Contemplation Changes Everything
Father Richard shares how contemplative practice offers access to a deeper, more loving response to the world:
Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander writes, “True thought is not the brain’s affair. But we have—in part by the brain itself—been so trained to associate our brains with what we think and who we are that we have lost the ability to realize that we are at all times much more.” [1] In this moment, in every moment, we are much more than our physical brain and our physical body.
True thought is pre-physical. This is the thinking behind the thinking, the consciousness behind our small ability to plug into it. If we stay at the horizontal level of calculating, judging, and labeling, we won’t plug into it very well because we don’t really believe in it. Many of us don’t really believe there’s anything spiritual beyond this material body. I think those of us in the West have probably been influenced by the materialistic worldview more than we realize, but Alexander and other scientists are coming to the recognition that there’s something more. The recognition that the real power, as in the Trinity, is in the capacity for relationship, for communion, for being mirrored, and therefore gaining the ability to mirror other people. This type of thinking isn’t dependent on linear deduction. It moves as fast as lightning, making connections on different levels. It might be hard to verbalize, but it’s experienced as a moment of insight, a spontaneous gift of compassionate, inner clarity. It will never be angry or violent, only a clarity of love.
In the face of this free inner intelligence, our ordinary thought is hopelessly slow and fumbling. It’s this free thinking that comes up with the radical insight or writes the inspired song. Handel composed the Messiah score in less than a month; clearly, he was in the flow. I hope we’ve all had moments when we’re inside of grace, inside of love, inside of communion. To revert to negative, resentful thinking is simply five steps backward, and yet we do it. Of course, we have to return to face the injustice, the evil, the stupidity, and the oppression present on this earth. Yet I believe that we’ll have the clarity, the calmness, the grace, and the freedom to do it better than we ever did before. We won’t respond to the urgency in angry or dualistic ways, and that makes all the difference.
Is it any wonder that so many people are excited to learn about the contemplative mind? This is why we dare to say that it really is or can be the change that changes everything. Contemplation gives us access to our birthright waiting within us. If we stay on this journey, we come to know that we are merely a grain of sand, though a wonderful grain of sand, in this marvelous universe. We are a part and therefore a participant. To the soul, that’s enough specialness for a lifetime.
The Way of a Pilgrim
Eastern Orthodox theologian Kallistos Ware (1934–2022) considers how we can become people of prayer:
How are we to enter into the mystery of living prayer? How can we advance from prayer repeated by our lips—from prayer as an external act—to prayer that is part of our inner being, a true union of our mind and heart with the Holy Trinity? How can we make prayer not merely something that we do, but something that we are? For that is what the world needs: not persons who say prayers from time to time, but persons who are prayer all the time. [1]
In The Way of a Pilgrim, a 19th-century Russian mystical text, the unnamed pilgrim begins by sharing the moment he was unexpectedly quickened by God:
On the twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost I went to church to say my prayers there during the liturgy…. Among other words I heard these—“Pray without ceasing” [1 Thessalonians 5:17]. It was this text, more than any other, which forced itself upon my mind, and I began to think how it was possible to pray without ceasing, since a man has to concern himself with other things also in order to make a living. I looked at my Bible, and with my own eyes read the words which I had heard, that is, that we ought always, at all times and in all places, to pray with uplifted hands. I thought and thought, but knew not what to make of it. “What ought I to do?” I thought. “Where shall I find someone to explain it to me? I will go to the churches where famous preachers are to be heard; perhaps there I shall hear something which will throw light on it for me.” I did so. I heard a number of very fine sermons on prayer—what prayer is, how much we need it, and what its fruits are—but no one said how one could succeed in prayer. I heard a sermon on spiritual prayer, and unceasing prayer, but how it was to be done was not pointed out.
The pilgrim sought many esteemed elders before encountering a starets—an Eastern Orthodox spiritual teacher—who guided him to the Jesus Prayer.
He began to speak as follows. “The continuous interior prayer of Jesus is a constant uninterrupted calling upon the divine name of Jesus with the lips, in the spirit, in the heart, while forming a mental picture of His constant presence, and imploring His grace, during every occupation, at all times, in all places, even during sleep. The appeal is couched in these terms, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’ One who accustoms himself to this appeal experiences as a result so deep a consolation and so great a need to offer the prayer always, that he can no longer live without it, and it will continue to voice itself within him of its own accord. Now do you understand what prayer without ceasing is?”
===================>
| Is America Good or Evil? |
 Over the holiday weekend, I’ve been reflecting on what it means to be patriotic, and whether our love of country should have limits. The questions arose because I rewatched Hamilton, the award-winning musical about Alexander Hamilton and America’s other founders. Although the show has been praised for its artistic brilliance and for casting people of color to represent the Founding Fathers, others say it wrongly celebrates men who were slaveholders, misogynists, and white supremacists. We Americans are split over our own history. Some want to see the founders as flawless saints who were inspired by God to establish a nation of “justice and liberty for all.” Others see the founders as irredeemable sinners who demanded freedom for themselves while enslaving millions and exploiting their labor to become rich. And the way we view these men—whether as heroes or hypocrites—often determines how we see the country overall. So, which is it? Is America good or evil?Interestingly, Jesus faced a similar dilemma. The Jewish leaders frequently questioned Jesus and wanted definitive answers from him. Are you on our side or Rome’s? Is this person a sinner or righteous? Who exactly is blessed and who is cursed? In almost every case Jesus responded by either rejecting the question or confounding the categories assumed by the person asking it. Their unreflective, either-or thinking simply did not match the more complicated, messy reality that Jesus saw. He knew that good and evil did not conform to national, social, or religious boundaries. Instead, they are entangled which means we require a wisdom far beyond the blunt categories of “us” and “them.”The entanglement of good and evil is also the theme of another of Jesus’ agricultural parables. In the story of the wheat and the weeds, Jesus illustrated how in this age the good seed of his kingdom grows alongside the weeds sown by the enemy. Someday everything will be sorted and evil will be destroyed, but until then we live with the entanglement.I think that’s a helpful way of understanding America and its founders as well. Our history is a messy entanglement of good and evil, of justice and oppression, of virtue and villainy. Therefore, slogans and simple declarations are not sufficient. We need true wisdom to discern the wheat and the weeds in our history and in our own lives. In the next few days, we’ll look more closely at what the parable means, its implications for how we see the world, and for how we see ourselves. DAILY SCRIPTURE MATTHEW 13:24-30 MATTHEW 13:36-43 PSALM 94:1-11 WEEKLY PRAYERC. Eric Lincoln (1924 – 2000)Lord, let me love, though love may be the losing of every earthly treasure I possess. Lord, make your love the pattern of my choosing. And let your will dictate my happiness. I have no wish to wield the sword of power, and I want no man to leap at my command; nor let my critics feel constrained to cower for fear of some reprisal at my hand. Lord, let me love the lowly and the humble, forgetting not the mighty and the strong; and give me grace to love those who may stumble, nor let me seek to judge of right or wrong. Lord, let my parish be the world unbounded, let love of race and clan be at an end. Let every hateful doctrine be confounded that interdicts the love of friend for friend. Amen. |
