On 10 October 2012 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, addressed the RC Synod of Bishops in Rome. That in itself was amazing and historic. What he said was striking and important -- and I thought you should hear a little bit of it here as a brief alternative to my words...
To be contemplative as Christ is contemplative is to be open to all the fullness that the Father wishes to pour into our hearts. With our minds made still and ready to receive, with our self-generated fantasies about ourselves and God reduced to silence, we are at last at the point where we may begin to grow. And the face we need to show to our world is the face of a humanity in endless growth towards love, a humanity so delighted and engaged by the glory of what we look towards that we are prepared to embark on a journey without end, to find our way more deeply into it, into the heart of the trinitarian life. St Paul speaks (in II Cor 3:18) of how 'with unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the Lord', we are transfigured with a greater and greater radiance. That is the face we seek to show to our fellow human beings.
And we seek this not because we are in search of some private 'religious experience' that will make us feel secure or holy. We seek it because in this self-forgetting gazing towards the light of God in Christ we learn how to look at one another and at the whole of God's creation. In the early church there was a clear understanding that we needed to advance from the self-understanding or self-contemplation that taught us to discipline our greedy instincts and cravings, to the 'natural contemplation'that perceived and venerated the wisdom of God in the order of the world, and allowed us to see created reality for what it truly was in the sight of God -- rather than what it was in terms of how we might use it or dominate it. And from there grace would lead us forward into true 'theology', the silent gazing upon God that is the goal of all our disciplieship.
In this perspective, contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom -- freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture, and our chaotic and unexamined emotions, encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need, so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.
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