Contemplative Practice

Gregg’s Reflection

I began meditating on retreat in 1982. I continued the practice somewhat consistently over the years. I began work with my spiritual director Mark Ritchie in 2010. He has accompanied me since then. One time in a session, I spoke of meditation and contemplation as if they were the same. Mark told me, “Meditation is about knowing and discerning. Contemplation is about experiencing unity.“

I began a daily contemplative sit in 2015. I had been reading Richard Rohr for a while. I began to be drawn to writings on contemplation from the saints and mystics, and journaling passages that touched me. Reading became a daily practice well before I enrolled in the Living School. This two year course of study with Richard Rohr, Jim Finley, Cynthia Bourgeault, Barbara Holmes, and Brian McLaren presented a broader and deeper immersion in mystical literature.

This post elaborates on the most helpful readings I have found. This is one of the longest and most important topics being published here. Savor it, and come back to it often as a source of strength and guidance. These practices come in many varied forms and expressions.

To help deal with thoughts during contemplation, Thomas Merton suggests: Imagine you are sitting at the bottom of a river. Your thoughts pass by along the surface. They arise, move through, and leave. Just don’t get on the boat with the thought. When I find myself thinking about a thought, I imagine myself letting go of the back of the boat and sinking down to the deep. All the turbulence is on the surface, the deep is calm and peaceful.

This post focuses on classical silent contemplation. I will publish topics wading into many various approaches and different contemplative practices. I will follow up with a post on Contemplative Life.

To read the latest science on advanced meditation practice check this article: BEYOND MINDFULNESS: An emerging science of advanced meditation

Scripture

This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall meditate on it day and night. Joshua 1:8

Their delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law they meditate day and night. Psalm 1:2

I think of you on my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night. Psalm 19:14

Be still and know I am God. Psalm 46:10 (This is the phrase that I repeat as I begin my sit. I drop a word with each repeat until “Be Still” is the refrain. When thoughts crowd in, I come back to “Be Still.”)

For God alone, my soul in silence sits. Psalm 62:1

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you. Psalm 63:6

I commune with my heart in the night; I meditate and search my spirit. Psalm 77:6 

I will meditate on all your work, and muse on your mighty deeds. Psalm 77:12

May my meditation be pleasing to Him, for I rejoice in the Lord. Psalm 104:34

I will meditate on your precepts (15). Make me understand the way of your precepts, and I will meditate on your wondrous works. (27). I will meditate on your statutes (48). At midnight I rise to praise you (62). Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all day long (97). I am your servant, give me understanding (125). My eyes are awake at each watch of the night, I meditate on your promise (148). Psalm 119

I think about all your deeds, I meditate on the works of your hands. Psalm 143:1

On the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate. Psalm 145:5 

Reflect on the statutes of the Lord, and meditate at all times on his commandments. It is he who will give insight to your mind, and your desire for wisdom will be granted. Sirach 6:37

Happy is the person who meditates in wisdom and reasons intelligently. Sirach 14:20

Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. Matthew 6:6

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. Mark 1:35

He would withdraw to deserted places and pray. Luke 5:16

Now during those days he went out to the mountain to pray; he spent the night in prayer to God. Luke 6:12

Every day he was teaching in the temple, and at night he would go out and spend the night on the Mount of Olives. And all the people would get up early in the morning to hear him teach in the temple. Luke 21:37

My spirit is praying but my mind is left barren. 1 Corinthians 14:14

In Celebration of Discipline Richard Foster teaches: Every discipline has its corresponding freedom. The purpose of the disciplines is freedom. Our aim is the freedom,  not the discipline. The moment we make the discipline our central focus, we turn it into law and lose the corresponding freedom. RENOVARE Bible profile of Paul, NT p. 327-328

Ancient Writings

Stand guard over your spirit, keeping it free of concepts at the time of prayer, so that it may remain in its own deep calm.

Evagrius Ponticus, Carl McColman, Christian Mystics, p. 122

God has found repose in the deep recesses of humanity. In whom shall I find repose but in the human who is peaceful and humble. For St Ambrose, the ineffable truth of human identity is that we are God’s sabbath.

St Ambrose, Martin Laird, Ocean of Light, p. 27

Everyone who longs for the continual awareness of God should be in the habit of meditating on it ceaselessly in his heart, after driving out every kind of thought. (Ancients saw thoughts as emanating not from the mind but from the heart.)

John Cassein, The Conferences, p. 329

That you are, we can know it, and your light, we see it, but what you are and of what kind, we are all ignorant. Nevertheless, we have hope, we possess faith, and we know the love you gave us, which is light, light which operates everything. Possessing it, I do not see it, but I contemplate it when it goes away. The light appears a short moment then goes away. From that time, it leads us by the hand, strengthens us, teaches us, appearing and fleeing when we need it, not when we want it. When we are in trouble, it comes to our aid. It enlightens my mind with a very sweet light. But, when I discerned what it was, it rapidly took flight leaving me the fire of its divine desire. It invites silence, it teaches the all-powerful humility. It reveals scripture to me and increases my knowledge. It teaches me mysteries that I cannot express.

Symeon the New Theologian, McGuinn, Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, p. 328-329

God may be sought in the universe around us or in the inner world of our own soul. In the visible world we behold his footprints, in our souls we discern his image. It is also possible to seek him in contemplation by raising the eyes of our minds to the light that descends upon us from on high, the light of eternal truth which illumines the minds of men.

Bonaventure, The Mind’s Road to God, trans Father James, p. 53

When the Almighty shows Himself to us by the chinks of contemplation, He does not speak to us, but whispers, in that He does not make Himself known, yet He reveals something of Himself to the Human mind.

Gregory the Great, Bernard McGuinn, Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, p. 369

St Catherine of Siena, in her Dialog, describes the spiritual life as a large tree:

The trunk of the tree is love

The core of the tree, that middle part that must be alive for the rest of the tree to live, is patience

The roots of the tree are self-knowledge 

The many branches, reaching out through the air, are discernment

In other words, love does not happen without patience, self-knowledge and discernment.

One should love God mindlessly. By this I mean that your soul ought to be without mind or mental activities or images or representations. Bare your soul of all mind and stay there without mind.

Meister Eckhart. Your Soul is bigger than your mind. So, why stay only with your thoughts? Your nonthoughts can carry you to amazing places. Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 131

For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, never.

The Cloud of Unknowing

Dealing with spiritual thoughts in prayer: You’ll find thoughts seducing you. For example, a thought may remind you of the many times God has been kind to you and how he is amazingly sweet and loving, full of grace and mercy. It likes nothing better than to grab your attention, and once it knows you’re listening, the thought will start rambling. It will chatter on about Christ’s Passion, drawing you in more and more, and then it will show you God’s miraculous, sacrificial kindness. The thought loves you when you listen to it… and before you know it, your mind is scattered all over the place. How did this happen? You listened to the thought. You answered it, embraced it, and set it free. (The hardest thing for me was to learn to let go of divine thoughts and inspirations during my contemplative sit. GB)

Cloud of Unknowing Ch 7

Lift up your heart to God with a gentle stirring of love. Focus on him alone. Want him, and not anything he’s made. Forget everything God made and everybody who exists and everything that’s going on in the world until your thoughts and emotions aren’t focused on or reaching towards anything.

The Cloud of Unknowing P. 11

Everything you dwell upon during this work becomes an obstacle to union with God. For, if your mind is cluttered with these concerns there is no room for him. Through grace a man may know completely and ponder thoroughly every created thing and it’s works, and God’s works too, but not God himself. Thought cannot comprehend God. I prefer to abandon all I know, choosing rather to love him whom I cannot know.

The Cloud of Unknowing, Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, McGuinn, p. 267

By the work of contemplative love man will be healed. By persevering in it he gradually rises from sin and grows in divine intimacy.

The Cloud of Unknowing, Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, McGuinn, p. 264

How Almighty God Speaks Inwardly to Man's Soul without Sound of Words: Speak, Lord, for I, Your servant, am ready to hear You. Give me wisdom and understanding to know Your commandments. Bow my heart to follow Your holy teachings, that they may sink into my soul like dew into the ground. I ask humbly that you speak to me Yourself, and I shall gladly hear You. Do not let Moses or any other of the prophets speak to me, but You Yourself, Lord, the inward inspirer and giver of light to all the prophets. You alone, without them, can fully inform and instruct me; they, without You, can profit me little.

They speak Your words, but they do not give the spirit to understand the words. They speak fair, but if You are silent, they do not kindle the heart. They reveal great high mysteries, but You open the true understanding of them. They declare Your commandments, but You help to their performance. They show the way, but You give strength to walk in it. They do all outwardly, but You illuminate and instruct the heart within. They water only externally, but You give the inward growth.

Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, p. 104

A very little of this pure love is more precious in the sight of God and of greater profit to the church, even though the soul appears to do nothing, than are all other works put together.

St. John of the Cross

Everyone is capable of inward contemplative prayer, and it is a terrible shame that almost all people have it in their heads not to do it. Contemplative prayer is nothing more than heartfelt affection and love. What is necessary is to love God and focus on him.

Madame Guyon, Selected writings, p. 57, Carl McColman, Christian Mystics, p. 127

Modern Writings

Contemplation: to abide with God within his temple. We are the temple of the new covenant.

Basil Pennington, Lectio Divina, p. 65

I work at preparing my mind, my spirit for the moment when God comes to himself in me. When it happens, I experience His presence. In it, I hear His voice in my own tongue. The center is God coming to Himself. At these moments, it may easily seem to me that all there is, is God.

Howard Thurman: Essential Writings p. 46

Awakening the heart, or the spiritualized mind, is an unlimited process of making the mind more sensitive, focused, energized, subtle, and refined, of joining it to its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love.

Kabir Helminski, Living Presence

The body plays a crucial role in all forms of genuine spiritual work, because bringing awareness back to the body anchors the quality of Presence. The reason is fairly obvious: while our minds and feelings can wander to the past or the future, our body can only exist here and now, in the present moment. This is one of the fundamental reasons why virtually all meaningful spiritual work leads back to the body and becoming more grounded in it.

Being in the Body has to do with first of all the direct experience of our existence; in spiritual traditions and philosophical traditions this is often called “being.” The ability to be. It’s the sense of being alive, of being connected, of being at one with things. If you’re actually fully here in your body, the spiritual rumors that we’re all one cease being rumors. It’s a little counter-intuitive. Your body is already connected with the whole sacred reality that God’s expressing right now.

So this Body is teaching us what it means to actually live in the here and now, to feel our existence, and to operate from that, which gives us a sense of confidence, fullness, aliveness, being. In religious language, it’s like you feel held in the Presence of God.

Russ Hudson, The Wisdom of the Enneagram, p. 51.

Contemplative spirituality is a way of seeing. It comes from the Latin, contemplatio, which means to look at, to gaze attentively, to make out a space for observation.

Phileena Heuertz, Mindful Silence, p. 7

Contemplation is the conscious, experiential awareness of the mission of the Son and of the Spirit, a reception of the Word Who is sent to us not only as life but also as light.

Thomas Merton, Inner Experience, p. 46

Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is life itself, fully awake, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant source.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 1

We only know God in so far as we are known by him, and our contemplation of him is a participation in his contemplation of himself. We become contemplatives when God discovers himself in us.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 39

God’s love seeks our awakening. Contemplation is that awakening.

Thomas Merton, Essential Writings, p.57

The poet enters into himself in order to create. The contemplative enters into God in order to be created.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 111

The contemplative journeys within, to discover that if you descend into the depths of your own spirit, and arrive somewhere near the center of what you are, you are confronted with the inescapable truth that, at the very roots of your existence, you are in constant and immediate and inescapable contact with the Infinite power of God.

Thomas Merton, The Contemplative Life, Dublin Review, p. 28

Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone. If you have never had any distractions you don’t know how to pray. For the secret of prayer is a hunger for God and for the vision of God, a hunger that lies far deeper than the level of language or affection. And a man whose memory and imagination are persecuting him with a crowd of useless or even evil thoughts and images may sometimes be forced to pray far better, in the depths of his murdered heart, than one whose mind is swimming with clear concepts and brilliant purposes. That is why it is useless to get upset when you cannot shake off distractions. They are often unavoidable in the life of prayer. The necessity of kneeling and suffering submersion under a tidal wave of wild and inane images is one of the standard trials of the contemplative life.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 221

It is the will to pray that is the essence of prayer, and the desire to find God, to see Him and to love Him is the one thing that matters. If you have desired to know Him and love Him, you have already done what is expected of you. 

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 224

God is manifesting in each moment as the human condition in each of us. ... 'We are icons of God.' God experiences Godself in us and awakens God's dispositions in us, especially humility, forgiveness and compassion. ...Christ lives in us means that Christ prays, acts, thinks, loves, suffers, and dies in us; and at the deepest level is our true Self. … Our precious days on earth -– the spiritual journey – are not primarily about us, or even about our transformation in Christ. They are about God taking over our lives in every detail. … Living daily life and the evolution of consciousness are ... about God …. The goal is not just union, or even unity with God, but God incarnating in our humanity with all its circumstances.

Thomas Keating, Reflections on the Unknowable

Spiritual reading is not only reading about spiritual people or spiritual things. It is also reading spiritually, that is, in a spiritual way. Reading in a spiritual way is reading with the desire to let God come closer to us. The purpose of spiritual reading is not to gain knowledge or information but to let God‘s Spirit  touch us. Strange as it may sound, spiritual reading means to let ourselves be read by God. Spiritual reading is reading with an inner attentiveness to the movement of God spirit in our outer and inner lives. With that attentiveness we will allow God to read us and to explain to us what we are truly about.

Henri Nouwen, You are Beloved, Introduction p. v

Why Pray? Why should I spend an hour in prayer when I do nothing during that time but think about people I am angry with, people who are angry with me, thousands of other silly things that happen to grab my mind for a moment? What I must do first of all is to be faithful. If I believe that the first commandment is to love God with my whole heart, mind, and soul, then I should at least be able to spend one hour a day with nobody else but God.

The question as to whether it is helpful, useful, practical, or fruitful is completely irrelevant, since the only reason to love is love itself. Everything else is secondary. The remarkable thing, however, is that sitting in the presence of God for one hour each morning—day after day, week after week, month after month—in total confusion and with myriad distractions radically changes my life.

God does not leave me waiting in the dark too long. I might think that each hour is useless, but after thirty or sixty or ninety such useless hours, I gradually realize that I was not as alone as I thought; a very small, gentle voice has been speaking to me far beyond my noisy place. So, be confident and trust in the Lord.

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devo, 11/20/20

Contemplation, therefore, is a participation in the divine self-recognition. The divine Spirit alive in us makes our world transparent for us and opens our eyes to the presence of the divine Spirit in all that surrounds us. It is with our heart of hearts that we see the heart of the world.

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devo 4/22/20

Contemplative life is a human response to the fundamental fact that the central things in life, although spiritually perceptible, remain invisible in large measure and can very easily be overlooked by the inattentive, busy, distracted person that each of us can so readily become. The contemplative looks not so much around things but through them into their center. Through their center he discovers the world of spiritual beauty that is more real, has more density, more mass, more energy, and greater intensity than physical matter. In effect, the beauty of physical matter is a reflection of its inner content.

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devo, 5/5/20

One of the experiences of prayer is that it seems that nothing happens. But when you stay with it and look back over a long period of prayer, you suddenly realize that something has happened. What is most close, most intimate, most present often cannot be experienced directly but only with a certain distance. When I think I am only distracted, just wasting my time, something is happening too immediate for knowing, understanding, and experiencing. Only in retrospect do I realize that something very important has taken place.

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devo, 5/12/20

Once God has touched us in the midst of our struggles and has created in us the burning desire to be forever united with him, we will find the courage and the confidence to prepare his way and to invite all who share our life to wait with us during the short time for the day of complete joy.

Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out, p. 162

God gives us a spirit of questing, a desire for understanding; it seems to me it’s only this ongoing search for understanding that will create compassionate and wise people.

Richard Rohr

Our practice of contemplation is not avoiding distractions, as was foolishly thought, but instead of using them to look over our shoulders for God. The persistence of the distraction can actually have the effect of steadying our ways, deepening our decision, and our desire for God and for grace over this or that passing phenomenon. The distraction almost becomes our necessary vantage point and creates a crosshairs of our seeing. I wasted years trying to deny, repress, reward distractions and dirty thoughts-which never worked very well. It is not the avoidance of problems that makes us contemplatives, for the daily holding of the problem, straight on, but not letting it hold on to us, and finding a resolution in a much deeper and more spacious peace of Christ, which will guard your heart and mind. (Philippians 4:7).

Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 370

Who you think God is, God isn’t. No, God is never who we think he should be.

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation p. 64

My emotions are still a mystery to me; without contemplation, they would control me.

Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 214

All of the wisdom traditions insist that wisdom is given and not taken, waited for and not demanded, having more to do with willingness than willfulness. This willingness comes at a price and invariably demands that you pass through some rings of fire. There are few teachers of the dark path, the journey through the shadowlands, the way of the cross.

Richard Rohr, Naked Now, p. 64

To contemplate is to observe carefully, or to pay close attention. An intimately felt communion with that which has awakened us, infused with love, experienced as a homecoming. You give yourself over to a setting sun as it gives itself over to you, an experience of communion. Engaging our whole being, meditation engages our true nature, engaging God, which flows out in action loving others and the world. 

James Finley, Living School Teaching

Here on earth, few are called to the full contemplative awareness of that reality that awaits each of us after death. But all who desire union with Christ are bound to seek the degree of prayer that is willed by God for them to achieve. For some people their response to Christ may involve only a minimal degree of interior realization of the union with God and others in Christ. For others, however, they know they simply must pray and pray with all their hearts if they are ever to become the person God wills them to be.

James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, p. xviii

It is only in learning to be faithful to a daily rendezvous with God in meditation and prayer that the reflective mind learns consciously to discern and to yield to God's oneness with us in our longings for deeper union with God, who is the origin and fulfillment of our longings.

James Finley, The Healing Path, p. 107

Contemplation is that act in which what we do is who we are. Contemplation is our true self truly actualizing itself as a self, made to become perfectly like God. This self-actualization of ourselves as one with God is experienced as a mystical death.

James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, p. 113

What happens in meditation is that we create the emotional and spiritual space which allows Christ to construct an inner sanctuary in the heart.

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline p. 20

The more we contemplate Christ, the more we discover our identity; and the more we discover our identity, the more opposites within us are reconciled. Thus, Christ comes alive within us. Contemplation is creative because it transforms the one who gazes in the mirror of the cross into a reflection of the image itself. That is, the more we contemplate Christ, the more we discover and come to resemble the image of God in whom we are created. Life in Christ is born of the Spirit. It requires openness to the divine energies permeating in our lives and the world. 

Ilia Delio, Christ in Evolution, p. 130-131

As we continue in contemplative practices, reactive mind gives way to receptive mind. New skills appear, cultivated in the less cluttered and therefore more expansive fields of receptive mind. The removal of clutter from the floor reveals more open floor space that was always present. Just as sunlight burning through fog does not imply an increase in the sun’s brightness but rather the dispersal of fog, so receptive mind involves no new addition, simply the clearing away of a lifetime’s mental fog.

Martin Laird, Ocean of Light, p. 114

The simplicity of God is too intimately present for the thinking mind to fathom.  Mental clutter provides us something to cling to. The practice of contemplation initiates the process of decluttering the mind by means of inner silencing.  Over many seasons of practice, layers of clutter are removed by the liberating dynamism of stillness itself.

Martin Laird, Ocean of Light, p. 138-139

There is no separate someone having an experience of a separate object called God. The mystery of God’s way of being present to us is too intimate for words, this mystery “in whom we live and move and have our being.” Acts 17:28.

Martin Laird, Ocean of Light, p. 157

God cannot be understood in concepts and the existence of God cannot be captured imaginatively or even felt in a possessive feeling, but God can be experienced, touched, and undergone. God cannot be thought, but God can be met. Through awe and wonder we experience God and there, as mystics have always stated, we understand more by not understanding then by understanding. In that posture we let God be God. In such a posture, too, we live in contemplation.

Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God.

Mystical theology is the knowledge of God gained not by human rational effort but by the soul’s direct reception of a divine gift.

Bernard McGinn, intro to Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism p.xiv

Contemplation is the journey of the intellectual soul through the various roads of salvation, the illumination of the mind that draws the intellectual soul to the invisible things of God in a saving way.

Bernard McGinn, Essential Writings of Christian mysticism, P. 337

Anything that brings your attention to a focal point—be it an idea, an emotion, a memory, a commentary, or a physical sensation (like an itch on your nose, or a ticking clock in the room)—is a “thought,” and needs to be let go for it stands in the way of the kind of objectless awareness which is the only mode in which God can be accessed or “known.”

Cynthia Bourgeault 

Contemplative prayer does provide relief from the false self and healing of the “emotional wounds of a lifetime.” But even more powerfully, as modern neuroscience has increasingly confirmed, it begins to restructure the brain, changing not what one thinks but how one thinks. This restructuring, in turn, paves the way for the emergence of Christianity at the level of “Christ consciousness”: non-dual, non-judgmental, compassionately seeing the mutual indwelling of all things in the mystery of divine love.

Cynthia Bourgeault, intro to Beatrice Bruteau’s Prayer and Identity. 

The immediate purpose of meditation is to break the tyranny of your usual mind with its constant, compulsive thinking. The long term and more powerful purpose is to catapult you into the direct experience of Being itself unmediated by thinking and allow a strong, visceral first taste of what heart perception feels like.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Wisdom Way of Knowing, p. 103

The Divine compassion can begin to operate, for once your being has become inwardly gentled and peaceable, those qualities of aliveness will flow out to others as a spontaneous healing and delight. I am not only able to wake up from my own fog but also to share that fresh breeze of awakening with those around me.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Wisdom Way of Knowing, p. 112

On the journey towards contemplation, we begin with the chaos of an undisciplined mind and emotional wounds that have never healed. Here is the pathway of contemplation and the states that arise on the journey:

Intention------> Attention------> Ease------> Joy------> Curiosity

Emerge from self to soul to Spirit. 

Cynthia Bourgeault

The Four Spiritual Senses. Little by little, as the monk perseveres, his understanding progresses through a series of stages: from the literal (preoccupied with linear causality and facts and figures) through to intermediate stages (known in the tradition as the moral and allegorical), which develop the powers of the imagination and begin to engage the personal unconscious. The fourth and final stage is known as the unitive. At this stage one is fully using the more subtle perceptivities of spiritual awareness – the spiritual senses, as they’re known-to see and taste the presence of the divine as it moves fully in and out of everything. It is Unitive in the sense of seeing the one beautifully and radiantly illuminating the multiplicity, like light pouring through a Stained Glass window, present in both the unity and diversity. At the unitive level Christianity is all heart-and in this unitive seeing, deeply mystical and poetic. Christianity becomes radiant with the flame of its own innermost truth, like the bush that Burns but is not consumed.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, p. 72

The heart of a true lover of Jesus is made so great and so large through a little sight of him and a little feeling of his spiritual love, that all the pleasures and all the joy of the whole world cannot suffice to fill a corner of it.

Walter Hilton, Scale of Perfection, p. 273

Contemplative prayer is wordless openness to God. Hence it involves a relationship. It is this intentional openness to God while setting aside thoughts that makes contemplative prayer so deeply transformational. It demands the openness to receive whatever might arise in you and then gently release it into God’s hands. But whatever emerges in silence and stillness before God emerges in the place within you in which you are held within God.

David G. Benner, Spirituality and the Awakening Self, p. 226-227

It is not enough to have wonderful theories about God. Authentic mystical encounters radically change us and our way of living. We are made for contemplation. It is the secret longing of your being. It is in the wilderness of your heart that you discover a reality beyond every religious form. We each have the capacity to touch and be touched by the source-to know the source through certitude too deep for words.

Beverly Lanzetta, The Monk Within p. 49-50

Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts: Those are the daily attention-grabbers that make it so that you can’t come from your mind to your heart to your soul. The soul contains love, compassion, wisdom, peace and joy, but most people identify with the mind. You’re not an ego. You’re a soul.

Ram Dass from NY Times Magazine article 9/2/19. 

No matter the thoughts of your mind or the perceptions which are formulated by the experiences of your life, it is the soul that draws you to God by his grace alone, the soul's natural magnetic pull to Spirit makes us intuitively aware of a different level of consciousness and expansion of pure knowing. Our souls hunger for God's love, a soul empowered with this love experiences great inner joy and the security of the true knowledge of soul union with Spirit, this felt  power within you ignites life and motivates you in many ways.

Many people often do not recognize this because their minds are buried in the debris of emotional suffering and the perceptions of the material mind, the soul is thus lost, covered up by the layers of negative thoughts and reactions to outside stimuli as the physical senses turned outward. It takes an effortless effort to go beyond the mechanics of the mind to that place of pure understanding and soul awareness, but if you seek God willingly and sincerely connecting mind to heart, heart to soul and soul to Spirit you will feel love, not human natural love, but a love with the essence of Divinity.

Many doors will open for you, a deeper understanding will come to you, many of your unanswered questions will be answered and with concerted effort and longing, you will experience the presence of God within you. At the beginning of your spiritual path, the pendulum of mind and soul will go back and forth from the sense of joy felt through the soul to the frustrations of life, in time the pendulum will swing less and less until you are rooted more in your soul's natural perceptions and pure knowing. 

This awareness is coming to you if you're sincere in your practice backed up with the knowledge that your true nature is a reflection of Spirit. You will begin to feel this and experience this new vision, this awakened deeper understanding will become clearer and continue to grow. Be receptive, to tune into this awareness which has always been with each individual you must be open to it and aligned with your soul in Christ.

Conor ©     #centeringsoul