A Pill for Contemplative Spirituality?

“Is there a pill I can take for that?”

said my eight year old son, who had just finished telling me that he felt dehydrated from a day of hard playing and learning at school. I chuckled a little and told him, no – there’s no pill – what you need to do is drink more water.

It’s a cute story, and one we all chuckle at. But while we can appreciate the joy of this story in a child, it is less endearing in adults – and we as adults replicate it so very often. To be clear for those who are worried, I’m certainly not intending this post to be anti-medication – medication is good, useful, and lifesaving in its place. What I’m more concerned about however is the mentality. Dehydration is the body’s state when it doesn’t get enough water, and the appropriate natural solution for it is to drink more water – and the story is funny because it’s a story of a small human trying to work out these matters in the world around him, as indeed a small human must.

But it’s perhaps less funny and more tragic when adults go around asking roughly the same question, moving from pill to pill, app to app – a crash diet here – a life hack there – a secret to success or two – some half-assed attempts to change your life in five easy steps or less – and a bunch of noise to cover the fact that none of it is working. If you don’t believe that this is typical, visit the so-called self-help section of your nearest local bookstore, and consider its populace of glazed and candied nihilism. It’s enough to make even the most hopeful lose their faith in the human project.

Not of course to pretend that I’m not part of it, and not tangled up in the thick of it with everyone else. I’m hardly here to pontificate as though I had found some magic cloud or plain removed from this, some place of superiority, some space from which I might be able to leverage the world like an Archimedean hipster reveling in a space of detached irony and sarcasm. Have I bought books from the self-help section? Of course. Will I again? Probably. But that’s beside the point, and my own problem, not yours – what is more to the point here is that there is hope. In a world looking for a pill for dehydration, there’s a better option – there’s still hope of tasting the freshness of water.

It is indeed an apt metaphor for the contemplative Christian life and all that that entails – the inhabitance of Scripture; the romance of silence; the strange holiness of the dark night; the God in the whirlwind; the wedding of the Lamb; all the things we long desperately for and then seem to miss, seem unable to experience. “My soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63, NRSVCE) says the Psalmist, and our hearts beat in time with his – until we grow bored and wander off and find some distraction or other to numb us, some vice to distract us, or worse still some virtue to recast as a frantic idol. “Thirst?” we say. “Who thirsts? Are not these the gods that brought us up out of Egypt?”

We seek to drown ourselves in the dazzle and the dance, while all the time it’s waiting there, this water – waiting for us to know enough of Christ’s passion to be able to admit with Him, “I thirst” – waiting for us to drink deeply of His well of eternal life. For this precisely is what the contemplative life is about – learning to drink daily of this water that can be as near to us as the closest silence or bit of Scripture or practice that has passed through numerous holy hands over the centuries to get to us in the present. But though others can show us ways – paths – to this water, it is only we who can make the final decision whether or not to drink it.

Indeed, this is the paradox of this blog, this Inner Room. We are writing into a cyberspace filled with noise and distraction – thirsty and dry – and the water you need and must find will not be in the blog post you’ve just clicked to from Facebook, but in the deliberate turning away for a space, an apartness removed from the noise. Indeed, we at the Inner Room recognize this – media such as our blog posts can, generally speaking, only ever be anciliary to the main event – He must become greater, and we must become less.

And yet anciliary though it is, it may yet be – if not the thing itself – perhaps a beacon. There is a lovely line in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer that talks about the purpose of ringing bells when the church is at prayer – in hope that, though the daily vicissitudes of life will keep most people away physically for most of the hours of prayer, the bells might in any case give workers cause to “at least…lift up their hearts to God in the midst of their occupations” (BCP, Order for Morning and Evening Prayer), a moment when they can look up and consider the church and bell tower in the distance and let their hearts momently be with the worshipers in spirit if not in body –  a consecration of time.

Such a beacon is never of course a replacement for regular and dedicated bodily worship, but it is a sign of hope pointing to that, to the wells where there may yet be water in a dry and thirsty land. We at the Inner Room may not be able to give you a pill for dehydration, but we can offer to join you in our common search for water, ringing bells now and then to remind us that there is water and life to be found if we but look about us, and that our tradition is rich with maps marking the most nourishing if sometimes most curious instances of these springs and oases in the desert.