The two tasks – 20 July 2012

There is nothing difficult in the contemplative life. It is difficult to understand the Higgs Boson, and how it somehow gives mass to everything else, such as us. I didn’t know I had the Higgs Boson to blame. It is difficult to understand logarithms, and how Auckland City water rates are calculated. But nothing in contemplative life or prayer is essentially difficult. For centuries the church perpetuated a myth that contemplative life and prayer was mainly for the spiritual giants, the elite, most of them in monasteries – people prepared to deny themselves and practice all manner of ascetic disciplines. One of my fellow Benedictine Oblates was told years ago by her parish priest, “Oh you don’t want to worry about that stuff. That’s for the real professionals.” She said that choice bit of advice actually set her back years before she began to learn better. Fr Laurence Freeman writes that there are two tasks we do in meditation, and each one is a kind of risk. The first task and risk is to be ourselves. He writes:

Meditation allows no self-deception. We see ourselves as we are. It is impossible to avoid seeing the ways in which we are phony or hypocritical; our illusions, self-deceptions, fearful insecurities, and compulsions stand out clearly; and the way we judge and dismiss others so arrogantly will strike a dagger in our conscience when we see it. But by facing this dark side of ourselves, we enlighten it. We see it with a light that shines from somewhere deeper in ourselves. And this light of our spirit burns away our self-hatred with the ultimately unavoidable and revolutionary truth that we are good and lovable.

The second task is to take the risk of letting others be themselves. He writes:

Perceiving their reality as distinct from our own is the way to do this. And to see them as real is to love them. Iris Murdoch once wrote that “love is the perception of the individual. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than ourselves is real.”

This is all risky because we can’t say what the outcome will be. We learn to live contemplatively in all that we do.