It quite often seems
to people who don’t practice contemplative prayer and life that those of us who
do are lacking a healthy sense of engagement with the world, we are aloof and
we lack concern for others. We retreat
away from the real world into prayer.
And perhaps some meditators do have that motive. It is a refuge, some kind of cocoon, a
blessed peaceful haven. Well, let’s not
despise that. Jesus knew that a lot of
people are very wounded and afraid. He
said, Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden – I will give you
rest…
The Desert Fathers and
Mothers had other motives. Detachment,
for them, meant that at the time of prayer no worldly concerns, including good
ones, would distract them from being present to God and to each other. That was the point of all their
discipline. One of the monks, Abba Dorotheus
of Gaza, puts it in an interesting way.
Detachment, he said, is being free
from wanting certain things to happen.
The burden we lay down in prayer includes a whole load of our desires,
whether things we desire for ourselves or for others, for good or for ill. You can’t be a Buddhist without learning from
the outset that our desires are the root of all unhappiness and suffering. It is one Buddhist truth which urgently needs
to be translated into Christian understanding.
To be free of desire
may be something we can’t even begin to imagine. But
then Abba Dorotheus gives as it were the other side of the coin. He says that we can find peace in what is happening. It is important to be clear about this. He does not mean we agree with or like what
is happening around us. What is
happening may be very hurtful or unjust.
But in the presence of God another door opens which we hadn’t
noticed. Where does it lead? It leads to a deeper level where we are at
peace with what we can’t change. It is a
level of trust. Once we have seen this,
and perhaps seen it in others, we begin to see it also for instance in the
Psalms. It is the resolution of the Book
of Job.
Kathleen Norris tells
a lovely story from the USA. A woman
middle-aged school bus driver suddenly had her bus, which was full of mentally
handicapped children, taken over by a deranged man with a gun. When reporters later asked her how she had
managed to talk the man out of using the gun, her reply was, “I pray a lot.”
That’s the kind of response I love – it seems absurd to most people, and it
really gets up the noses of the atheists.
Notice, the woman did not say, “I prayed a lot.” What she indicated was that she was generally
not far from prayer. In that sense at
least, she was a contemplative person.
And the encounter between her and the man with the gun was not quite
what he expected, evidently.
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