Contemplative Prayer
How easy it is when seeking after a pure relationship with God to make it work, to add it to our never ending to do list. I love to study scripture but when I do it with the intent to share my new knowledge in Sunday School, write a dynamic blog post or count it against my insecurity that I am not smart enough, the I've left the intimacy of my relationship with Jesus and once again taken up the mantel of works. It happens to the best of us. If it were easy to keep things on the right path then I suppose we would all be super saints. I recently read to following excerpt from the article, Building God's Temple Within from Kyria.com.
The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a classic medieval work on contemplative prayer, tells us:
You only need a naked intent for God. When you long for him, that's enough. If you want to gather this focus into one word, making it easier to grasp, select a little word of one syllable, not two. The shorter the word, the more it helps the work of the spirit. God or love works well … . We can know so many things. Through God's grace, our minds can explore, understand, and reflect on creation and even on God's own works, but we can't think our way to God. That's why I'm willing to abandon everything I know, to love the one thing I cannot think. He can be loved, but not thought. By love, God can be embraced …
Thomas Keating, a priest and founding member and spiritual director of Contemplative Outreach, recommends that we try contemplative prayer once or twice a day for 20 minutes. This ancient Christian discipline helps us learn to rest in and experience God's presence, as we build God's "temple" in our hearts (Psalm 46:10). There, in this holy sanctuary, we move beyond simple conversation with Christ to have deep communion with Christ. We hear and are healed by the eloquence of divine stillness, as John of the Cross says: "Silence is God's first language."
The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a classic medieval work on contemplative prayer, tells us:
You only need a naked intent for God. When you long for him, that's enough. If you want to gather this focus into one word, making it easier to grasp, select a little word of one syllable, not two. The shorter the word, the more it helps the work of the spirit. God or love works well … . We can know so many things. Through God's grace, our minds can explore, understand, and reflect on creation and even on God's own works, but we can't think our way to God. That's why I'm willing to abandon everything I know, to love the one thing I cannot think. He can be loved, but not thought. By love, God can be embraced …
Thomas Keating, a priest and founding member and spiritual director of Contemplative Outreach, recommends that we try contemplative prayer once or twice a day for 20 minutes. This ancient Christian discipline helps us learn to rest in and experience God's presence, as we build God's "temple" in our hearts (Psalm 46:10). There, in this holy sanctuary, we move beyond simple conversation with Christ to have deep communion with Christ. We hear and are healed by the eloquence of divine stillness, as John of the Cross says: "Silence is God's first language."
After returning from the store yesterday, I had a silent thirty minutes as Hubby took Miss Wiggles on a jog. There was no one talking or babbling, no nap time sound machine or Baby Einstien filling my ears. Just silence. I joked on Facebook that I almost forgot what silence sounded like, that God understood my need for quiet as a mommy of a toddler and even He kept quiet for those twenty minutes.
How sweet it would have been had I invited Him into my silence. I think a quiet moment with a cup of tea on my back deck contemplating God's love would have been a lot more refreshing than my dazed out twenty minutes on facebook and Yahoo News.
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