This week, Richard Rohr’s meditations are all about the monastic and contemplative life. He offers this on September 22nd, , “Parker Palmer writes, “The function of contemplation in all its forms is to penetrate illusion and help us to touch reality.”
I almost became a religious monastic with the Catholic orders of St. Benedict or the Redemptorists. I was 17 when I had my first “call” experience. If you have never received a call to the ministry, it is weird. Every ministry board wants to know about it, but describing a subjective experience to people who try and fit this experience into an objective understanding is near impossible. To add to this confusion, I received my call to not only preach and teach, but to pray and meditate. After coming back from Army Basic Training and Advanced Training, I started my discernment with my local church and began conversations with the Benedictine and Redemptorist Orders, I was 18 years old. For two and half years, I would go to daily morning mass and pray the rosary and say the Psalms at noonday prayers and at vespers (before bed).
Cultivate a Contemplative Life – Five Suggestions
You do not need to have a religious calling to try out the contemplative life. Following are some suggestions to get you started. There are lots of resources available now whereas in my late teens, information was available, but internet was still in its childhood to immediately look up and access this information.
Read the Contemplatives
True growth comes out of being uncomfortable. I was talking this morning with my wife about my spirituality and how it has gotten me in trouble with my church over the years. Not only do I find Christian contemplatives like Thomas Merton and John of the Cross inspiring, but also Buddhist teachers like Thich Nhat Hahn, The Dalai Lama and Sufi teachers like Rumi informative for my growth. When you study religion for a while, you will begin to see a very large Ven diagram when it comes to spiritual influence.
Look for Quiet Places
As I will mention later, there is not much quiet in my household. It has only been in last 5 years that we really moved out of the small child role of parenting. Before that, it was preparing breakfasts and herding children to school and then off to work. Where is the quiet? For me, it was/is a five-mile run and a thirty-minute drive to work. Usually, this thirty minutes is devoted to listening to a podcast on religion and faith. By the time I arrive at work, I am grounded and ready for the challenges the day has for me. Creativity is the essence of a contemplative life.
Practice Centering Prayer
Mimicking traditional Eastern practices, centering prayer is a form of Christian contemplative prayer, to center awareness on the presence of God. This modern movement in Christianity was initiated by three Trappist monks of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts in the 1970s. I would come to Centering Prayer before learning about mindful sitting and other Eastern practices. Centering prayer is crucial to the contemplative practice of lectio. The challenge here, is to let go and let God be present.
Try Lectio
Reading for reading sake can be boring. I will always remember my first lesson on lectio. Read as a cow chews its cud. First you read, then you chew (contemplate/mediate) then you read again. Each time, the words tell you something new or see something you have never seen before. In all the years of hanging out and running at Oil Creek State Park, it never ceases to amaze me that I continue to find new things from the past oil industry tucked away in the forest. I find that after a lifetime of lectio in the bible, I experience the same thing.
Trust the Journey
Too often, we look upon God as a mean and vindictive God who punishes us and lords over us. I will always reflect on Jesus’ view of God as abba, daddy. I think of my own children who seemingly trust me and come to me for guidance, even as they are now adults. It was, is and continues to be difficult to say to God, “here I am, send me.” The journey has been long and arduous at times, but overall, mostly type 2 fun.
Spiritual Practices for a More Contemplative Life
In my late teens, I started praying the hours, first by going to morning mass on campus, usually an hour before mass started, engaging in bible reading and praying the rosary. Now, that practice is much more nuanced as the demands of life often dictate my movements. What has not changed though are the conditions in which true time in thought requires, the practice of presence, silence (relative when you have four children) and transformation.
The mantra, “Be here now” is a great practice of centering. By repeating this statement three times and then trailing off the words until you get to “be”, one can easily access the practice of presence. Learning to be more present enhances our contentment with each moment. In reading scripture, being present means being present with not only the words, but also with the set and setting of the words. Who wrote these words first, what was their context and how does it relate to my current context? Here we are not allowing the words to “tell us” something. Instead, we are allowing it to inform us as to how the audience received it contextually.
Silence is golden they say, but if you have four children who at one point are under the age of 10 and your house is a four square with very little private or quiet space, then silence is relative. The world is an increasingly noisy space. When I started this process of studying contemplation, there were no cell phones, no Bluetooth radios, it was fairly easy to find a quiet space. Mary Ann and Frederic Brussat offer that silence is “Silence is often referred to in terms of space: the immensity inside, the cave of the heart, the oasis of quiet, the inner sanctuary, the interior castle, the sacred center where God dwells.” I find that in the long hours of running alone, I can access this immense inside. Here, God and Self sit together and converse. And if I can get out of my own way, I can hear with the ears of my heart the guidance God offers the self.
At this point, if you have read my writings, you know I am a big fan of the quote that no one stands in the same river twice. Romans 12 and its call to be “renewed by the transformation of our minds” has been my guiding light these last 30 years. I worked in churches for years and often heard folks talk about desired change but then also protested the loudest about the aforementioned changes. Transformation and change is hard, but it does not have to be. I was at a church many years ago where we transformed the worship space. First, we moved the non-working organ, which was a feat in and of itself. Then it took me about six months to move the altar table and erect a cross. The result was a beautiful worship space that everyone seemed to enjoy. Transformation can and should start small.
In closing
It is okay to ask questions on our spiritual journey, which is often not the path we are told to take. In a prescriptive church environment, you often read your bible, listen to the sermon and go to a Sunday school or Vacation Bible School program written and prescribed by the church’s leading doctrine. A contemplative life entertains these questions and with a monastic mindset, the focus on lectio, meditatio, contemplatio and oratio, we can engage in our spiritual and faith practices in a deeper, more embodied manner.
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