End of the Book

As I finish Foster's book, I am resolved not to finish the practice of creative prayer, prayer that stretches me, unfamiliar or even uncomfortable prayer, because I am a branch ever seeking a deeper abiding in the vine.  A dynamic relationship comes from dynamic interaction.

I have been writing down the phrases that most struck me in this reading, and in this final entry on the subject, I wanted to share them with cyberspace:

• To be effective prayers, we need to be effective lovers. (3)
• We will discover that, by praying, we learn to pray. (13) 
• What we learned to do in the light of God's presence, we also do in the dark of God's absence [the dark night of the soul]. (24)
• Who we are - not who we want to be - is the only offer we have to give. (31)
• The less we are mesmerized by human voices, the more we are able to hear the Divine Voice. The less we are manipulated by the expectations of others, the more we are open to the expectations of God. (63)
• It is an occupational hazard of devout people to confuse their work with God's work. How easy it is to replace "this work is really significant" with "I am really significant." (73)
• Thoughts continue to jostle in your head like mosquitoes. To stop this jostling you must bind the mind with one thought, or the thought of one only. - Theophane the Recluse (124)
• That is my task: to hold my will to the current of power and let you sweep through endlessly. - Frank Laubach (126)
• Virtue is discovered not so much in the attaining as in the trying, the struggling, the running of the race. (150)
• Know that it is by silence that the saints grew, that it was because of silence that the power of God dwelt in them, because of silence that the mysteries of God were made known to them. - Ammonas (155)
• He is closer to my true self than I am myself. He loves me better than I love myself. He is Abba Father to me. I am because HE IS." - James Borst (163)
• The discovery of God lies in the daily and the ordinary, not in the spectacular and heroic. ... Ours is to be a symphonic piety in which all of the activities of work and play and family and worship and sex and sleep are the holy habits of the eternal. (171)
• Petitions that are less than pure can only be purified by petition. (180)
• Love loves to be told what it knows already. ... It wants to be asked for what it longs to give. (181)
• Struggle is consistent with love, for it is an expression of our caring. (225)
• The righteous man strives in prayer with God and conquers in that God conquers. - Soren Kierkegaard (226)

Moving on, I am not completely sure what this blog will become. I am thinking it may be a prayer journal, and I like that idea better than abandoning the whole project. This is a question I will bring to God in conversational prayer!

Contemplative Prayer

The Concept

“For God alone my soul waits in silence.” (Ps. 52:1)  

 

Contemplative Prayer is silence before God, a respite from our addiction to words. Foster comments that our modern society is one that has more active communication but says less than any other society in history. With Contemplative Prayer, our own voice recedes, and we can enter an experience of the heart not the head, a focused and devoted attentiveness to being with God.

The experience and revelation of the Father gained through this prayer is far beyond the scope of human words. Thomas Merton describes, “God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons.”

Comfortable silence with God, as in any relationship, grows intimacy. Without words to cloak the interaction, the experience is pure and unadorned.

Yet Foster cautions that this is an “advanced” prayer, one that shouldn't be undertaken before maturity in prayer life is reached. He says it should only be exercised by those with “flexed spiritual muscles” who “know something about the spiritual landscape” because not all spiritual guidance is divine guidance. Though I appreciate the advice to pray for protection, to pray for divine guidance, before entering an attitude of contemplation, I don't think there is any need for “advanced” prayer techniques here. I think it calls for a pure heart, a heart solely seeking God, no matter the size of the spiritual muscles. Sometimes big muscles accompany big egos, and ego is the most dangerous thing on the spiritual landscape.

The steps given for this kind of prayer are :

1. recollection: releasing (not suppressing) all competing distractions until you are truly present where you are. This is difficult, but take encouragement: “If at first we achieve no more than the understanding of how much we lack in inner unity, something will have been gained, for in some way we will have made contact with that center which knows no distraction.” (Romano Guardini)
2. inner attentiveness: an expectant silence, utterly responsive to the Lord. The long-term goal is to bring this posture of listening naturally into the course of everyday experience.
3. spiritual ecstasy: this is the devastatingly beautiful revelation of God that transforms our hearts. It's nothing we can do, but a work God does upon us. Juliana of Norwich writes, “The whole reason why we pray is to be united into the vision and contemplation of him to whom we pray.” Madame Guyon explains, “This cannot be brought about merely by your own experience. Meditation will not bring divine union; neither will love, nor worship, nor your devotion, nor your sacrifice. … Eventually it will take an act of God to make union a reality.”

The Experience
This is not a prayer that you step into and master immediately. I quickly discovered in myself the pitfalls of pride and selfish aspiration, (“How cool it will be for my blog if I have a major contemplative success!”)

I also became aware of the weakness of the flesh, so bored by the absence of thought and language that it tends to put itself into sleep mode. I found it helpful to abandon the eastern meditation techniques of “emptying the mind” and focus instead upon release: acknowledge the thought then turn it loose because it's value is nothing compared with the desire to experience the Father. After several assessments of value like this, no thought stands for long. Still, it will take many attempts to silence this inner voice constantly playing to my mind's desire for entertainment.

I know from my meager attempts, that the key to this is “more of you and less of me.” In the words of John the Baptist: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). I can think of nothing greater than scraping away all my outer layers – my words, my thoughts, my aspirations – and finding at the center only Christ. I know he is there now, but it may take stilling those outer layers to fully experience the truth of it in this lifetime.

As a huge fan of Martin Buber, this exercise made me want to re-read I and Thou because I think the genuine experience of the Thou is ultimately what Contemplative Prayer is about.