplation, or mystical union. Our will, our volition, has very little to do with the event: Rather it appears that God alone acts to touch us deeply. This event is ecstatic. The stages of prayer beyond these first inklings are perhaps best left to be shared in an experiential manner in the group. Suffice it to say, we do distinguish between meditation, which is an activity of one s spirit by reading or otherwise and contemplation is the souls inward vision and heart s simple repose in God. Discipline Like the process of learning to ride a bicycle, many of the things we hear described make no sense until the bicycle is ridden. So the words we describe the process of prayer, of attaining contemplation, defy our best efforts to fit them into words. Ascedia, the discipline of the self, is mean to open us to the soul, or the spirit. Letting go of the noisy, demanding self is biblical in its precedents; Then Jesus told his disciples, If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. (Mt. 16:24) Paradoxically that denial, that death of the self, brings freedom for the true self to come forth: Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. (Mt. 10:38) In such a perilous attempt, to wrestle with the false self, one takes the teaching of the mystics and tries them on, like 6
attempting different kinds of monocycles, bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles, reclining tricycles, and such, with great care, reassuring the Nous, the heart that its intuitions and feelings are to be honored and listened to. Setting a discipline, a rule of life, a benevolent and healthy care of the soul each one of us has stewardship over, is a gentle discipline, motivated by love. The Quaker idea of the light within a person that relates intuitively to the Light of the World reassures us of the capacity of the caring, loving soul to find its way to the divine. There are warnings along the way, and we know from our lives, there are forms of spirituality that are destructive of life, best described as demonic. Heeding the warnings of the mystics can help, even if the negative guidance has to be acquired and interpreted not by the literal, logical mind, but with the Nous intuition. Paradox Finally paradox about perception: In the Transfiguration, a dazzling whiteness precedes the spiritual event, and after the confusion of the disciples, the bright cloud overshadowed them (Mt. 17:1-9) From a light so bright it blinds, the voice of God speaks. Eyes will not work, perception is confused and prone to silliness (see Peter), and only an oblique and partially understood memory of what has happened comes away with the witnessing disciples. As a child, I lived in a part of the world without electricity. In the darkness so complete, I learned how to perceive obstacles I needed to avoid: I saw them from the corner of my eye, not 7
strait on, using the receptors for very weak light found there. So it is with perception of the spirit: what we can only talk about what we see directly. What we intuitively know is harder to communicate. Some terminology: Kataphatic is used to refer to prayer which uses symbols, such as icons or words. Apophatic is prayer without the symbol. Intuition is probably a better description of the means whereby a person apprehends or encounters the numinous. Sometimes we use the word feeling. Nous is often translated as mind or intellect, but it means so much more in Greek. It is the knowing, intuiting, feeling center of our being. Maybe heart would work as an alternative. Ascedia, the root of asceticism has come to mean harsh and punitive spirituality. It means discipline, the applied Love that is God, applied to the individual soul. Apatheia is the root of the word apathy. It has nothing to do with indifference; it has everything to do with the proper attitude towards emotions of all kinds in the pursuit of the awareness of God. Ecstasy is the perception that a person stands outside of oneself. It is used most frequently to describe the state of connection with the divine that feels like both transcendence of the world and union with all that is, and which defies verbal description. 8