Notes on Contemplative Prayer
This Lent, I am revisiting Martin Laird's remarkable little book, Into the Silent Land, as an aid to my contemplative prayer practice. For me—and I imagine I speak for many who have gone through St. Matthew's Pastoral Ministry class—Into the Silent Land was my first introduction to the Christian tradition of contemplative prayer.
I remember feeling a certain amount of instinctive mistrust approaching the subject. The language of "meditation" seemed foreign to my Christian context; to my ears, it more readily evoked Eastern or New Age spirituality. Before I even began to read Laird in earnest, though, the book sleeve addressed my hesitations head-on, clarifying that Laird's intention was precisely to correct the common misconception that Hinduism or Buddhism (or "spiritual but not religious" postmodernism) have a monopoly on meditation, and to reconnect his readers with the rich history of contemplation in Christian spirituality.
Contemplative prayer is not an easy spiritual discipline. Though I no longer think I need to be concerned about its Christian bona fides, it still feels counterintuitive at a gut level. It is quite different from the Mass or the Daily Office, lacking the stable structure that makes those forms of prayer feel safe and comfortable. However, I have kept at it over the years because I have found that it meets a profound need in my life of prayer: the need to "pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17).
What, after all, does St. Paul mean when he exhorts the Thessalonians to "pray without ceasing"? For a long time, this struck me as an unattractive and impossible demand because I didn't know how to imagine a form of "ceaseless prayer" that was not an anxiously babbling internal monologue. This was what Into the Silent Land offered me: a way to conceive of "praying without ceasing" not as an awkward, exhausting, too often one-sided conversation with God, but as a steady, stabilizing undercurrent flowing through all of life. Through the contemplative practice of breathing and praying, prayer begins to become as natural, pervasive, and unobtrusively essential as breath. After all, we depend on God for our life no less than we depend on air.
In the Ash Wednesday liturgy, we pray, "Grant us, O Lord, to begin with holy fasting this campaign of our Christian warfare..." and in this "campaign" of Lent, contemplative prayer is a weapon particularly suited to our war against distraction.
I have found that in seasons of fasting, what is most pressingly needed is usually some form of noise reduction: some concerted effort to step away from distractions, whether they arise from the hurried pace of the world around us or the riot of unruly thoughts and feelings within us. As the Anglo-Catholic poet T.S. Eliot writes in The Four Quartets, we are "Distracted from distraction by distraction." It is enormously difficult for us to carve out spaces of stillness and silence in which we can listen to God, in which it can be revealed what God is quietly doing in the deep recesses of our hearts. At this point, it is tempting to embark on a Luddite tirade about the way technology has atrophied our attention spans, but that would be its own way of missing the point. After curbing my addictions to social media with regular fasting for the better part of a decade, I can attest that new, non-technological distractions readily spring up to fill the spaces previously occupied by Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. It is simply a perennial human tendency, deeply rooted in our nature, to contrive distractions that keep us from the hard work of being still with God—to hide from Him, as our first father and mother did in the Garden.
This tendency can even tempt us to make Lent a season of religious performance, filling the time with pious projects which are their own particularly insidious variety of distraction. Contemplative prayer, which is always inescapably oriented towards stillness and silence, helps us resist this temptation to prop ourselves up with "productivity." To set aside even five minutes for contemplative prayer is to make them useless by any of the world's metrics. It frustrates every effort to contort it into another self-help project. (I know; I've tried.) As Laird writes, attempts to "make something happen" by praying contemplatively are doomed to fail, because it is fundamentally not a technique by which we acquire a desired result. It is only a way of attending to God's presence with us; nothing more, and nothing less.
What might one experience when praying contemplatively? The answers to that question probably vary infinitely, because our endlessly creative God meets us in infinitely variable ways. I can only speak about my own experience, and suspect that it will resonate with others'—and I cannot speak more precisely than through pictures.
I might say that contemplative prayer is like sinking into a deep ocean, descending to the deep place in the heart where I most need to meet God, where the Holy Spirit unites Himself to "groanings too deep for words" (Romans 8:26). Since I began to pray contemplatively, the imagery of Psalm 139 has become more and more a part of the way I understand my life of prayer: "If I … remain in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me."
Or I might invert the image and say that when I pray contemplatively, those things that hide in the deep places of my heart slowly and gently float to the surface. Normally, the furious churning on the surface of the water keeps them down; contemplative prayer stills the water so they might rise.
Either way, contemplative prayer gets past the façade of what I think I ought to be saying to God and unearths what my heart is actually saying to God. It not only creates a space in which I can listen to Him; it also creates a space in which I can begin to believe that He graciously and patiently listens to me instead of stopping His ears and turning away in impatience and disgust.
If we stick with contemplative prayer, we will almost certainly be drawn to confront the deepest wounds of our hearts, the wounds we are most desperate to ignore or avoid. It does not write the script, but sets the stage and hushes the audience so that a quiet encounter with God can take place—the kind of quiet encounter that is the only thing by which our wounded hearts can begin to be healed.