Sheer Gift
“Contemplation is sheer gift. There is nothing we can do to bring forth its flowering, but there are important skills, without which it will be unlikely to flower.”
I have been revisiting Fr. Martin Laird’s Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation, in which the preceding passage humbly stands at the center of page 54. He continues, “God is always Self-giving; it is a question of removing the obstacles that make it difficult to receive this Self-gift. This receptivity is what contemplative practice cultivates.”
As I dip back into Laird’s thoughts several years after first reading them, I find that I am open to receive his instruction in a fresh way not because I now possess more knowledge than before but, I believe, because of the subtle change that contemplative practices cumulatively imprint in my being. Day by day, sit by sit. Every intentional return to receptivity, every utterance of my sacred word reorients my perceptivity of God’s presence and “[removes] the obstacles” that prevent me from seeing what always is there.
Another gift of these practices: self-critique. I do not mean self-judgement that tears down the spirit or chokes the soul in tarpits of guilt or shame. I mean honest insight and the courage to bear it. Cor is the Latin root of courage, which has to do with the heart rather than swaggering bravado; courage is large-heartedness. My spiritual-life journey has lacked nothing so much as honest insight and large-hearted courage held for myself. How about you?
Yet, I increasingly find that these contemplative practices draw out more of reality and more large-heartedness or draw them together. The practices take time, and there are no short-cuts. It’s a miracle that any of us practice them at all. They slow us down. They still us by intention and attention. Maybe we practice because we have caught the scent of divine love that is more real than all else we have experienced in life, in church, in relationships. Maybe we know in our heart rather than our mind that this scent is where God has passed by and that here we are on the trail to God’s true home, living within us.
So yes, “contemplation is sheer gift.” This gift reminds me Rumi’s oft-quoted lines from A Great Wagon:
Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing,
there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
Doesn’t make any sense…
See you in the field, my friends.