Contemplation 4 – Always and everywhere

The cloisters in Gloucester Cathedral

One immediate benefit of the regular formal practice of prayer is that the prayer continues into the rest of our daily life. We find that we don’t need to be alone, and we don’t need external silence. You can turn to God and offer yourself in prayer at any time and in all situations. The stillness within you is unshakeable and will inform your every action. In a way this reflects a growing awareness of God within us. As John Dalrymple puts it in Simple Prayer (DLT, 1984):

As we travel towards the prayer of union we find that prayer spills over into all our day and is not confined to special times. God and the soul are always present to each other, so their mutual exchange of love tends to go on all the time, with fewer interruptions, depending on the business which engages our surface selves. The time for prayer becomes now … Simple prayer needs no special time and place … It is a question of responding to God’s love generously as the minutes tick by. Each moment acts as a sacrament to us, bringing God’s grace, God himself, into our life.

Cynthia Bourgeault makes a similar point in The Heart of Centering Prayer (Shambala Publications, 2016):

Perhaps the subtlest fruit of the practice …is a gradually deepening capacity to abide in the state of ‘attention of the heart,’ as it’s known in the Christianity of the East. You might describe this as a stable state of mindfulness or ‘witnessing presence,’ but emanating from the heart, not the head … The essence of this kind of attentiveness is perhaps best summed up in those words from the Song of Songs: ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake.’ Once you get the hang of it, attention of the heart allows you to be fully present to God, but at the same time fully present to the situation at hand.

It is the realisation that God is everywhere, that he is not only the light of our life, but the light on the road that leads us on. Instead of practising contemplation, we become contemplative people. As John Byrom puts it in Prayer the Passion of Love (SLG Press, 1981):

By simple perseverance in the act of prayer and in the practical obligations of Christian living, by the constant expression of simple desire, one gradually emerges into a new stage of intuitive awareness of God which becomes the guiding light of one’s life. Slowly the cold and darkness of the ‘cloud of unknowing’ give way to a new kind of light and a new kind of stillness. And the person who is now aware of both is a changed person, deeply purified in heart and will and mind, no longer measuring everything by the standard of his own comprehension, but content to absorb the new sense of interior light and reality through the action of the Spirit upon him.

Another way of reaching the same point is to consider the relationship between prayer and conduct. When we start out, we might see these as different but complementary: we try to live Christian lives and we try to engage with God. So we pray in order to become better people. But eventually, as God becomes more central in our lives, a shift takes place in our lives. There is a beautiful summary, again by John Dalrymple in Simple Prayer:

Another way of describing this growing unification of our lives is to say that we become less preoccupied with morality (correct conduct, works), and more concerned with relating closely to God (faith, prayer). This was well put by William Temple in his aphorism about Christianity, that ‘the right relation between prayer and conduct is not that conduct is supremely important and prayer helps it, but that prayer is supremely important and conduct is its test.’ In Christianity, prayer, the attempt to relate our lives personally to God, is supremely important.

We longer pray to live. Instead we live to pray.

Tags: Contemplative prayer