Week Four: Contemplation Is a Gift

Contemplation is a gift from God that we could not even attempt in the first place if God hadn’t given it to us. This approach to prayer reminds us that we truly do rely completely on the grace and kindness of God.

However it’s also all too easy to turn the pursuit of contemplation into it’s own end. Merton warns us against seeking mountain top experiences or assurances of God’s love because these pursuits can overtake our greater pursuit of God’s loving presence. He writes in Thoughts in Solitude:

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“The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He shows Himself to us, and yet at the same time that He would not have inspired us to seek Him unless we had already found Him.”

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“There is a stage in the spiritual life in which we find God in ourselves—this presence is a created effect of His love. It is a gift of His, to us. It remains in us. All the gifts of God are good. But if we rest in them, rather than in Him, they lose their goodness for us.”

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“If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.”

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Learn more about Thoughts in Solitude…

For Reflection

Week Four: Second Half of Life Enlightenment

Falling Upward challenges us to stop seeking enlightenment. The more we try to create spiritual breakthroughs, the more frustrated we’ll become. We can only seek God and then take whatever enlightenment and breakthroughs result.

Religion can be healthy or unhealthy. While we begin our religious journeys by learning rules and facts, the deeper Christian experience is a union with God–Jesus called this abiding. Richard Rohr speaks of these two movements as the two halves of life. Both are necessary, but the first half of life can become toxic and unhealthy if it’s all we ever know.

Once we fail, doubt, and struggle, we are most ready to experience God on God’s own terms. Rohr writes:

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Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. You will see only what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise.

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Many people are kept from mature religion because of the pious, immature, or rigid expectations of their first-half-of-life family. Even Jesus, whose family thought he was “crazy” (Mark 3:21), had to face this dilemma firsthand.

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By the second half of life, you have learned ever so slowly, and with much resistance, that most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot, and incites a lot of push-back from those you have attacked.

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“The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” I learned this from my father St. Francis, who did not concentrate on attacking evil or others, but just spent his life falling, and falling many times into the good, the true, and the beautiful. It was the only way he knew how to fall into God.

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Read more…

For Reflection

Are you encouraged or discouraged to read Rohr’s thoughts on reaching enlightenment?

Take 5 minutes today to rest in God’s direction for your life.