A Lifetime’s Death in Love

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

— T. S. Eliot, “Dry Salvages”

Introduction

This post is about a way to approach contemplative prayer. I freely admit from the outset that I am no master of this art of ultimate trust in God’s love for me. Almost twenty years into my journey as an Anglican and over thirty into my life as a Christian, I am still unlearning the engrained habits of self-sufficiency. It is still too easy to begin from a sense of separation from God, to view Him as holding up the felt sense of His presence and love at the end of a string, like a carrot, to entice me through the rigors of faithful living. Keep up the hard work, I hear the false voice of God say, and maybe soon you’ll get to where I am. Yet that is not, I am learning, what God is like. We begin as the beloved, and much of the transfiguring work of the Christian life is in knowing God who is already knowing us, close and clearly. It is, as Curt Thompson observes, to behold Him beholding us, to hear from the outset of the spiritual journey His voice saying “you are my child, whom I love, and I am so pleased that you are on the earth.”

True contemplative prayer is a perfect relational communion with God. The great 20th-century Anglo-Catholic poet Thomas Stearnes Eliot, an ardent student of Dante Alighieri, spent much of his masterwork, Four Quartets, meditating on that communion. Besetting his attempts at contemplation from all sides, however, were the relentless distractions arising from within—the remnants of his imperfect life—and from without—the mounting noise of the modernizing world. Eliot believed that poetry was one of the few remaining places where one could seek the essence of a thing, to know it in the way Lady Julian of Norwich knew even the smallest hazelnut: as something God had made, that God keeps, and that God loves. Through the refining of this meditation on the Creation’s declaration of God’s provident love, St. John of the Cross surmises, the person at prayer may find that God assumes them directly into the love shared between the Divine Persons of the Holy Trinity, an ineffable experience of the communion which all the faithful are called to know in God’s Kingdom.

Formation in a Place

As with all things motivated by the Spirit given to us, the end of our formation in contemplative prayer is our perfection in love. Already, though, I hear within myself (and perhaps also you) an accusation arising with the word ‘perfection.’ We like the idea of perfection because in it we detect the possibility of no longer needing help from outside of ourselves—perfection is often synonymous with the illusion of perfect self-possession (in the sense of ownership, not discipline). Once I am perfect, I imagine, I will no longer embarrassingly need to reveal how frail I am as I ask for the encouragement of others.

Our sense of perfection must always remain faithful to its object “in love.” Our perfection in the Spirit is not the crafting of a divinely-engineered Superman. It is the fullness of life as we were created to enjoy it—within an un-ruptured communion with God, each other, the creation, and ourselves. The Spirit capably searches every corner of my life to root out all that is the enemy of this communion. As I learned in Sunday school, “the heart of a man is desperately wicked; who can search and know its depths?” Yet St. John tells us, “God is greater than our hearts, and He knows all things.”

Our initial steps into contemplation confront us with the discomfort we sometimes feel sitting on the examination table at the doctor’s office. Most people, especially men, avoid this experience at all costs—even to the point of endangering themselves (how bad is that twinge in my side, really?). As Christians, we attempt the clever theological move of suggesting, Well, the Spirit is God, and God is omnipresent, so God can find me anywhere and work in me even if I’m doing other things. But while that is true, the Lord rarely assents to our attempt to make salvation a background process that fits into our busy multi-tasking. As the embodied creatures that He made us to be, He requires us to find a place in space and time to be with Him. Martin Laird calls this ‘the body’s call to prayer.’ Before we can be still and know God, we must stop our bodies, turn off the distractions, and call back in our over-extended selves.

The Comforter in the Clutter

Okay, I’m here. Now what? Two things begin to happen. As Laird again observes we experience what he calls “the wild hawk of the mind” that is in constant vigilant search for anything upon which to swoop. We are beset by how loud and busy our interior lives can be. So often we think that our minds are just the narrator voice (that we identify with), possibly God (if we’ve invited Him in), and the thoughts/feelings and ideas we have chosen to admit. Instead, we find that we are more permeable than we imagined. Thoughts—the impressions of sensations, emotions, feelings, experiences, images, and words—come flowing through without ceasing. Ideas—the interior structures and landscapes we deliberately cultivate—lay strewn about like half-forgotten DIY projects. Imagination—both the power of the mind to grasp and receive the true forms of things we encounter—proves too often immature or imprecise. Nous—the knower in the middle of all of this—shudders like a double-shifted air-traffic controller in the middle of things.

Even so, when we call the body to prayer, and we begin to order our body ergonomically through posture and breathing to forward focus, the Spirit who dwells in the inmost place responds. Yet the Spirit moves from the place where we have let cardboard boxes of junk collect in towering piles. Like an episode of the horrific TV show Hoarders, we see the layered stacks of boxes in the double-wide trailer of our souls begin to shift—and we wonder what could be alive back there. Our first encounter with contemplation is this call and response. We call the body to stillness and it reveals what we have been using all of the distractions to avoid: the clutter of the inner life. There, though, the Spirit responds from beyond the wall of debris to assure us that He is there and that we are not alone with the mess—that it is time to get to work. The Spirit calls us to remember Christ (God with us) and to ask for the help that the Spirit is ready to provide (God who comes to our side). Anciently, this comes out of the mouth in the form of, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

The Art of Surrender

As we continue over months and years to call the body to prayer, to seek the Lord where He dwells in the heart by faith, we experience what the presence of the Creator God has done since the beginning. The formless and void (another way of saying the thing that had not yet received its purpose and the path to it), is transfigured into a fecund world in which the Lord will sit enthroned. The clutter begins to thin each time we return. We expect this to happen much quicker than it does—yet is that not always how we approach a big project? We are on Another’s timeline at this point. We advance along it insofar as we continue to call the body to attend, and call the mind to sit at the Lord’s feet.

There, the wild hawk will drop its carrion at our feet—so many dead things inside of us that the Lord must make alive. There, the Spirit will bring before us the bric-a-brac of our hearts to ask: “Can I have this? This too?” After time, we find that all of the littered items of our inward lives are set beneath the Lord (rather than on top of Him as they had previously been), and that as He sits with us on top of that mountain of experience and impression and feeling and knowledge, it is transformed to assist our understanding of the encounter we continue to have with the Lord. At times we simply know how He is making all things new; we know for a brief moment (who knows how long it actually is), that all things fit together when they are given to God, that all things serve our communion with Him. The wild hawk no longer finds fresh kills or dried bones to bring us, and so finally alights on the arm of the Lord’s seat. At last, we know that we are safe to lean back against the place He sits as children do when they are seen, safe, secure (and often sleepy).

Raymond Carver’s haunting little poem “Late Fragment” reaches toward the point where contemplative prayer takes us: And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what was that? To call myself beloved, to feel my self beloved on the earth. We end where we began, as beloved. Though, now we know it—perhaps for the first, but by no means the last time.

Conclusion

This brief post is not a school of contemplative prayer. But it is an anecdotal report of the worthiness of the contemplative work. Read Laird’s Into the Silent Land. But better yet have someone who knows it explain it to you, and then start to practice it for a few minutes a day until your stamina improves. All of the best things in life require a lifelong commitment that is exercised in small ways everyday. Contemplating the Lord and resting in His love are one of the things we know we will be doing into the reaches of eternity. So maybe start today.

But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

— T. S. Eliot, “Dry Salvages”