WHAT IS CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER? Seriously. I know this is a bizarre question, but I don’t feel like I have a good handle on it. I do a lot of petitionary prayer, thanksgiving, and praise, but I don’t even really know what contemplative prayer is like. Surely it’s more than thinking lovingly about God, no? There have definitely been times when I felt really sharply focused on one aspect of God, for example God the Creator, or the Crucifixion–almost always this was in the presence of the Eucharist, often right after receiving Communion. Basically it was like I snapped into a visceral awareness of God, an intense “noticing” of an aspect of God and a sense of how this aspect is directly relevant to my own life. Seeing what is always there, in other words, underneath the inattention and pride and other accumulated grime of the Fall–as if a curtain had moved away from a window, or the sun come out from clouds.

But this was not something that I planned. I always try to be open to this, but I don’t think of it as a type of prayer–it’s more like something that arrows down at me, sometimes. If contemplative prayer involves practices that can sustain this kind of awareness, and make it more frequent, that would be awesome.

So, thoughts? Reading or practice recommendations?