After I was in school, a good friend and I made a silent retreat on the Abbey of Gethsemani. If the abbey sounds acquainted, it could be since you are acquainted with one among its most well-known monks, Thomas Merton.
The abbey is a holy place in a rural space of Kentucky aptly referred to as “Trappist.” There’s a close-by hill you’ll be able to climb to gaze out over the farmlands. Or you’ll be able to spend time within the quiet, easy chapel, praying together with the gathered monks.
Meals are taken in silence. To encourage that state of quiet, recorded reflections are performed over the eating corridor audio system. Typically, I entered a meal in the midst of such a mirrored image and left lengthy earlier than it was over. I caught solely snippets.
This was roughly 15 years in the past, however one such snippet has remained with me. A lady was reflecting on her contemplative prayer, remarking how she had sat for hours beholding a easy flower. She stated that at one level, a single petal fell onto the ground at her ft; she burst into tears.
As a school scholar, I didn’t perceive this perception. I keep in mind snickering with my good friend. We talked about it on the hill later that evening. What an odd type of prayer! What a curious waste of time! We laughed as we stared out throughout the fields of wheat.
And but, all these years later, the picture that our nameless lunchtime speaker shared by the use of muffled recording has stayed with me. It involves thoughts time and again. As I’ve grown, as I’ve prayed, as I’ve explored my very own religious journey, I’ve found that the picture shared over that mealtime recording is kind of highly effective.
Contemplative prayer requires deep consideration, a need and a self-discipline to sit down and behold that which is earlier than us. Within the Ignatian custom, we speak about contemplatives in motion; Walter Burghardt, SJ, provides us the great definition of contemplative prayer as taking “an extended, loving take a look at the actual.”
We see what’s earlier than us—actually and deeply—realizing that right here on this place dwells the dwelling God. We enable what we see to stir us to behave, needing that our motion manifests God’s dream for our lives and the world.
What, then, to make of that flower and its fallen petal? Contemplation isn’t simply the act of trying; we behold the matter at hand in its fullness. We see a flower, maybe—lovely and potent—but additionally our world in all its damage, sorrow, and marvel. We sink into that which we see; we sit with it. We attempt to perceive how our personal selves are sure up on this seemingly different factor, realizing, slowly, that, actually, we’re all linked. We’re all on this collectively.
After which the petal drops.
I’m wondering if, in our contemplative prayer, we enable for such delicate, quiet shifts. We see the world and the wants of the second, after which we spring into motion.
However the petal falls slowly, with not a sound.
The second that we ponder—the headlines, our backyard, the portray within the chapel, our very lives—shifts barely too. Typically shifts are arduous to overlook, like a cannonball second, however most occasions, shifts are quiet and nonetheless. A factor was a method, and now it’s one other.
It’s a reminder to us that God is really right here, working. The very object of our consideration is altering earlier than our eyes, and we’ve nothing to do with it. A petal falls after which one other, and the world turns.
And we’re reminded that our prayer can’t be a static factor however one thing alive and altering.
Picture by wal_172619 from Pixabay.
