 |
|
|
|
 ontemplative prayer
is, in a way, simply the preference for the desert for emptiness, for poverty. One has begun to know the meaning
of contemplation when he intuitively and spontaneously seeks the dark and unknown path of aridity.in preference
to every other way. The contemplative is one who would rather not know than know. Rather not enjoy than enjoy.
Rather not have proof that God loves him.
He accepts the love of God on faith, in defiance of all apparent evidence. This is the necessary condition, and
a very paradoxical condition, for the mystical experience of the reality of God's presence and of his love for
us. Only when we are able to "let go" of everything within us, all desire to see, to know, to taste and
to experience the presence of God, do we truly become able to experience that presence with the overwhelming conviction
and reality that revolutionize our entire inner life.
The fourteenth-century English mystic Walter Hilton says in his Scale of Perfection::
Contemplation is essentially a listening in silence, an expectancy. And yet in a certain sense, we must truly begin to hear God when we have ceased to listen. What is the explanation of this paradox? Perhaps only that there is a higher kind of listening, which is not an attentiveness to some special wave length, a receptivity to a certain kind of message, but a general emptiness that waits to realize the fullness of the message of God within its own apparent void. In other words, the true contemplative is not the one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect or anticipate the word that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. he does not demand light instead of darkness. he waits on the Word of God in silence, and when he is "answered," it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. it is by his silence itself suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God. But we must not take a purely quietistic view of contemplative prayer. It is not mere negation. Nor can a person become a contemplative merely by "blacking out" sensible realities and remaining alone with himself in darkness. First of all, one who does this of set purpose, as a conclusion to practical reasoning on the subject and without an interior vocation, simply enters into an artificial darkness of his own making. He is not alone with God, but alone with himself. His is not in the presence of the Transcendent One, but of an idol: his own complacent identity. He becomes immersed and lost in himself, in a state of inert, primitive and infantile narcissism. His life is "nothing," not in the dynamic, mysterious sense in which the "nothing," nada, of the mystic is paradoxically also the all, todo, of God. It is purely the nothingness of a finite being left to himself and absorbed in his own triviality. The Rhenish mystics of the fourteenth century had to contend with many heretical forms of contemplation and both Tauler and Ruysbroeck carefully distinguished between the dark night of genuine contemplation and the arbitrary, self-willed passivity of those who adopt a quietistic form of prayer as a matter of systematic policy, simply cultivating inertia as though it were, by itself, sufficient to solve all problems. Of these, Tauler says:
The trouble with quietism is that it cheats itself in its rationalization and manipulation of reality. It makes a cult of "sitting still," as if this in itself had a magic power to solve all problems and bring man into contact with God. But in actual fact it is simply an evasion. It is a lack of honesty and seriousness, a trifling with grace and a flight from God. So much for "pure quietism." But does such a thing really exist in our day? Absolute quietism is not exactly an ever-present danger in the world of our time. To be and out-and-out quietist, one would have to make heroic efforts to keep still and such efforts are beyond the power of most of us. However, there is a temptation to a kind of pseudo-quietism which afflicts those who have read books about mysticism without quite understanding them. And this leads them to a deliberately negative spiritual life which is nothing but a cessation of prayer, for no other reason than that one imagines that by ceasing to be active on automatically enters into contemplation. Actually, this leads one into a mere void without any interior, spiritual life, in which distractions and emotional drives gradually assert themselves at the expense of all nature, balanced activity of the mind and heart. To persist in this blank state could be very harmful spiritually, morally and mentally. One who simply follows the ordinary ways of prayer, without any prejudice and without complications, will be able to dispose himself far better to receive his vocation to contemplative prayer in due time, assuming that he has one. True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us only as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques. The logic of quietism is purely human logic in which two and two seem to make four. Unfortunately, the logic of contemplative prayer is of an entirely different order. it is beyond the realm of strict cause and effect because it belongs entirely to love, to freedom, and to spiritual espousal. In true contemplation, there is no "reason why" emptiness should necessarily bring us face to face with God. Emptiness might just as well bring us face to face with the devil, and as a matter of fact it sometimes does. This is part of the peril of this spiritual wilderness. The only guarantee against meeting the devil in the dark (if there can be said to be a guarantee at all) is simply our hope in God: our trust in his voice, our confidence in his mercy. Hence the contemplative way is in no sense a deliberate "technique" of self-emptying in order to produce an esoteric experience. it is the paradoxical response to an almost incomprehensible call from God, drawing us into solitude, plunging us into darkness and silence, not to withdraw and protect us from peril, but to bring us safely through untold dangers by a miracle of love and power. The contemplative way is, in fact, not a way. Christ alone is the way, and he is invisible. The "desert" of contemplation is simply a metaphor to explain the state of emptiness which we experience when we have left all ways, forgotten ourselves and when the invisible Christ as our way. As St. John of the Cross says:
This might aptly be completed by the following words from John Tauler:
There are two simple conclusions to be drawn from this. First, that contemplation is the summit of the Christian life of prayer, for the Lord desires nothing of us so much as to become, himself, our "way," our "truth and life." This is the whole purpose of his coming on earth to seek us, that he may take us, with himself, to the Father, whom no man shall see and live. By dying to ourselves, and to all "ways," "logic" and "methods" of our won we can be numbered among those whom the mercy of the Father has called to himself in Christ. But the other conclusion is equally important. No logic or our own can accomplish this transformation of our interior life. We cannot argue that "emptiness" equals "the presence of God" and then sit down to acquire the presence of God by emptying our souls of every image. it is not a matter of logic or of cause and effect. it is not a matter of desire, of planned enterprise, or of our own spiritual technique. The whole mystery of simple contemplative prayer is a mystery of divine love, of personal vocation and of free gift. This, and this alone, makes it true "emptiness" in which there is nothing left of ourselves. An emptiness that is deliberately cultivated, for the sake of fulfilling a personal spiritual ambition, is not empty at all: it is full of itself. It is so full that the light of God cannot get into it anywhere; there is not a crack or a corner left where anything else can wedge itself into this hard core of self-aspiration which is our option to live centered in our own self. Such "emptiness" is in fact the emptiness of hell. And consequently anyone who aspires to become a contemplative should think twice before he sets out on the road. Perhaps the best way to become a contemplative would be to desire with all one's heart to be anything but a contemplative; who knows? But, of course, this is not true either. In the contemplative life, it is neither desire nor the refusal of desire that counts, but only that "desire" which is a form of "emptiness, " that is to say which acquiesces in the unknown and peacefully advances where it does not see the way. All the paradoxes about the contemplative way are reduced to this one: being without desire means being leg by a desire so great that it is incomprehensible. it is too huge to be completely felt. It is a beyond desire, which seems like a desire for "nothing" only because nothing can content it. And because it is able to rest in no-thing, then it rests, relatively speaking, in emptiness. But not in emptiness as such, emptiness for its own sake. Actually there is no such entity as pure emptiness, and the merely negative emptiness of the false contemplative is a "thing," not a "nothing." The "thing" that it is is simply the darkness of self, from which all other beings are deliberately and of set-purpose excluded. But true emptiness is that which transcends all things, and yet is immanent in all. For what seems to be emptiness in this case is pure being. Or at least a philosopher might so describe it. But to the contemplative it is other than that. It is not this, not that. Whatever you say of it, it is other than what you say. The character of emptiness, at least for a Christian contemplative, is pure love, pure freedom. Love that is free of everything, not determined by any thing, or held down by any special relationship. It is love for love's sake. It is a sharing, through the Holy Spirit, in the infinite charity of God. And so when Jesus told his disciples to love, he told them to love as universally as the Father who sends his rain alike on the just and the unjust. "Be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect." This purity, freedom and indeterminateness of love is the very essence of Christianity. It is to this above all that monastic prayer aspires. |
