Sometimes I think that contemplative prayer must be a confession of our helplessness as much as anything. Most of our thoughts, most of our days, are about memories, hopes, desires, fears and worries, things that have happened... or plans. I can be very happy sitting in the winter sun and reviewing what I should have said to Mrs Thundermuffin 30 years ago. We don’t see people, places, situations as they really are, but rather as coloured by our reactions to them, our opinions, prejudices, experience and emotions. So really, to that extent, we walk around in a landscape of our own mind, our own thoughts, sometimes even a world of illusion of our own construction. We get caught up in our own narrative; it seems to be the only reality that exists.
Moreover, contemplative people are bothered by the fact that, the minute we start to imagine God, through the filters of our own opinions, hopes and fears and whatnot, to say nothing of the residue of what we think the church and our parents taught us about God long ago, we have started constructing an idol. Jewish wisdom understood this, and hence the absolute prohibition of “graven images”, idols. God is in fact encountered only as God’s self determines -- and for that we need to be still and silent, our agendas and all our best thoughts set aside. God seems to be best present to the humble of heart, say the Hebrew scriptures. There are various ways of saying this -- not in the earthquake, wind and fire, but in the still, small voice; Elijah needed to have exhausted all his own wisdom and strength before he could hear it, on Mount Carmel.
I suppose there are, somewhere, some wonderful contemplatives who are much closer to these mysteries than I have ever known. Mostly, we see it from afar; something may happen which suggests that we have moved a bit further along the road of pilgrimage, and that’s very good. What we do is what we can. We sit still, and we decide not to rush off anywhere right now. We shut down the agendas of our lives. It doesn’t matter that this is only for 20 - 30 minutes. It is not tokenism, it is an important gesture and an important discipline. Sometimes I like to think it serves notice on all the rest of my life and consciousness that it had better be very worried. For that brief time we are as real as we know how. We are not saying anything -- but if we were, it would be that we are content to be here because we don’t have to do anything or appear in any way which is not truthful. The person who is present here and now, then, is the person God made and loves.
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