Perhaps you have heard about or even
practice some form of meditation such as Mindfulness Meditation, or a type of
contemplative prayer like Centering Prayer, but you struggle, as I do, to
articulate, either to others or for your own understanding, just what contemplation is and isn’t. Well, I
recently participated in a Pittsburgh Theological Seminary Spiritual Formation
Class about “Thomas Merton and the Journey to True Self” that required I read
Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation.
Its first chapter is entitled “What Is Contemplation?” “What Contemplation Is
Not” is the title of the second chapter. Merton has therefore offered me some
guidance to better express what contemplation is and isn’t.
 |
| From new seeds, growth begins and spreads. |
In the first sentence of the first
chapter of New Seeds of Contemplation,
Merton writes “Contemplation is the highest expression of [humanity’s]
intellectual and spiritual life” and “reaches out to the knowledge and even to
the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God.”[1]
I like that Merton defined contemplation in broader terms than just an
intellectual knowledge of God or only a spiritual experience of the Divine. Merton
did not divorce his heart from his head, something my own beloved Reformed
Tradition has sometimes been prone to do.
Having been raised and educated in
the Reformed Tradition, my head was often more engaged than my heart. My faith frequently
seemed to be measured by what I thought about God rather than if, or how, I
experienced God’s grace, mercy, and love.
Therefore I have found Merton’s writings about spirituality in general
and contemplation in particular offering me a much needed corrective to a
spirituality of the head because I not only want to know about God
intellectually but to actually know God experientially. Contemplation, or
contemplative prayer, such as Merton describes it, is the primary way I have
experienced the Divine in an affectional, intuitive, and personal way that
transcends a mere intellectual assent.
Just as it is often difficult to
describe God because God is so far beyond our ability to formulate our thoughts
and feelings into words, it might also be equally difficult to describe
contemplation for similar reasons. God can be so difficult to describe that
sometimes we resort to saying what God is not. After we remove everything that
is not God, all we should be left with is the Divine. Likewise, it might make
more sense to say what contemplation is not, and whatever remains is
contemplation. Merton follows this “negative” approach in the second chapter of
New Seeds of Contemplation, where, in
the first paragraph of the second chapter, he writes that contemplation “cannot
even be explained. It can only be hinted at, suggested, pointed to, [and] symbolized.”[2]
Pointing to contemplation by describing
what it is not, Merton notes that “nothing could be more alien to contemplation
than the cogito ergo sum of
Descartes.”[3] As
a child of the Enlightenment who has been educated by both a culture and a
church that has tended to separate the head not only from the body but also
from the heart, I find Merton’s assertion both troubling and liberating. It
troubles me because I have been raised to value education and an intellectual
faith that emphasizes orthodoxy. I find it liberating because I have come to
believe that we can never think our way to divine union or experience union
with God simply by theological reflection or believing the right things.
Merton also states in the second
chapter that “contemplation is not prayerfulness, or a tendency to find peace and
satisfaction in liturgical rites. These, too, are a great good, and they are
almost necessary preparations for contemplative experience. They can never, of
themselves, constitute that experience.”[4]
I value liturgical, ordered, public
worship. I affirm, along with the new Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Book of Common Worship that “over time,
an order of worship helps to shape our faith and faithfulness as the people of
God, becoming a pattern for how we live as Christians in the world.”[5]
Yet Sunday Worship has rarely satisfied my thirst and hunger for an experience
of the living God in the same way that the spiritual discipline of daily
contemplative prayer has fed my soul.
Here is the link to the introductory post in the series.
Here is the link to the introductory post in the series.
[1] Thomas
Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New
York: New Directions, 2007), 1-2.
[2] Ibid.,
6.
[3] Ibid.,
8.
[4] Ibid.,
9.
[5]
Book of Common Worship, PC(USA), 4.
No comments:
Post a Comment