Contemplative Prayer: Establishing a Practice; Avoiding the Pitfalls
By Brother David
Scope of This Article
A lot has been written on prayer, and much of that has been
written on Contemplative Prayer. Many of
these books and articles cite a number of Church Fathers, mystics, and experts
on the subject. This is not that kind of
series. This is basic: bricks and mortar
basic. This is neither “Towards a
Theology of Contemplation” nor is it “28 Days to Theosis (Divinization).” What I want to do is take you, the reader,
with me through a journey in prayer.
Some of this will be Sunday School basic, and some will be utterly
idiosyncratic (after all, it’s my journey that I’m drawing on). My suspicion is that most of what I write
will be either already known or really obvious on reflection. So while there may be new things for some, I
do not regard these articles as instruction per
se but rather as an invitation to prayer.
Or perhaps even as an invitation back to prayer.
The way I learned about what contemplation is and how to
“do” contemplative prayer was through teachings from various people. With some of these people, the explicit
intent was to teach prayer (my confessors and spiritual directors fall into
this category), but with others, prayer was incidental to the interchange, and
it was only later when I found that my prayer had changed in response to what
had happened.
Please understand that this is not a dismissal of the
literature. The Philokalia, The Way of the
Pilgrim; the writings of Nil Sorsky, Fr. John Main, Ignaty Brianchaninov,
and Jean-Baptiste Chautard; the writings of Guigo II, Jens Soering, Evelyn
Underhill, and many others in the Christian tradition; writings from Buddhist,
yoga, and Sufi traditions; and writings in the disciplines of neurophysiology
and psychology as well as many others have proven valuable and been of great
use. I have even drawn lessons from
horror literature—with a big shout to Dean Koontz, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark
Aston Smith. But books can only take us
so far. That having been said, I will
offer a short bibliography, sometimes as short as one book, at the end of each
article, which might prove useful to some.
When I first discovered sushi I fell in love. I decided that I’d figure out how to make
this wonderful cuisine for my house and myself.
Well, I got a couple of books and some of the tools necessary to make
sushi. I followed recipes and
instructions. The efforts were noble,
but the results left something to be desired.
OK, it was pretty awful: all of the ingredients were there, but I didn’t
understand “Sushi.” So whenever I had
the chance, I’d go to Japanese restaurants and watch the sushi chef. I might order only a couple of pieces or a
roll, but that gave me the excuse I needed to sit and watch and ask
questions. And I learned. I learned how to eat sushi and came to
appreciate what “Sushi” means in its greater context. Once I could appreciate the experience, I
could strive to give other people the opportunity to have that or a similar
experience. I experimented and found
things that worked for me. I can now use
books on Japanese cuisine to help me expand my knowledge. I am not a sushi chef. If anything, I now realize how woeful my
attempts at sushi are. But I know what
it can be. I have a goal towards which
to aspire.
So that’s what these articles are about: giving a taste of
prayer, contemplation, and contemplative prayer. They aren’t exhaustive—not by a long shot—and
they are not a substitute for a teacher or a spiritual director, but they might
be enough to whet the appetite, to give a sense of what’s going on, to help
raise questions, to encourage the reader to seek a guide, and finally to
encourage the reader to experiment with this form of prayer.
Our journey will takes us through an overview of prayer in
general: what it is and is not. We will
then examine what contemplation is and is not.
We will look at “techniques” (a word I don’t like but which is useful)
for contemplation. We will also address
some of the pitfalls of contemplative prayer and prayer in general. As a special aspect of pitfalls, we will also
examine the need for guidance in our prayer life. Finally, we will examine the practicality of
contemplative prayer. My hope is to put
forward one article per month. As it is
looking now, some of the topics will be combined, but some will take two essays
to be fully fleshed out (we’ll see). I’m
not exactly sure where this will go because the topic is unfolding even as I
write. I will say this: prayer is
important to me. I believe that the art
of prayer is one of the most fundamental human activities: without it, we are
less than we could be.
What Prayer Is Not
First of all, let’s start with what prayer is not. Prayer is not thinking about God. Thinking about God is a great and noble
occupation, but it isn’t prayer. It may
be doing theology or philosophy, but it is not prayer. As soon as we start “thinking about,” we have
erected a boundary between ourselves and that about which we are thinking: the
one thinking is “subject,” and the one being thought about is “object.” We talk about “maintaining objectivity” in
our thinking and judgments to keep our thinking clean, so “thinking about”
keeps us at a remove from the object under consideration.
However, even though it is not prayer, it is important to
think critically about God: we need to know this God to whom we pray. We need to understand, as far as is humanly
possible, the nature of this God. An
analogy would be buying a gift for someone we love: if we haven’t thought about
the person, considered likes and dislikes, and considered the nature of our
relationship, it is impossible to buy an appropriate gift: what might be
appropriate to a spouse might well be inappropriate to a friend. So doing theology or reading books and
articles about God (under which heading I would include writings on Scripture)
is an important adjunct to prayer.
There is a further aspect to this understanding of God in
relation to prayer: we need to get beyond myths about God if we are to have an
adult relationship with God. If God is
seen as the Bogey Man or Santa Claus, or if our idea of Jesus is Superman, we
are bound to have an immature relationship with God. For example, Jesus is savior, not rescuer;
there’s a big difference. In addition,
we need to beware of projecting our societal and personal standards onto
God. For example, we need to look at
what Jesus is talking about when he speaks of God as Father rather than
projecting what we think of as the sins of patriarchy or our dysfunctional
relationships with our own parents into the scene. This is not to dismiss
injustice or personal pain, but it is to allow ourselves to be taught something
important about God by the One whom we, as Christians, believe to be God
incarnate.
Prayer is also not feeling a certain way or trying to
generate certain feelings. One of the
traps of prayer is the belief that we should feel certain things about God and
prayer: we should feel reverent, we should feel sorrow, or we should feel joy,
and when we don’t feel what we think of as appropriate feelings, we can feel
that our prayer is deficient. Just as
dangerous and misleading is thinking that an intense emotional experience in my
prayer time means that my prayer was “good.”
I would contend that “generating feelings” is not only counterproductive
but actually dangerous and a hindrance to prayer. For instance, working to feel
bad about something might well be an exercise in self-pity rather than a prayer
of repentance; further, having attained to feeling bad, thinking that I have,
in fact, repented when all I’ve done is attained to a new level of
self-involvement and self-deception.
This being said, strong feelings can result from prayer,
even though strong feelings are not the aim of prayer. The “gift of tears,” for example, is not
something to strive after in the sense of thinking that this will make one’s
prayer good (whatever that may mean).
Rather, the gift of tears results, to the extent that it is true to the
individual’s nature and personality, from a depth of prayer wherein one
recognizes the truth about one’s self, creation, and God. It is entirely possible to have a deep
awareness of sin and God’s love for us and not to weep—the real test of that
awareness is not tears but repentance and change.
In the next installment, I’ll discuss more of what prayer is
by means of an examination of the various “modalities” of prayer.
Bibliography
Good Goats: Healing
Our Image of God. Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn, Matthew Linn
(authors), Paulist Press, 1994.
