When God Brings You Contemplation
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One
Contemplation as God’s initiative
Venerable Fulton Sheen used to distinguish prayer according to the following images related to contemplation: He said that vocal prayer was like walking somewhere on foot. You’re in control, and you’re doing all the work. Then meditation is like riding on horseback. You’re still in control, but the holy spirit and the book you’re reading and the imagination and the discursive intellect – these are doing most of the work.
Now if you’re riding a horse on a familiar path with the reins held loosely, it will sometimes wander off the path, then you’ll have to pull on the reins to get it back on the path. So too, with meditation, when you find your mind wandering, you have to pull your mind back to sacred things, but as long as you stay focused on sacred topics, you can let your imagination and your calculating mind go.
In any case, the third category of prayer is contemplation, and this is where God takes over. Where He brings you where He wants. This is like being a passenger in an airplane. You’re not in control, and you’re not doing any of the work. But you’re going way higher and way faster than you could ever go on your own.
Two
Mystical Experience
None of our ideas or images are adequate to God, as St. John of the Cross says, “Everything the intellect can understand, the will enjoy, and the imagination picture is most unlike and disproportionate to God” (Ascent, II, ch. 8).
Therefore, in order to truly love God as He is, He has to give us some direct experience of Himself, otherwise we’d always be loving our pictures and ideas about God instead of actually loving God.
This is the level of prayer called “Mystical theology” or “Infused contemplation.” And, because these experiences go beyond our words and our ideas and our imaginations, they aren’t experiences we can understand or communicate to others. In fact, at first, they aren’t experiences we can necessarily even detect while they’re happening
St. John of the Cross says it’s like a light beam entering a room through a window. If there are dust specks in the room, you can see them clearly, but you don’t see the light.
That’s like when God enters the soul to illuminate and clarify certain ideas. But if there are no dust specks, you can’t see the light – even though the light itself is actually less hampered when there are no dust specks in its way (Dark Night, II, ch. 8).
So too, when God enters the soul without ideas and images, you may not be aware of His presence, but He is more present to the soul than He ever was before.
Three
The Willingness to Be Passive
Contemplative prayer is a gift, as the Catechism says (#2713).
That means you don’t acquire it by working, by constantly churning out better images or better insights. Before God brings you to contemplation, you have to work at prayer, and it’s really difficult for a lot of people to become disciplined to put in the time and put in the work. But when God brings you to contemplation, you have to go to your time of prayer and not work.
Both St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila use the analogy of a very small child whose mother wants to pick him up to take him somewhere. The mother knows she can carry the child much faster than the child can walk on his own so she picks him up. But if the child insists on using his limbs, thrashing his arms and legs, not only is that not going to help, it’s going to get in the mother’s way (Cf. e.g., Living Flame, stanza 3).
So don’t feel like you have to thrash in prayer. If God is working on your soul, then it’s okay to let Him do the work.
Four
The nature of Contemplation
The prayer of Contemplation isn’t thinking about God, or making resolutions, or speaking about God, or imagining some story in the Gospels. Contemplative prayer, instead, is when we’re actually able to “look” at Jesus.
The Catechism says, “Contemplative prayer is a gaze of faith, fixed on Jesus. ‘I look at Him and He looks at me’; this is what a certain peasant in Ars in the time of his holy cure used to say while praying before the tabernacle.”
And St. John of the Cross says that souls in this stage, “should proceed only with a loving attention to God, without making specific acts. They should conduct themselves passively, as we have said, without efforts of their own, but with the simple, loving awareness, as when opening one’s eyes with loving attention.” (Living Flame, stanza 3).
Sometimes we have to do things for the people we love. We have to keep the conversation going, we have to do them some act of service, and we have to show our love in some active way. But other times, we just have to be present and delight in the other person in silence. If the Lord brings us to that beautiful point, let’s rest there, and be happy.
Five
Dealing with What We Don’t Understand
God is a mystery, He works in mysterious ways. We don’t understand Him, and we often don’t understand what He’s doing, even in our own prayer lives. And the truth is, it’s hard to deal with things we don’t understand. It’s disorienting and challenging. But in this case, it’s the best thing you can do.
It’s sort of like a man who is married to a beautiful, good woman whom he sometimes has a hard time understanding. What a mistake it would be to stop spending time with her so he could spend more time in his garage working on part of a car that he does understand. This is the mystery of prayer and of the Christian life in general. It’s better to spend time with what is above us, even if we can’t understand it, than to focus all our energy on what’s understandable, but what is less than we are.
The pictures formed by our imaginations, the ideas formed by our intellects, these are good, but ultimately they are human products that are less than we are and much less than God is.
If God comes to us directly, let’s welcome Him, no matter how infinitely mysterious He is.